Look at the half-title page before you read a line of the poetry.
Progress issued five volumes of nineteenth-century verse and prose in the series this book belongs to, and we are reissuing all five. Four of them carry the same line at the head of the half-title:
PROGRESS · RUSSIAN CLASSICS SERIES
Turgenev, 1974. Saltykov-Shchedrin, 1975. Lermontov, 1978. Gogol, 1980.
This volume, 1979, reads:
PROGRESS: CLASSICS SERIES
One word has been taken out. Somebody in Moscow, preparing the Ukrainian national poet for foreign readers, decided that he could not be filed under Russian classics — and did not replace the word with Ukrainian either. The category was simply widened until it had no nationality in it at all.
We have checked this in both the scan's text layer and the printed page, and against the four sibling volumes. It is not a misprint, and it is the most eloquent thing in the book's apparatus.
Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814–1861) was born a serf on a Ukrainian estate belonging to the Engelhardt family. He was a house-boy, then an apprentice to his owner's painter in Petersburg. His freedom was bought in 1838, when he was twenty-four, with money raised by selling a portrait — Karl Bryullov painted the poet Zhukovsky and the proceeds bought the serf.
Two years later he published Kobzar, and Ukrainian literature had a national poet.
In 1847 he was arrested with the members of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a small Kyiv society that wanted a federation of Slav republics and the abolition of serfdom. Shevchenko's punishment was the heaviest, because of the poems found in his possession. He was sent as a private soldier to the Orenburg garrisons, and Nicholas I added an instruction in his own hand: the prisoner was to be forbidden to write or to paint.
He served ten years. He was released in 1857, allowed back to Petersburg in 1858, and died in 1861 — a week before the manifesto emancipating the serfs was read out in the churches. He was reburied, as he had asked, on a hill above the Dnieper at Kaniv.
That is the life. Almost everything in this volume was written either under surveillance or under a ban.
This is the Progress printing of 1979 — a first printing — designed by V. Y. Pushkaryova, with the title page recording simply "Translated from the Ukrainian". The translators are named poem by poem in the contents; Olga Shartse and Irina Zheleznova carry much of it, and Shartse is the translator of "The Caucasus".
The foreword, "A Great Humanist Poet", is by Yevgeny Kirilyuk, the leading Soviet-Ukrainian Shevchenko scholar of his generation. It is informed and affectionate, and it quotes Ivan Franko on the appearance of Kobzar: "This small book instantly revealed to us a new world of poetry, and like a spring of pure, cold water it sparkled with a crystallike clearness."
In 1845 Shevchenko learned that his friend Yakov de Balmen, an artist who had illustrated his poems, had been killed in the Caucasus. He wrote "The Caucasus" and dedicated it to him, under an epigraph from Jeremiah: "O that my head were waters, And mine eyes a fountain of tears, That I might weep day and night For the slain..."
The poem is printed here in full, and it is one of the great anti-colonial poems in any language. It opens on the mountains:
Mighty mountains, row on row, blanketed with cloud, Planted thick with human woe, laved with human blood. Chained to a rock, age after age Prometheus there bears Eternal punishment — each day His breast the eagle tears.
Then it names what is being done, in the voice of the empire doing it:
'Twas there that We, the Gracious, found Poor freedom hiding 'mid the crags (A hungry thing, and all in rags), And sick'd our dogs to drag her down.
And then Shevchenko takes the side of the people his own empire is conquering, in lines that need no gloss:
And glory, freedom's knights, to you, Whom God will not forsake. Keep fighting — you are sure to win! God helps you in your fight For fame and freedom march with you, And right is on your side!
The last movement is the civilising mission, ventriloquised and destroyed:
With us, it's different! We can read, The Gospel of the Lord we know!... Come, learn from us! We'll teach you what The price of bread is, and of salt! We're Christian folk; with shrines we're blest, We've schools, and wealth, and we have God! Just one thing does not give us rest: How is it that your hut you've got Without our leave; how is it we To you, as to a dog a bone, Your crust don't toss! How can it be That you don't pay us for the sun! ... Just look at all our vast domains — Boundless Siberia alone! And prisons — myriads! Peoples — throngs!
That you don't pay us for the sun. Written in 1845 by a former serf about the war his own state was fighting, and printed in English by that state's successor in 1979.
Now set it beside another volume in the same series, which this house issued the year before. Lermontov's Selected Works (1978) is the work of a Russian officer who fought in that same war and died in it. Its foreword, by Sergei Narovchatov, runs to four thousand words and mentions the Caucasus five times — and the words mountaineer, conquest, colonial and Shamil not once. The Lermontov volume reproduces the poet's own painting of the battle of Valerik, his sketch of the fighting, a portrait of him drawn in a tent afterwards, and a photograph of his manuscript of the poem about it. It does not print the poem.
Here, in the Shevchenko volume, the poem about that war is printed entire, and Kirilyuk's foreword says plainly that in it the poet "demanded freedom not only for his own Ukrainian nation but for all the peoples belonging to the Russian Empire".
Same house. Same war. One year apart. The difference is which side of the empire the poet stood on. When the poet is a Ukrainian ex-serf, the apparatus can say the peoples belonging to the Russian Empire. When the poet is a Russian officer, the mountaineers have no name.
That is worth more than any general argument about Soviet publishing, and a reader can verify it by putting the two volumes side by side.
The volume also prints Haidamaki (1841), Shevchenko's long poem about the Koliivshchyna, the peasant and Cossack rising of 1768 against the Polish landlords of right-bank Ukraine — including its central section, "Gonta in Uman".
Kirilyuk's foreword describes it as a poem "about the heroic uprising of the peasants, supported by the Zaporozhian Cossacks, against the Polish feudal lords in 1768", and then adds: "The young poet's internationalism found its first expression in 'Haidamaki'."
The text the volume prints is a good deal harder than that.
The rising at Uman was a massacre. Shevchenko does not hide it and does not enjoy it. He gives the aftermath in full — "The Poles / Were left unburied, food for wolves, / Until the heavy winter snows / Concealed their bones" — and calls what happened by its name:
The raging snow-storms did not stop The vengeance worse than hell
And then, in the middle of his own poem, he stops and turns on the people he is writing about. Spring comes, the larks sing, the earth is beautiful:
A heaven truly! And for whom? For people. Yes, but they? They do not even want to look... They want it tinted up with blood And brightened with a blaze... What they mean is: too little hell! Oh people! Will you e'er Be satisfied with what you have? Oh, people, you are queer!
To blood and human savagery Spring did not bring a halt. It's terrible.... Yet 'twas the same In ancient Troy, recall, And will be in the future, too.
That is not internationalism and it is not a celebration. It is a poet who believes the rising was justified and cannot bear what it did, saying both at once and refusing to resolve them — and then widening it to Troy and to the future, which is to say: this is what people are.
We are not accusing the foreword of censorship. The poem is here, uncut, massacre and all; the reader can see for themselves. But "the young poet's internationalism found its first expression in Haidamaki" is a sentence that would leave a reader entirely unprepared for the poem they are about to read, and the gap between the gloss and the text is where the real Shevchenko is.
The volume's first long poem is Katerina (1838), and before a line of it there is a dedication that contains Shevchenko's whole relation to Russia:
To V. A. Zhukovsky in memory of April 22, 1838
That is the date of his emancipation. Zhukovsky — poet, tutor to the imperial family — had sat for the portrait by Bryullov that was raffled for 2,500 roubles to buy a serf out of bondage. The poem is Shevchenko's thank-you.
And this is how the poem opens:
O lovely maidens, fall in love, But not with Muscovites, For Muscovites are foreign folk, They do not treat you right. A Muscovite will love for sport, And laughing go away; He'll go back to his Moscow land And leave the maid a prey To grief and shame....
A Ukrainian village girl is seduced by a Russian soldier quartered in her village, left pregnant when the regiment marches, driven out by her parents and the villagers, and walks to Muscovy with the child to find him. The refrain returns, hammered, a second time within twenty lines: Muscovites are foreign folk, / They leave you in a plight.
Consider what is on that page. A poem whose opening stanza warns Ukrainian girls that Russians are foreigners who will ruin them, dedicated in gratitude to a Russian court poet, written by a man whose freedom Russian money had purchased three months earlier — and printed, in English, in Moscow, in 1979, by the publishing house of the Soviet state.
Nothing about that is simple, and Shevchenko did not intend it to be. He owed particular Russians his liberty and he owed the Russian Empire ten years in a garrison with a ban on his hands. Both facts are in this book, on facing sides of a single dedication.
Shevchenko is also merciless about his own people here. It is not only the Muscovite who destroys Katerina. It is the village — "the village gossips meanwhile hissed: 'A girl of ill repute!'" — and it is her parents, who put her out of the house. He gives her one of the loneliest images in the poetry of any language: she goes to the well at midnight rather than in daylight "so that she won't by foes be seen", stands under the snowball-tree and sings.
A national poet who writes his nation's suffering and his nation's cruelty in the same poem is a harder possession than a monument, which is one reason both empires that have claimed him have had to do some editing.
The most famous poem he wrote is here, in Irina Zheleznova's version, and so is a reading of it that deserves examination.
Oh bury me, then rise ye up And break your heavy chains And water with the tyrants' blood The freedom you have gained.
And it closes:
And in the great new family, The family of the free, With softly spoken, kindly words, Pray, men, remember me.
Kirilyuk glosses the ending like this: the poem "ended on a hopeful note that one day the peoples of the Russian Empire would become united into a big, free family".
Shevchenko wrote in the family, free and new. Whether that family is the Ukrainian nation freed, or a federation of Slav peoples of the kind the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius was broken up for proposing, or all humanity, the poem does not say — and the vagueness is doing work in the poem, as such endings do.
Reading it as the peoples of the Russian Empire united is one available interpretation. It is also, conveniently, a description of the state publishing the book. A reader should notice that the gloss arrives at the present arrangement, and should feel free to decide that a poem calling for tyrants' blood was not principally a prophecy of federal union.
The volume closes with work most English readers will not know: the novella The Artist, excerpts from the Diary, and the play Nazar Stodolya.
The Artist is autobiography at one remove — a serf boy who grinds pigment and paints floors and fences, and who is bought out of bondage into the Academy of Arts. It opens by measuring him against Thorvaldsen:
The great Thorvaldsen began his brilliant artistic career by carving ornaments and tritons with fishes' tails for snub-nosed Copenhagen ships. My hero began his not so brilliant but nevertheless artistic career by grinding ochre and mummy between millstones, and painting floors, ceilings and fences. A dismal, hopeless beginning. But are there then many of you, fortunate artistic geniuses, who began otherwise?
One fact about this prose belongs in any honest introduction and is not on the title page. Shevchenko wrote his poetry in Ukrainian and his prose in Russian — the novellas and the diary alike. Kirilyuk's foreword mentions in passing that the poem "The Wake" was "written in Russian", and leaves the larger pattern unremarked.
It was not a preference. Ukrainian prose had almost no outlet and, after 1847, Shevchenko had none at all; the novellas were written in exile, for a market that existed only in Russian, by a man forbidden to write anything. That a national poet's prose survives in the imperial language is not a betrayal and not an irony. It is what a ban on a language does, and it is visible in the contents page of this book if you know to look for it.
A serf who was bought out of slavery with the proceeds of a portrait, who was forbidden by an emperor's own hand to write or draw for ten years, and who used his freedom to write the best poem in the Russian Empire against the Russian Empire's colonial war.
Read "The Caucasus" first, and then read it again next to the Lermontov volume in this series. Read Haidamaki whole, including the passage where its author turns round and calls his own subject a vengeance worse than hell. Read "Testament" and decide for yourself what family he meant.
And keep the half-title page in view. Four volumes in this series say Russian Classics. This one says Classics, and the word that went missing is the whole subject of the poetry inside it.