Shevchenko Remembered

By Walter Kish

My earliest recollections of organized Ukrainian culture are memories of concerts every March at the UNF hall in the little town of Rouyn–Noranda in northern Quebec to commemorate both the birth and passing of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s greatest poet and arguably the father of the Ukrainian language, literature and self-identity.  Of course at that age I had little appreciation for either the man or what he stood for, and what sticks in my mind is that such events tended to be filled with mournful songs, long boring speeches and over-emoted recitations of poetry that I did not understand and could not appreciate. 

As I got older, I was strong-armed into participating by memorizing some of Shevchenko’s poems which I would dutifully recite on stage to warm applause. Still, it was more a chore, and something that had to be endured rather than enjoyed.  Even then though, I had an inkling that Shevchenko was something special, because I could see and sense the deep feelings and emotions that the event evoked in parents and the other grown-ups present.  The finale, the singing of Shevchenko’s Zapovit (“When I die, please bury me…) would inevitably have the majority of the audience in tears.

It was not until much later in life that I came to understand the emotional attachment that most Ukrainians, and immigrants in particular, have for Shevchenko.  There are of course, his powerful verses whose natural rhythms flow like the wind blowing over the steppes that he loved so much.  His poems were powerful reflections of Ukraine’s history and its people.  They resonated with beauty, love, heroism, determination, passion and tragedy, the basic building blocks of both the Ukrainian character and culture.  His works were the voice of an oppressed people seeking to break the shackles of centuries old oppression and subjugation

But it was not just the poetry that moved all these Ukrainians in exile far from their native land in the northern reaches of distant Canada. It was the fact that Shevchenko’s life itself was a representative symbol of their own turbulent lives.  Most of Shevchenko’s short forty seven years of life were spent in forced exile away from his beloved Ukraine.  Like my parents and many other Ukrainians, fate and circumstance made him a “displaced person” too, forced to leave the comfortable little universe of his native selo.  As a serf and orphan, his master took him at the age of fourteen from his village in the Cherkassy province of Ukraine to St. Petersburg where he was to spend a major portion of his life.

Although his skills as an artist eventually served to earn him his freedom from serfdom, his other talent as a poet got him into trouble with the Russian authorities who viewed his poetry as subversive and sent him into exile in the Far East in what is now Kazakhstan.  From then on, except for several brief visits, he saw very little of his homeland until he died on March 10, 1861, a day after his forty seventh birthday.

Most of those who gathered every March to commemorate Shevchenko be it in Rouyn-Noranda or any other of the countless Ukrainian communities in Canada, the U.S., or other countries of the diaspora, understood on a very personal level just what Shevchenko must have felt being torn away from his roots and forced to spend most of his life far from his native land, his people and his culture.  His pain was their pain; his suffering was their suffering too.

Perhaps that is also the reason why in the last decade or two, the annual March Shevchenko commemorations have lost some of their poignancy and impact.  With Ukraine now independent, with most of the Ukrainian community now comfortable in their “exile”, with the battle for a free Ukraine now seemingly won, somehow the symbol of Shevchenko has lost some of its luster and power. 

Yet, there may also be a bright side to all this,  As Shevchenko loses some of his role as a political symbol, maybe people will start appreciating him more as one of history’s most outstanding poets of any language or culture.  Let us all remember him with “a kind and quiet word!”