1. Taras Shevchenko
Pіdgotuvala:
Schoolgirls 10-A Klas
Rozhenkova Dasha

2. Content
1. Childhood
2. Shevchenko Art
3. St. Petersburg
Period
4. Arrest and Exile

3. Childhood
Taras Shevchenko, the son of
serfs, was born on the estate of Baron Vasili
Engelhardt on March 9, 1814.
One of six children, at his birth he
was little more than another possession of his
lord and master.
The place of his birth was the village
of Moryntsi, some 120 miles or 200 kilometres
to the south of Kiev, an area which in earlier
generations had been the home of the
Zaporizhian Cossacks.
In 1816 the Shevchenko family
moved to the village of Kirilivka (now
Shevchenkove), where Taras spent his childhood
years.
Amongst the peasantry, burdened
by the brutal and unjust system of serfdom, tales
of these folk heroes and their struggles for
freedom, were commonplace, a relief from the
toils of the day, as well as a hope for a better
future.
It was in such an environment that
the young Taras and his siblings were raised.

4. Childhood
Shevchenko's parents, Hryhori and
Kateryna, worked the fields of Baron
Engelhardt, as did his older brother Mykyta.
As was usual in those times, the
serfs laboured five days for their master, and
one for themselves.
His father also worked on
occasion as a chumak, a teamster, hauling salt
for Baron Engelhardt from southern Ukraine.
It appears that his father, on
occasion, took Taras with him on these trips,
as young children were not obliged to work for
their master.
During these trips, the young boy
was able to see some of the world, even major
centres such as Elizavetgrad and Uman.

5. Shevchenko Art
T.Shevchenko, Parents House in
Kerelivka, 1843
His mother Kateryna, while working
the fields during the growing season, spent the
winters at home, as did most peasant
women, spinning and weaving for the master.
Inside the household, again as was
typical, the older children took care of the younger
ones.
In the Shevchenko household, older
sister Katrusia was the mainstay and had quite an
effect on her younger brother.
He was upset, it appears, when she
married and moved away with her new
husband, and it was to her home that Taras
returned a few years later after fleeing a brutal
deacon for whom he worked.

6. Shevchenko Art
At home, the life of the family
was a happy one in terms of the human
relations, but a hard one in terms of
material possessions and human want.
Often, there was a shortage of
food, particularly after the hard winter
months. Shevchenko himself noted that his
mother would often refuse to eat after
working the fields all day, claiming she
wasn't hungry.
Taras later concluded that she
didn't eat because she wanted the children
to be better nourished.
This interpretation was no
doubt underscored by the fact that his
youngest sister, Mariyka, who was forced
to fast during the lenten period before
Easter and after a winter of food
shortages, went blind as a result of
malnutrition.

7. Shevchenko Art
Another influence on the young
boy was his paternal
grandfather, Ivan, who often related
stories to the young boy of the struggles of
the peasantry and the not infrequent
rebellions and violent uprisings.
These stories probably are the
basis for much of the poet's later
works, such as Haydamaky.
As a youngster, Taras stood
out amongst his peers.
He was inquisitive and
adventurous, often wandering away to
search out answers to his many
questions.
When he was six, he set off to
a distant burial mound to see the iron
pillars which he imagined held up the
sky.
Luckily, a villager spotted
him on the road and brought him home.

8. Shevchenko Art
It was not long after this that
the boy was sent to study with a deacon to
learn to read and write.
He was one of twelve village
boys studying, out of some one hundred of
that age.
This in itself, shows that Taras
was exceptional amongst his peers.
He excelled at his studies and
was sometimes sent to read psalms for the
dead in the deacon's place.
By this stage, young Taras was
already sketching and wanted to become an
artist.
He often would copy liturgical
materials and illustrated the margins of his
pages with various designs.

9. St. Petersburg Period
Taras Shevchenko arrived in St.
Petersburg from Vilnius, along with the rest of
the servants of Paul Englehardt, in February of
1831. He was on the eve of his seventeenth
birthday.
It was here, in the Tsarist capital and
the centre of the cultural life of the Russian
Empire, that Shevchenko was to mature, first as
an artist, and as a poet, writer and activist.

10. St. Petersburg Period
While a good part of
Shevchenko's apprenticeship was spent
mixing paints and delivering items to
various of Shyrayev's projects across St.
Petersburg, he also honed his own talents
and learned much from the master
painter. Although he was still
officially a serf, his apprenticeship
nonetheless allowed him a certain degree
of personal freedom in the city.
In his spare
moments, normally in the evenings, he
would wander the city making
sketches, often in the Summer Gardens
during the northern "white lights".

11. St. Petersburg Period
With his freedom
attained, in 1838 Shevchenko became
an external student at the Academy of
Arts, studying under Karl Bryulov.
In January of 1839, he was
accepted as a resident student of the
Association for the Encouragement of
Artists and at the annual examinations
at the Academy was awarded a silver
medal for a landscape.
The following year, he
again won a silver medal for his first
oil painting The Beggar Boy Giving
Bread to a Dog.

12. St. Petersburg Period
As his artistic talent
developed, Shevchenko continued to move
in the circles of the progressive
intelligentsia and also broadened his world
view.
He took courses in
zoology, physics and philosophy, studied the
French language and avidly read literature
- Homer, Goethe, Schiller, Sir Walter
Scott, Dickens, Shakespeare, Defoe, Mickiew
icz, Pushkin, Gogol and many others.
In art, he became a critical
realist and applied his approach to
portraiture, etching and illustrating.
However, it is for his written
work that Shevchenko is best remembered.
According to his own
memoirs, he first began to write verse
during his visits to the Summer Gardens in
1837. However, he had become so
immersed in this that, by 1840, his first
collection of poetry appeared - the
Kobzar, containing but eight verses, with a
forward in verse form, the now famous
Dumy moyi.

13. Arrest and Exile
Together with a group of young
Ukrainian liberals, Kostomarov organized a
political association - the Society of Cyril and
Methodious, named for the legendary disseminators
of reading and writing among the Slavs.
The Society called for the unification of
all the Slavic nations on the basis of equality, and
stood for the annulment of serfdom and for close
cultural and political fraternization.
However, its members imagined that
they could achieve their aims through sermonizing
and dissemination of knowlege, ruling out any idea
of revolutionary action.
The poet attended meetings of the secret
fraternity, where he read his flaming poems, calling
for an uprising. He headed the left wing of the
society.
In March of 1847 the Society was
denounced to the authorities and its members -
Kostomarov, Shevchenko, Hulak and others - were
arrested.

14. Arrest and Exile
Violating the Tsar's
prohibition and disregarding all
threats, Shevchenko secretly continued to
write poetry.
It should be noted that among
his immediate superiors there were not
only rude martinets, but also some very
sensitive and humane people.
During his ten years of exile he
composed many marvelous works, in
which, disclosing his own feelings and
experiences, he expressed the cherished
aspirations of all oppressed people.
Never did freedom seem so
precious to Shevchenko as it did there, in
exile and bondage.
With all his heart he
yearned for Ukraine, although
she, too, was deprived of freedom.

15. Arrest and Exile
Shortly before his long-awaited
freedom, Shevchenko began to keep a diary in
the Russian language.
He began it "out of boredom", as he
put it simply because he had " a terrible desire to
write" and because he wanted to practice
writing. "Just as his instrument is imperative for
the virtuoso and his brush to the painter, so
must a man of letters practice writing."
He had no idea that his Journal (as
he titled it, according to fashion) would become
one of his most remarkable works.
It is more than a biographical
document.
It is also a unique self-portrait of the
man whom Nekrasov called "a most remarkable
person of the Russian land" -a self-portrait that
allows us to gain an intimate knowlege of the
poet, his feelings, thoughts and political
convictions.
In his Journal, Shevchenko appears
as a staunch fighter, incapable of compromise
and firm in his belief that the final victory of the
people over the powers that held them in
slavery.

16. Arrest and Exile
When Shevchenko was
finally released in 1857, already
during the reign of Tsar Alexander
II, the poet seemed to have been
born anew as though he had
dumped the hard years of exile off
his back: "It seems to me that I'm
exactly the same as I was ten years
ago.
Not a single trait of my
inner being has changed.
Is that good? It is good!"
he wrote in his Journal.

17. The End…