Taras Shevchenko and Lykera Polusmak:

Lately the bard has gradually been shedding the veneer of a flamboyant revolutionary democrat, kind of a prophetic hermit poet who seemed to gear all his words, deeds, lines and, finally, all his life to his future reader in Ukrainian Soviet literature. So the apparent facts, once banned and now declassified, are a true revelation for us. He turns out to have been in love and jealous, he would cool down in his sentiments and fall in love again. Like all normal people, like us all.

Woman serf Lykera Polusmak  played a virtually fatal role in Taras Shevchenko's life. They met in 1860 in Petersburg, far from their native land: a Ukrainian girl and Ukrainian poet. She served a gentry family Shevchenko knew and visited. It was the poet's third free summer after coming back from exile. It later proved to be his third and last. The soul must have felt his days were numbered and allowed him to fall in love for the last time.

Different things were said about them. The 19-year-old Lykera was scolded for not sparing Shevchenko's heart, being light-minded and giving him grounds for jealousy. Her 44-year-old fiancО was chided for ill-considered behavior and even demanded to break off the engagement. And some could not simply believe that Taras, the famous father Taras, fell in love with an ordinary servant girl.

Their love may have lasted a hundred days. The first gusts of fall wind brought cold to their relationship and then disrupted it altogether. And although Lykera Polusmak had already been independent in her actions (she was set free thanks to the poet's effort) and had a residence of her own found again by Shevchenko, and although the gentry's jibes were of late not so thorny (for, whatever you say, Lykera Polusmak was on the point of becoming Mrs. Shevchenko), the tragic end was relentlessly approaching. The husband to be was too tired. The bride to be was too young. Surely, the 19-year-old girl failed to hold onto the destitute poet and fathom his complex feelings. In a word, she failed to save Taras. Moreover, some suggest something harsher, that it was she who brought him to his death.

He repudiated her in November. What was the last straw nobody knows. Most researchers share an opinion that most likely it was "...Lykera's flirtation, philandering with someone else..." (O. Doroshkevych). Facts testify that Shevchenko was in utter despair in those days. "Burn all that is left with Lykera (i.e., his presents - Author)!" Or: "In addition to what I asked you to burn down under her eyes, she must pay 14 rubles for rent and 1 ruble for the key she lost," writes he in letters to acquaintances N. Zabila and M. Makarov. And another hundred of days later the poet passed away...

She did find that key, but too late. The search lasted very long. After Shevcheko's death Lykera Polusmak had to earn her living in Petersburg as a seamstress, then she moved to Tsarskoye Selo, where she married a certain barber named Yakovlev. She gave birth and brought up children. Word has it her husband drank, so she had to keep house on her own. And when the children stood on their two feet, she began preparations to travel to faraway Kaniv. The trip was put off many times, and only in 1904, after her husband's death, she at last resolved to go. For she understood: that place held a key to everything, to what she had and what she lost. Moreover, she was no longer nineteen. Later on she settled there permanently.

Lykera Polusmak lived in Kaniv for about ten years, until she died  in 1917. Local children called her Taras's bride. All clad in mourning clothes, she would bring presents to the Hill, hand them out to children, and sit weeping for hours by the grave. Here is a line from the visitors' book of that time: "On May 13, 1905, your Lykera, your beloved came, my friend. Today is my name day. See how I repent."

However, even here, next to the bard's shrine, she was caught up with people's condemnation. They said the 70-year-old fiancОe had come to Kaniv to beg for money. She was said to want to bask in the rays of Shevchenko's glory in the final stretch of her life. She was said to be merely playing the role of a penitent. So many things were said. There might have been a grain of truth in each piece of gossip. A certain tiny fraction may have fallen in her hands. But what kind of money could one collect by begging in that holy place at that (and this) time? Our newspaper wrote recently that now, in the late 1990s, employees of the Kaniv Shevchenko Museum have to buy themselves firewood in the nearby forest to heat Shevchenko's chamber, for they lack money even for coal. And there cannot have been any money back at the turn of this century. Basked in the rays? She may have, but only to warm up her heart. But she could, in theory, win true glory in this "role" in the capital rather than here, in a backwater province on the Dnipro's steep banks where mostly common people used to come to pay tribute to father Taras: they were, in fact, indifferent to who sat by the bard's tomb. The role of a penitent? Possibly, the more so she once rubbed shoulders with actors and actresses in Petersburg. But that was a very tragic role indeed. From the reminiscences of ОmigrО writer Oleksa Kobets from Kaniv: "Every day... I always came across an old woman by the grave, where she would stroll for hours down the footpaths with a proudly raised head and casting a long look in the distance beyond the Dnipro. And when a larger crowd of pilgrims gathered, she would suddenly sprawl prone on the grave, spreading her arms like a bird in flight, and so lie unmoving for an hour or more." Lykera found the key Taras had reproved her for. But it turned out to cost a whole life, not one ruble. Having outlived her beloved by 56 years, Lykera Polusmak ended her days in a Kaniv poorhouse. Taras Shevchenko's fiancОe was died forgotten, lonely, and in dire poverty. She breathed her last on February 4 (17), 1917.

This is what deputy curator of the Shevchenko museum in Kaniv Zina Tarakhan-Bereza writes in the book The Shrine: "The only thing she left as a token is ... a home-spun towel, almost four meters in size, with the initial letter of her name embroidered  in the middle. There is a round wreath above it, and roosters on the side. Word has it Taras Shevchenko wanted a rooster-depicting towel at his wedding ceremony."

...Even the earth divides them: he lies on the glorious Hill at Kaniv in view of the whole world, and her modest grave is overgrown with weeds in an old town cemetery. The distance between them is about three miles. As they tried and failed to reach each other in their lifetime, so they ascended, also halfway - the eternally engaged Taras Shevchenko and Lykera Polusmak.

 Kaniv.

Photos from the archives of
Zina Tarakhan-Bereza