Lifelong choice

In search of allies against the rebellious Poles, the imperial center had to satisfy the longtime aspirations of the Ukrainians for their own university in Kyiv, an issue they had repeatedly raised since the 1760s — first with Catherine II (1766, 1767) and then Alexander I (1802, 1805). A corollary to this question was the need to expand the university faculty not only with German graduates of Dorpat (now Tartu) University but also local Ukrainian and Russian professors.

One Ukrainian scholar who received an offer to teach was the Poltava-born professor of Moscow University Mykhailo Maksymovych, a well-known botanist and naturalist, who was terribly homesick for his country since his mother’s death. But instead of heading the Botany Department, he was appointed an ordinary professor of letters and offered the post of university rector. He was also appointed dean of the Philosophy Faculty’s First Division. Russian history was taught first by V. Dombrovsky and after his death, by Mykola Kostomarov. Nikolai Gogol, too, was seeking a transfer to Kyiv to teach the general history course.

In an attempt to transform Kyiv into a regional history research center, these professors formed a commission to study ancient sources. This desire was behind Taras Shevchenko’s move to Kyiv, where he intended to obtain a position at St. Volodymyr University. Kostomarov noted that Shevchenko came from St. Petersburg “with the intention to settle here and find himself a position.” Earlier, an interest in history had brought Panteleimon Kulish to Kyiv.

Shevchenko knew quite a lot about the political role and other tasks that the government assigned to the university because he had close ties with its professors, many of whom were his followers, devotees, and friends. He met Maksymovych in June 1843, when the latter was reinstated as head of the Department of Russian Letters, and before that he had heard about him when Maksymovych was the editor of a collection of Ukrainian folk songs. After graduating from the Academy of Arts, on March 23, 1845, Shevchenko was given a ticket to travel to Ukraine “for artistic studies.”

In late May 1845 the poet arrived in Kyiv and joined the Interim Commission formed on Maksymovych’s initiative to study ancient literary monuments. The commission consisted mainly of university professors. In 1843 Dmitriy Bibikov, Governor of Kyiv, Podillia, and Volyn, supported the creation of this commission on the grounds that it could help preserve ancient monuments in the Russian Empire’s southwestern provinces as ample evidence that this land was Russian since time immemorial. Shevchenko was invited to the commission on Maksymovych and Kulish’s recommendations. The invitation was a foregone conclusion, as the Ukrainian poet was the author of the first installment of the album Pictorial Ukraine. Published in Petersburg in 1844 and widely circulated in the Ukrainian provinces, the album included the graphic etchings In Kyiv, Vydubychi Monastery, and others works, which were also the subject of subsequent issues. The historic churches, graves, and fortresses depicted in Shevchenko’s etchings interested the commission members because the sketches, artistically drawn from nature, were in line with their views and the task that the government had set them.

Shevchenko was told unofficially to draw historical monuments in Chernihiv and Poltava gubernias. The drawings he presented in late November 1845 were duly appreciated, and he was made a full-fledged member of the commission on Dec. 10, 1845. Shevchenko worked in the commission for almost 18 months until March 1847, receiving a monthly salary of 12 rubles, 50 kopecks. His archeological notes, made during his travels through Ukraine, in which he listed and described old churches, religious attributes, graves, and fortifications, have been preserved.

Shevchenko befriended Kostomarov and was the first to congratulate him on his appointment to the Chair of Russian History at Kyiv University. The poet told Kostomarov about his desire to work at St. Volodymyr University. “It would be very good if God lets me find a haven at the university,” he wrote in a letter to Kostomarov.

In the summer of 1846 Shevchenko, together with M. Ivanyshev, a professor at the Department of Public Administration Laws, took part in the commission’s archeological excavations of ancient Scythian burial grounds Perepet (Perepyat) and Perepetykha near Fastiv, Vasylkiv county, in the summer of 1846. The results of the excavations, published in the Report of the Ancient Monuments Research Commission, were of great scholarly value. Collaboration with Ivanyshev instilled in Shevchenko a strong conviction in the importance of archeology, which he called the “mysterious mother of history,” as well as a deep respect for the scholar whom the poet presented with a Kobzar in 1860.

Shevchenko continued his travels throughout the Poltava, Chernihiv, Kyiv, Volyn, and Podillia regions to survey archeological monuments. His close contact with university professors and researchers of local history, frequent field studies, and reflections on the collected material and written monuments of the past, historical songs and legends, contributed to the poet’s spiritual growth and deepened his knowledge of the Ukrainian nation’s historical roots.

In contrast to the Russian imperial policy of de-Polonization and Russification, Shevchenko and Kostomarov endorsed the idea of the renaissance and unification of all Slavs into one federal, republican state. This idea was clearly spelled out in the program of the society Books of the Genesis of the Ukrainian People (“in a single, inseparable, and diversified union”) and was the lodestar of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. The society’s members and sympathizers were people who were directly associated with Kyiv University: the former students, now teachers, Vasyl Bilozersky and Dmytro Pylchykov; the students Yuriy Andruzky, Oleksandr Navrotsky, Ivan Posiada, Opanas Markovych, and Oleksandr Tulub.

In 1846 Shevchenko competed for the position of university drawing teacher, hoping to combine this job with his work at the commission. The aging artist K. Pavlov, who had held this position, retired because of ill health. Although there were three other candidates — the London-based member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences J. Gaberzetel, collegium registrar and artist P. Schleifer from the Kyiv Institute of Noble Young Ladies, and the Podillia-based artist and owner of a private painting school in Kyiv N. Buyalsky — the minister of public education agreed that Shevchenko should be appointed to this office. But the poet failed to realize his dream and hold this appointment because he was arrested on April 5, 1847, for his involvement in the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood.

In 1859, during his last tour of Ukraine, Shevchenko visited Kyiv and met with university students. In Ivan Soshenko’s apartment he met K. Bolsunovsky who said that, against all odds, the students knew the poet’s works. In response, Shevchenko enthusiastically welcomed the founding of Russia’s first Sunday schools by Kyiv students and sent them 50 copies of the Kobzar in 1860. The thank-you note, dated January 8, 1861, was signed by 65 individuals, mostly university students. On the day Shevchenko died, Feb. 26, 1861, the students of St. Volodymyr University gathered at the university church for the funeral service. When the coffin with Shevchenko’s body was being transported from St. Petersburg to Kaniv, they met the procession outside Kyiv on the Dnipro’s left bank on May 6, 1861. The students unharnessed the horses before the bridge and carried the coffin on their shoulders into the city. The university administration rejected the idea of the poet lying in state at the university church, so his body was laid out at the Nativity Church in the Podil district.

In spite of the administration’s warnings, sensitive students, who were not bound by official duties, made up the bulk of the mourners in the procession that took place in Kyiv on May 7, 1861, when the coffin with the poet’s body was being carried along the Dnipro embankment to the steamship Kremenchuk. The procession made frequent stops, and various people, including university students M. Drahomanov and O. Stoyanov, gave eulogies. The ex-rector of the university, Maksymovych, also came to Kaniv from St. Michael’s Hill to attend the funeral. The students M. Lysenko, M. Starytsky, T. Rylsky, P. Zhytetsky, M. Malashenko, P. Vyshnevsky, and M. Kovalevsky accompanied the coffin to Kaniv and helped G. Chestakhivsky arrange the poet’s gravesite.

Shevchenko’s aspirations to serve Ukraine rather than Russia’s imperial interests were the reason why the poet was barred from living and working in his native land. The university was belatedly named after him in 1939, but this seems to have been merely a semblance of veneration. Today it is clear that real honors will only come when his descendants serve Ukraine’s interests, as the great poet did.