SHEVCHENKO’S METAMORPHOSES

March 9 marked

Taras Shevchenko’s 185th birthday

“... When will we see our own Washington with new and righteous laws? And someday he will come,” the poet wrote. When his statue was unveiled in the US capital in 1964, bearing this anti-Soviet legend, the KGB decided to make sure whether he wrote this in the mid-nineteenth century.

He did. The poet also turned out to harbor ideas of which Soviet scholars knew nothing, content with the excerpts they had dug up, sorted out, and adjusted to the official propaganda.

Does this mean that the enthusiasts unveiling his statues on other continents know a different Shevchenko? Not the “revolutionary democrat” all Soviet generations were taught? For example, Oleksandr Archipenko’s monument in Paris depicts a prophet with a meaningfully pointing hand. The poet’s life story and creative heritage are fantastic, they cannot be fitted into any propaganda pattern. Of course, for Soviet ideologues a zealot fighting tsarist autocracy, wearing peasant clothes, defending the starving and downtrodden masses, was ideal; this figure could be (and was) used as yet more graphic evidence of how well the Bolshevik Revolution had solved all of society’s problems, and, of course, erecting a monument in the so-called capital of the so-called Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a number one priority.

Thus, no one even tried to fully comprehend Shevchenko under the Soviets. One of the metamorphoses in the poet’s life took place shortly before his death. After Nicholas I’s death, Taras Shevchenko, having spent ten years in exile, returned to St. Petersburg. Soon he was awarded the title of Academician of Fine Arts and, on the crest of fame, was made welcome by the creme of the capital’s aristocratic families. However, this role did not set well with his Cossack nature, and he made a point of wearing peasant clothes and stressing his parentage in the shocked aristocratic eyes. A photograph dating from that period has since been extremely popular with a great many people, including those still in bondage (whatever its twentieth century form). Proof? Take a look at a Hr 100 banknote. In a word, this image has been taken for granted. The fact remains, however, that Shevchenko was anything but an old stooping man. He returned from exile at the age of 44 and planned to marry a young girl.

For this reason there are monuments portraying a young national bard and others a gloomy peasant patriarch. There are hundreds of his statues all over the world.

But this is not all: external contrasts can, after all, be reconciled. The greatest problem comes from different interpretations of his legacy. His popularity was such that every political force remembered to make him their “supporter.” Indeed, Shevchenko always fought all forms of bondage. Of course, he was severely opposed to the Russian autocracy and combined Ukrainian patriotism with solidarity with other national liberation movements. Finally, he often conversed with God and reproached Him for allowing injustice.

It was only natural for Ukrainian patriots to consider Shevchenko their apostle. The narodniks (Populists) and later revolutionaries saw him as a poet eulogizing the struggle for liberation. They had a point, but the worst thing was that categorizing the poet had to be kept in line with the given party’s program and rules: who is not with us is against us.

When Bolshevik ideology became official and this motto made obligatory, the poet had to be adjusted to a new class program. With all its totalitarian straightforwardness. Soviet propaganda used Shevchenko to strengthen the foundations of the evil empire which was now referred to as “a family free and new” (borrowed from Shevchenko’s “ Testament” where he calls for Ukraine’s liberation and independence).

Bolshevism was a jealous god. Of course, they could not accept Shevchenko conversing with God, with his love and prayers. So they committed perhaps the worst act of violence against the poet’s heritage. They resorted to blatant falsification. His works were “edited” in accordance with “needs of the new age.” This was not difficult, for by then the national bureaucrats had developed their parlance and imposed it on Ukrainian culture and history. Pavlo Tychyna wrote on the subject, “We will make all words fit our size.”

Shevchenko’s image was distorted, adding distinct touches of hatred. Now he was a materialist, atheist, placed in the front ranks of the struggle against “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism.” And woe unto those who tried to steal a glance under that disguise or even call it disguise.

This was a totally different Shevchenko whom the people no longer recognized. A split personality. Remarkably, only several works were shelved and kept secret. All the others were falsified and propagandized in terms of class struggle and sociological primitivism. But the goal was achieved: Shevchenko was now estranged from God and his people, a mouthpiece of ideas he never espoused but wholeheartedly loathed. And the most remarkable metamorphosis was that this inveterate dissident had become a pet minstrel in the Soviet court. Countless monuments were erected and unveiled with great pomp and only anecdotes hinted at the truth, like the one about a Shevchenko literary soiree dedicated to Comrade Stalin.

Of course, there were those who tried to refute such brutal mystification. Some spoke their mind in public and were severely punished. Books were published abroad, but they were in practice accessible only to those who knew the truth anyway but kept that knowledge to themselves.

The falsification of Shevchenko, imposed on four Soviet generations, is over at long last, but the stereotypes are still there, because some prefer them to the truth. Everybody knows that a straight backbone is better than a curved one and that straightening it takes agonizing treatment, yet it can easily return to the previous state afterward if one does not follow the doctor’s orders.

Shevchenko, who united the nation with his love, in this eviscerated world was placed before distorting mirrors, and we lost the aureole of this severe prophet who scourged the cruel and insatiable.

New books are published and the poet is interpreted in a new manner, truthfully. There is hope that Shevchenko, who explained to a many a generation the spirit and letter of The Word, will continue to speak in the hearts of all those seeking the Truth and Beauty.

All this is good, but a certain Oles Buzyna maintains in Kievskie Vedomosti that the poet is no longer relevant. As many other newspaper philosophers, the author tends to jump to conclusions, saying that Shevchenko just does not sound right these days. Moreover, Mr. Buzyna refuses to acknowledge his talent, supporting this allegation by the trite “I am not alone but legion.” The easiest way would be to shrug him off as yet another academic underachiever, hence his being “legion.” But suppose he was an honors student all the way and then forgot all about his “views” recited at his last graduation exam and then entered the market with his nose to the wind?

Why, then, is the market against Shevchenko? He cuts a figure seen from afar, standing out amongst a pagan crowd, trying to “force his way to the palace” (as in “The Dream”).

We are surrounded by lesser people captivated by their own consumerism. A gray flood of vulgarity is washing away the foundations. Dwarves do their dance macabre, waiting for the rest of the structure to collapse, for it embodies a world totally alien to them.

Classics have a very poor market and those willing to pay the real price cannot afford it. And then someone looking very much like Oles Buzyna stands on a barrel and addresses the crowd, speaking in a language they all understand and appreciate.

And standing above this is Taras Shevchenko, saying, “Things come and go with no end, Where do they come from? Where do they go?