Taras Shevchenko is a Ukrainian poet, prose writer, playwright, thinker, painter, engraver, ethnographer, public figure.
Place of birth
He was born on March 9, 1814 in the village of Moryntsi, Zvenyhorod district, Kyiv province, in a family of peasants.
Childhood
At an early age, he was left without parents: when he was 9 years old, his mother died, and at 11 his father. After that, his older sister Ekaterina looked after him.
In the autumn of 1822, he began to study literacy under the guidance of a local deacon. Later, he went to work for the deacon Bogorsky, who came from Kyiv. Due to the cruel attitude of the owner, he could not stand it and ran away, after which he began to look for a master painter in neighboring villages from whom he could learn to draw.
In 1828, he found himself among the servants of the landowner Engelhardt – at first he worked as a cook, later became a Cossack. Seeing Taras’s passion for drawing, the landowner decided to make him a home artist. To do this, he handed it over to Jan Rustem, a portrait painter who taught at the University of Vilnius. Taras stayed in the city of Vilna for a year and a half.
In 1831, when Engelhardt moved from Vilna to St. Petersburg, he took Shevchenko with him and arranged for him for 4 years in science with the artist Vasily Shiryaev.
Creative activity
In the summer of 1836, Shevchenko met Ivan Soshenko, who was also from Ukraine and was engaged in painting. Thanks to his acquaintance, he later met with Yevhen Hrebinka, Vasyl Hryhorovych and Oleksiy Venetsianov.
In the spring of 1838, Karl Bryullov, together with Vasyl Zhukovsky, bought Shevchenko out of serfdom. Shortly thereafter, he became a student at the Imperial Academy of Arts.
He published his first collection of poetry in 1840 under the title “Kobzar”. This edition includes 8 works.
On May 25, 1843, he left St. Petersburg for Ukraine, and a year later he returned.
In the same 1844, he wrote the poem “Dream”, which had a political character and testified to his decisive transition to the struggle against autocracy in the Russian Empire.
On April 5, the council of the Academy of Arts issued him a ticket giving him the right to travel to Ukraine. Already in November 1845, the meeting of the Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg approved the decision to award him the title of non-class artist.
On March 31, 1845, he left St. Petersburg, passed through Moscow and headed for Kyiv. In the spring of 1846, he arrived in Kyiv, and in April he joined the activities of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood.
Exile
On April 5, 1847, he was arrested, after which he was transported to St. Petersburg and imprisoned in a casemate. Subsequently, he was exiled to the army and sent to serve in Orenburg. Several relaxations in his position occurred in the spring of 1848, when he was included in the expedition that explored the Aral Sea.
In April 1850, Shevchenko was arrested for the second time. After six months in custody, he was sent to the Novopetrovsk coastal fort.
On August 2, 1857, he was released from exile. In the spring of 1858, he returned to St. Petersburg, and the next summer he came to Ukraine, where he had not been for 12 years.
For the rest of his life, he remained under covert police surveillance.
On March 10, 1861, Shevchenko died in St. Petersburg. He was temporarily buried at the Smolensk cemetery. According to his expressed wish, on May 10 of the same year, his ashes were reburied in Ukraine – on Chernecha Hill near Kaniv, above the Dnieper.
