Sixty years ago, on April 8, 1961, The Ukrainian Weekly featured an essay, “Shevchenko, the bard of Ukraine” by Roman Olesnicki, that was read at the Shevchenko Centennial Concert in Newark, N.J., on March 12, 1961.
Mr. Olesnicki opined that Shevchenko should not be compared to literary greats such as Robert Burns, William Blake, or even with poets of Ukraine’s neighbors, Sandor Petofi of Hungary and Adam Mickiewicz of Poland, who were both Shevchenko’s contemporaries. Instead, these literary greats should be compared to Shevchenko, he added, noting that “we set his person, life and works as a standard of perfection… to gauge the stature of other poets by that of Shevchenko.”
Mr. Olesnicki continued with his comparison between Walt Whitman (1819-1892) and Shevchenko (1814-1861), whom he called “political poets.” Whitman in 1855 wrote a set of standards which a poet would have to meet in order to be rightly called a “bard.”
Shevchenko, rather than Whitman, meets those standards, according to Mr. Olesnicki.
In Whitman’s words: “A bard is to be commensurate with a people… His spirit responds to his country’s spirit… To him the hereditary countenance descends – both mother’s and father’s. To him enter the essences of the real things, and past and present events… Bards shall be hungry for equals days and night… The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots.”
Shevchenko’s words, Mr. Olesnicki added, “have been a solace to all slaves for these past hundred years – he can justly be called the poet-laureate of the Soviet slave labor camps, and the scourge of despots: from Czar Nicholas the First to Stalin, Hitler and Khrushchev. How much afraid was Nicholas of him we see from his hand written addition to the sentence of 10 years exile in hard military service imposed on Shevchenko in 1847: ‘no writing and no painting.’”
It was Khrushchev who exposed Stalin as a despot, and quoted Shevchenko in an attempt “to divert the hatred of the Ukrainian people against the Communist regime from his own person and to channel it to that of Stalin, who, it was now permitted to say, had like Nicholas I, put a gag on the mouths of all his slaves, and told them to like it.”
Using Whitman’s words, Mr. Olesnicki continued his comparison to Shevchenko: “The prescient poet projects himself centuries ahead… a great poem is for the ages and ages… The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.”
Charles Dickens wrote of Shevchenko in 1877, “The Ukrainians worship the memory of Shevchenko.” Years later, Oxford professor W.R. Morfill also affirmed, “The tomb of the poet is the object of special reverence among his countrymen, the Mecca of the Ukrainian patriots.” French scholar Emile Durand in 1876 wrote: “The grave of the poet is never solitary… pilgrims recite and sing the poems… It would be impossible to find elsewhere a poet to whom the crowd would thus render homage such as is usually reserved for sanctuaries or saints.”
It was the hope of Ukrainians in 1961 that Shevchenko’s words from the poem “Yurodyvy” (translated as The Madman or God’s Fool) would one day be fulfilled with the coming of a Ukrainian George Washington who would introduce “new and righteous laws.”
The poem concludes with hope: “We surely will, one day.” However, another dream was beginning to be realized for Ukrainians in 1961. While still in the planning stages at the time, a monument of the bard was erected in Washington, with its unveiling held on June 27, 1964.
This year marks the 207th anniversary of the birth of Taras Shevchenko, and the Ukrainian community around the world continues to honor the bard of Ukraine with concerts, presentations, exhibits and other events. Many events, due to the pandemic, have been moved online. A listing of some of these events can be found by visiting the Ukrainian World Congress website, www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/featured-news/taras-shevchenko-207th-birthday-upcoming-online-events/.
Source: “Shevchenko, the bard of Ukraine,” by Roman Olesnicki, The Ukrainian Weekly, April 8, 1961.