Washington's Shevchenko and his neighbors: if only they could converse (04/06/03)

Washington's Shevchenko and his neighbors: if only they could converse

by Yaro Bihun
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - Taras Shevchenko got a rare birthday gift this year - a welcome neighbor in the form of Tomas Garrigue Masaryk.

A 12-foot bronze statue of Czechoslovakia's founding father and first president was unveiled March 8 on a small triangle of land on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and 22nd Street, N.W., a block away from Shevchenko's monument on 22nd and P Streets. It was a gift to the nation's capital from the Czech Republic and the American Friends of the Czech Republic.

As is noted on the monument, Tomas Masaryk (1850-1937) is honored as a "professor, creator of a democracy and champion of liberty." Ukrainians - especially a couple of generations of Ukrainian scholars and professionals - remember him also for the helping hand he extended to them as the president of Czechoslovakia from 1918 to 1935, when his government not only facilitated but helped finance the Ukrainian Free University in Prague and the Ukrainian Academy of Technology and Technical Husbandry Institute in Podebrady.

Unlike the Shevchenko statue, which Leo Mol (Molodozhanyn) created specifically for the Washington site, Masaryk's statue has a long history to it. Czech sculptor Vincenc Makovsky created it soon after Masaryk's death in 1937, but because of the Nazi and then Soviet occupation that followed it was not cast in bronze until the "Prague Spring" in 1968, only to be put back into storage when the Soviets quashed that political experiment. There it remained until its unveiling in Washington.

The statue depicts Masaryk in his later years, his head ever so slightly bowed and with a downward gaze. An overcoat draped over his shoulders, he holds in front of him a rolled-up Constitution of Czechoslovakia in one hand and his hat in the other. With his balding head and full mustache, Mr. Makovsky's Masaryk is reminiscent of most of the statues of Shevchenko in Ukraine and elsewhere, in sharp contrast to Leo Mol's young, vibrant and defiant Shevchenko standing ramrod straight a block away.

Kindred spirits in many ways, the Ukrainian poet and the Czech president, unfortunately, are positioned facing away from each other.

Both monuments stand on triangular plots of park land. Shevchenko's is many times larger, with space enough for a lawn, trees, shrubs, benches and a fountain. Masaryk's park, although less than one-fifth the size, stands right at the entrance to "Embassy Row," a mile-long stretch of Massachusetts Avenue lined with foreign embassies and diplomatic residences.

When the Shevchenko monument was unveiled in 1964, this fashionable area of the capital was a lonely place for statuary. The only other statues along or near Embassy Row at that time were that of Civil War Gen. George P. Sheridan of the Union army on his horse in the middle of a traffic circle bearing his name and the four bronze bison standing guard at the ends of a nearby bridge.

Within two years, however, some prominent and interesting new neighbors began to appear along Massachusetts Avenue. The first two - of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and of the 18th Century Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet - were unveiled in 1966. Appropriately, they are separated by at least a half mile and stand on opposite sides of the street.

Signifying his Anglo-American ancestry, Churchill stands with one foot on embassy grounds and the other on U.S. territory, his right hand raised in a signature two-finger victory salute.

The statue of the Irish patriot Emmet, whose life was cut short by an English executioner in 1803 when he was 25, was presented to the United States when Ireland became independent in 1916, but had to wait a half century for its unveiling on Embassy Row. As Ukrainians have raised much of Shevchenko's poetry to the level of anthem, so the Irish hold in special reverence Emmet's final statement to the English court on the eve of his execution. In his last act of defiance in the face of death, the Irish patriot, among other entreaties, expressed his hope for a future Ireland with a phrase that most Ukrainians would recognize: "I wished to procure for my country the guarantee which Washington procured for America," Emmet told his oppressors many years before Shevchenko penned a similar appeal now inscribed on his monument in Washington.

In 1996 Lebanese Americans dedicated the Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) Memorial Garden, directly across Massachusetts Avenue from the Winston Churchill statue, to honor their Lebanese American poet and philosopher for "the powerful simplicity of his words, which continue to inspire those who long for peace, search for love and strive for justice."

By far the most puzzling statue a tourist will encounter in Shevchenko's neighborhood stands - or, more precisely, sits - in front of the embassy of Croatia. It's that of St. Jerome (340-420), described on its pedestal as the "Greatest Doctor of the Church." It is a larger-than-life nude figure of the saint sitting in a semi-lotus position, studying a large book cradled on his feet.

One suspects that it is not St. Jerome who is being honored here, even though he is the patron saint of the Franciscan Fathers in Croatia, but the statue's creator, Croatia's most famous sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883-1962), whom Auguste Rodin called "the greatest phenomenon among the sculptors" of his time. Sculpted in 1954, it was placed in front the newly opened Embassy of Croatia following the break-up of Yugoslavia.

The last statue before Masaryk's to be erected in this area was that of Mahatma Gandhi, whose name has become synonymous with non-violence and civil disobedience, a philosophy not found in the "Testament" (Zapovit) by his less forgiving Ukrainian neighbor two blocks away.

Its dedication in September of 2000 in a small triangular park on 21st Street and Massachusetts Avenue was unique in its brevity and simplicity, according to a report in The Washington Post. There were no microphones, speeches or music during the 10-minute ceremony, in which President Bill Clinton and the prime minister of India threw rose petals at the sandled feet of the lean, robe-clad figure of Gandhi striding on a low, rough-hewn granite pedestal.

If statues could talk to one another - and some people with imagination think they do late at night when, unlike New York, Washington sleeps - one can presume that Shevchenko would welcome his new and interesting neighbors and relish the opportunity to discuss the things that matter to people of their stature.

Considering Shevchenko's bad experience with involuntary military service, he probably would not go out of his way to engage Gen. Sheridan in a conversation, and one could presume that there would be some arguments with a few of the other honorees - civilized, of course, as befits gentlemen. (Isn't it a shame that not a single woman has been honored in this neighborhood.)

But if Shevchenko was allowed to invite only one guest next door for an all-night session over beer at the Brickskeller, which boasts of serving a thousand world brands of beer and helped quench the thirst of at least some of the 100,000 people who witnessed his unveiling on that hot summer day almost 40 years ago, it most likely would be Emmet.

There is much in what that young Irishman told the English court that Shevchenko would like and he would recognize the similarities in his own, later writings - as in Emmet's concluding entreaty:

"Let no man write my epitaph; for as no man who knows my motives dare now vindicate them, let not prejudice or ignorance asperse them. Let them and me repose in obscurity and peace, and my tomb remain uninscribed, until other times, and other men, can do justice to my character; when my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then, and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done."

And so the epitaphs of a handful of brave and creative men have been written - along Embassy Row, in Washington.

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