Calamity Again

Dear God, calamity again!

It was so peaceful, so serene;

We had just begun to break the chains

That bind our folk in slavery,

When suddenly…! Again the people’s blood

Is flowing. Like dogs hungry

For butter, the royal thugs

Are at our throats again.

The poem was written in 1859, two years before Shevchenko’s death, but it seems as relevant today as it did in his own time, when many Ukrainians (as well as many dissident Russians) were struggling against the oppression of the Tsarist state. His reference to slavery in the poem was not simply a rhetorical flourish. He was born in the village of Moryntsi, south of Kiev, in the geographical heart of Ukraine, into a family of serfs who were owned as private property by the German-Russian landowner Vasily Engelhardt. Shevchenko claimed Cossack ancestry, and his forefathers had taken part in a number of rebellions against Russian domination before they were defeated and enslaved.

Taras was a precocious child who proved to be a talented painter as well as writer: in Ukraine today, besides his status as the national poet, he is recognised as an important artist. His gifts were appreciated by his master, who began to take the young man with him on official business within the Russian Empire, and particularly to the then capital, St Petersburg. There he was enrolled in art studies, and subsequently attracted the notice of both Ukrainian and Russian artists and writers. His friends were eventually able to collect enough money to buy his freedom in 1838, when he was 24 years old.

After this Shevchenko established himself in the imperial capital, becoming an important figure in émigré Ukrainian circles, as well as mixing with other Russian writers, artists, and intellectuals. Most of these figures (whether Ukrainian or Russian) were opposed to the extreme authoritarianism and repressiveness of the Russian state under the Emperor Nicholas I (known as ‘the gendarme of Europe’), and Shevchenko became increasingly involved with intellectual and political movements dedicated to gaining greater freedom for the empire as a whole.

He had already begun writing poetry in his native Ukrainian while he was still a serf, and in St Petersburg in 1840 he published his first collection of verse, entitled Kobzar (‘The Bard’), a title which was subsequently given to his collected poetic works and also to the poet himself. At first his poetry dealt with traditional Ukrainian themes – nostalgic and Romantic depictions of Cossack life – but over time it became more overtly political and serious as he directly addressed the oppression and sufferings of his people. Though he was based in St Petersburg, he travelled widely in Ukrainian lands, and was moved to paint and write in response to what he saw and felt: the wide plains of the southern steppes, the towns, villages, monasteries and churches he visited there, and life and customs of the people (often peasants). He is regarded as a seminal figure in establishing Ukrainian as a distinct language, with its own literature and spirit.

However, his involvement with dissident groups in St Petersburg attracted the attention of the Tsarist authorities, and in 1847 the publication of a poem mocking the imperial family led to his arrest and exile to a remote area of the empire, 1000 miles southeast of Moscow, near the modern border with Kazakhstan. He was to remain there for many years, cut off from the intellectual milieu of the capital and also from his own homeland. The document giving his sentence bore the following comment written by the Tsar himself: ‘Under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint’. This was a condition that Shevchenko himself was, by and large, able to ignore, and he continued  to write and paint throughout his exile.

At the same time, as the idea of a distinct Ukrainian language and separate cultural identity came to be viewed with suspicion and hostility, his work was banned in the Russian Empire and confiscated from libraries and bookstores, as well as from individual citizens. Just like today, the Russian imperial government increasingly denied the Ukrainians the right to be considered a distinct people. Shevchenko’s work was itself the most potent and eloquent witness against this thesis, and remains to this day a classic expression of Ukrainian identity and sensibility, expressed in the Ukrainian language itself.

In arousing the personal and vindictive hostility of the Russian autocracy, he was not alone. The same happened to Mandelstam, Shostakovich, Pasternak and numerous other artists under Stalin, and to many journalists and dissidents under Putin – some paying for that disfavour with their lives. The great national poet of the Russians themselves is Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), who was also exiled and persecuted by the imperial authorities before dying in a duel which many believe to have been deliberately instigated by Tsar Nicholas himself. Throughout its modern history, the conscience and creative soul of the Russian people has been distinct from, and often in opposition to, the authorities who rule them, even if those authorities subsequently seek to manipulate the reputations of the persecuted artists for their own purposes.

Shevchenko was only released from the sentence of exile after Tsar Nicholas’s death in 1855 and the accession of his son Alexander II, whose liberal sympathies aroused new hope among those awaiting an easing of Tsarist oppression. But the poet’s health had been broken after the long years of serfdom, exile, and political oppression, and he died in 1861 at the age of 47. A few months later, the new emperor finally decreed the ending of serfdom in the empire.

However the subjects of the empire continued to experience its random and ruthless brutality, sometimes without warning. Even under the new Tsar, the Russian state and its agents (the ‘royal thugs’) continued with extraordinary brutality to sow division and suffering in Ukraine, attempting to ensure that hopes of autonomy and self-expression would not be fulfilled. This found its most devastating expression in the ‘Holodomor’ during Stalin’s reign, a famine deliberately created by the Soviet authorities to bring the Ukrainians to heel, which led to the deaths of around three million people.

As with all great poets whose works have a particular appeal for their own people, the work of Shevchenko speaks to all mankind, with its themes of longing for freedom and peace, its depiction of injustice and dread, its love of people, landscape, and nature. Though in ‘Calamity Again’ he is describing a particular Ukrainian experience, he is also speaking to all of us who believed that the events taking place today were something of the past, something we had outgrown on this continent. We believed we were now in a different phase of human development, no longer engaged with existential survival, or in naked struggles for power and control, but rather in breaking the chains of slavery – extending freedom and justice in the societies in which we live. But now the dogs are once again at the throats of the Ukrainian people, and for many of us who are watching from the sidelines, their struggle is also our own. 

Banner image: Izyum, Ukraine, March 4, 2022. A damaged retail store, bombed by Russian army aviation forces, killing eight civilians. Photograph: Rizvanov Ruslan [/] / Shutterstock.

Inset: Taras Shevchenko,  photographed by Andrey Denyer [/], c. 1859.