If you want to know more about Taras Shevchenko and his company, it is worth visiting the Shevchenko Literary and Memorial House Museum in Kyiv. This place is historic and memorable for more than one reason: it is blessed with the spirit of the great Bard who lived and wrote here in 1846. “When Shevchenko came back from Sednev, we met Mykhailo Sazhyn, an artist and his old friend, and soon we all settled in Khreshchatyk, on a street called ‘Goat’s Bog’,” the Ukrainian poet Oleksandr Afanasiev-Chuzhbynsky wrote in his memoirs.
I will note that Shevchenko, with tsarist sleuths at his heels, would have hardly managed to put up at such a good, very comfortable and cozy house if the landlord Ivan Zhytnytsky had not favored him. He not only warmly remembered his tenant until the end of his lifetime (he died in 1890) but may have also cherished the hope of establishing a museum there some day. But neither he nor his son managed to do this in the tsarist era. Then the house belonged to a number of owners, and in 1917 the Bolsheviks made a shared-apartment place of lodging.
This house is significant for the poet himself. It is here that he met the historian Mykola Kostomarov, one of the founders of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, which Shevchenko also joined. Incidentally, Kostomarov presented Shevchenko, as a token of friendship, with an ivory pipe, which is still kept at the museum. The rooms display not only painting and graphic works, some of which were executed in this building’s penthouse, but also his painting and engraving implements. “In June 1846, I can’t remember the date, I dropped in at Shevchenko’s Goat’s Bog house,” said V. Askochensky, professor at the Kyiv Theological Academy and editor of the journal Domashniaya beseda. “His home consisted of a small room overlooking the street and a penthouse studio.”
On March 9, 1998, 152 years later, the poet Lina Kostenko would write down in the museum’s guest book, “I will bow today and always to this house, where the paintbrushes can still preserve the touch of Shevchenko’s hand.” The brushes touched a lot of pictures. It was here that Shevchenko and Sazhyn were planning to publish an album of the views of Kyiv (“The Most Picturesque Landscapes of Kyiv, the Interior of Temples, and Interesting Outskirts”). Among the pictures painted by Shevchenko’s brush is St. Sophia of Kyiv, St. Sophia’s Cathedral. The Interior, The All Saints Church at the Kyivan Cave Monastery, Askold’s Grave, The Kytayiv Cloister, and others. What is more, these pictures are not only valuable as pieces of art but also very useful for historians, architects, and even geographers, because the artist drew the city’s streets, squares, cathedrals. and churches with topographical accuracy.
However, sadly enough, this “Goat’s Bog” house, where, to quote Afanasiev-Chuzhbynsky, “a new life began in an extremely poetic atmosphere,” this small cozy room was, in fact, Taras’s last home in Ukraine. As member of the Archeographical Commission, he took part in the excavations of Perepiatykha’s grave near Fastiv. Back in Kyiv, the poet wrote the ballads “Lileia” (The Lily) and “Rusalka” (The Mermaid). Inspired by his poetic and painting successes, Shevchenko submitted an application to the position of painting teacher at St. Volodymyr University (now Taras Shevchenko National University) in late November. If he had been accepted, many years of his life would have probably been closely linked with Kyiv and Ukraine.
Unfortunately, fate, which Shevchenko said was “not the same to each,” frowned on him. He was not destined to enter a St. Volodymyr University classroom as teacher because he was arrested over involvement in the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. Fortunately, there were also some bright moments in those many years Shevchenko spent in exile, when he did not feel like, to quote Ivan Drach, “a lonely oak-tree out in the wilderness.”
“The figure of our Taras is so gigantic, powerful, deep, and versatile that not everyone can fathom it in all their lifetime,” says Anatolii Palamarenko, a well-known actor. “I have been reciting Shevchenko’s poetry for many years and have read more than one piece of research on him, but every time I discover something new for myself. We must therefore not just study and know his oeuvre but also walk down his paths, and develop deep empathy for him. Only then will we be able to understand what our Ukrainianness and our national idea rest on when we perceive the exalted national spirit that used to inspire Shevchenko and his like-minded friends.
“That was a period of high spiritual culture prevalent in both the Ukrainian and the Russian elites. Moral and spiritual values were a bridge that connected them. So when Shevchenko was banished, his Ukrainian fellow countrymen, as well as Russians, rushed to help him. For them he was not just a poet but a great citizen of his country. And the word ‘citizen’ was much weightier at the time than it is now. Let us recall Nekrasov: ‘You may not be a poet but you must be a citizen.’ And if our and Russian elites managed to reach such a high level, our political, artistic and simply human relationships would be altogether different.”
THE MUSEUM
The house museum of Taras Shevchenko obtains new exhibits on an annual basis. As a rule, the descendants of those who personally knew and made friends with Shevchenko or participated later in establishing museums and publishing the Bard’s works are constantly handing over manuscripts, letters, photographs, and valuables. This is the way the house museum has been filling its repository for 80 years now; now it possesses nearly 4,000 items.
On Nov. 10, 1928, when it seemed that the Ukrainian intelligentsia, already under a watchful eye of the “great leader” dissatisfied with their “Ukrainian spirit,” had other things to do, the house museum of Taras Shevchenko was solemnly opened. The museum was established by Vasyl Krychevsky, a professor at the Institute of Arts, who had sought permission from the authorities for more than five years and supervised the building’s renovation and restoration since 1925, and the literary critic Volodymyr Miyakovsky.
Eyewitnesses recall that it was a great event for Ukraine. Miyakovsky was the museum’s first director. Eighty years later, his daughter Oksana Radysh-Miyakovska, a US citizen, handed over to the museum some carefully-preserved letters and materials studied for many years by her father, a research associate at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and a full-time fellow at the Shevchenko Institute. The most precious of these exhibits is the archive of Valentyn Yakovenko, a researcher of Shevchenko’s life and oeuvre, book publisher and journalist, who was constantly persecuted for his political views and publications. In 1894, after overcoming numerous barriers set up by censors, he managed to publish in St. Petersburg the book Taras Shevchenko. His Life and Literary Career in F. Pavlenkov’s famous series “The Lives of Outstanding People.”
As one of those who inherited Pavlenkov’s publishing business, Yakovenko dealt, until the end of his life, with printing and propagating Ukrainian books, established about 2,000 free-access village libraries, and prepared the new edition of an encyclopedic dictionary with Shevchenko’s biography. It was a real event in literature when Yakovenko published Shevchenko’s works, such as the third, extended, edition of Kobzar (1910) and a two-volume book of his poems (1911–1912). Yakovenko’s last printed word about the Bard was the article “Saul, Saul, Why Persecutest Thou Me?” in the Feb. 14, 1914 issue of the newspaper Den. That was an indignant protest against the tsarist authorities, which had forbidden marking Shevchenko’s birth centennial.
Valentyn Yakovenko died a year later at the age of 55, while he was born exactly 150 years ago. I do not know if this date, which only museum employees know so far, will be marked at the official level, but I hope that there will be a place, if only a posthumous one, for Yakovenko among contenders for the 2010 Shevchenko Prize. He is one of the few who protected Shevchenko’s works and brought them to people in the most reactionary period.
A GIFT FROM THE LAZAREVSKYS
This year the house museum has also acquired some new items for its exhibits. These were handed over by Oleksandr Lazarevsky, a great-grandson of his namesake, the well-known Ukrainian historian and Shevchenko’s contemporary. A civil engineer and economist by profession, Lazarevsky lived for many years, by no means at his own will, in northern Russia, beyond the Arctic Circle. His father Oleksandr was also an engineer and a political prisoner under Stalin, in the 1930s, while his grandfather Hlib Lazarevsky was a Ukrainian literary and political figure in the 19th and the 20th centuries.
Oleksandr Lazarevsky handed over to the Kyiv-based literary and memorial house museum not only family photos, letters, and memoirs but also his book In the Prophet’s Milieu: Taras Shevchenko and the Lazarevsky Family, which was launched on the last day of February. This family is an invaluable, albeit little studied and insufficiently respected, treasure for Ukrainian history in general and Shevchenko researchers in particular. Suffice it to say that four out of six brothers were close friends of Taras Shevchenko — and not only in his lifetime. They were among those who were paying their last respects to the poet and were the greatest popularizers of his creative legacy. This is the family archive record of the first day after Shevchenko’s death: “On the same day (Feb. 26, 1861, by the Julian calendar. – Ed.) friends of the deceased gathered at the home of the poet’s friend Mykhailo Lazarevsky. There were other Lazarevsky brothers present: Vasyl, Yakiv and Oleksandr. Here, in a narrow circle, they resolved to do the following:
- transfer the poet’s body to Ukraine in accordance with his poetic Testament;
- erect a monument at his gravesite;
- establish a public school named after Taras Shevchenko;
- institute one or several scholarships at Kyiv and Kharkiv universities, the Odesa Lyceum, and the Academy of Arts;
- publish his oeuvre in the best possible fashion;
- institute prizes for the best description of the poet’s life in the Ukrainian language and for the best critical review of his works;
- help his relatives;
- make sure that one of his friends visits his grave every year.”
Another entry reads: “The friends immediately began to raise funds to bury the Bard and immortalize his memory. What proves this is the Record of the Money Collected to Honor the Memory of Taras Shevchenko. It is Mykhailo Lazarevsky who was in charge of this undertaking and immediately donated 100 rubles. The Petersburg admirers of Shevchenko raised about 1,000 rubles, which made it possible not only to carry out a funeral in Petersburg but also transport the coffin with the poet’s body to Ukraine. Oleksandr Lazarevsky and Hryhorii Chestakhivsky were entrusted with accompanying the mourning train.”
SPIRITUAL PURGATORY
When you read this list, you cannot help recalling the present-day “friends” and “comrades” of our well-known and respected writers, poets, artists, and composers, who have departed this life lately. To draw a list like this, their “admirers” always need an organizing committee, a presidential decree, or a Cabinet resolution. And if they had to raise money for the funeral to boot, the deceased would have to lie in the morgue for quite a long time. It is good that it is a duty of national artists’ trade union committees to fund the funeral ceremony. But this only applies to union members, while for others it is their families’ headache.
“Friends” and “comrades” can only condole with the family and shed a tear in public — in the first days, as a rule. But the latter-day “dear and sweet ones” do not venture, to put it mildly, to undertake the things that “Shevchenko’s friends” took care of in the conditions of harsh censorship and harassment. Take, for example, the simplest thing: visiting the grave of the deceased. This usually occurs in connection with a major anniversary and, still, with great difficulties. And it is difficult to find those who would be willing to do this annually in Kyiv and, even more so, elsewhere. I will not dwell on the timeliness and the level of organization typical for other similar events. We have already written on this topic in connection with Platon Maiboroda and Raisa Kyrychenko (see Den of Dec. 4, 2008).
The house museum of Taras Shevchenko is not all too popular, either, among the Ukrainian intelligentsia. Only some of the nation’s spiritual leaders visit this place from time to time — usually on the occasion of a jubilee. The same occurred last year. When the President of Ukraine came here, only the best-known ones came along. As for the Shevchenko Prize winners, now counting several hundred, far from all of them even know about this unpretentious house in the very center of Kyiv, which miraculously survived among modern concrete and plate-glass architectural monsters that rose up in the late 1990s.
There are not only exhibits here: a mulberry tree, which “remembers” Shevchenko and his friends, is still there in the courtyard and in the spring and summer you can always hear the buzz of beetles or bumble-bees. A good place for creative inspiration, isn’t it? But, unfortunately, far from all know the way to this place. It is perhaps worthwhile for the Shevchenko Prize Committee to resolve that all prize winners should visit, at least once in their lifetime, on The Day they receive the award, the Shevchenko-related places in Kyiv — there are not so many of them. I would advise all of us to do so, too, because these places is our spiritual purgatory. If we pass through them, we will be different.
Now about a few more routine things that the present-day admirers of the Bard still have no time to occupy themselves with. As is known, the house museum was somewhat renovated, for the first time in so many years, to time with the last year’s jubilee: exterior repairs were made, furniture was restored, the courtyard was modernized, a memorial bust of Shevchenko was installed, and the building itself was renovated. But, as usual, there were not enough funds to do some small things: the wooden fence is on the point of collapsing, the roof is about to leak, and other repairs are needed.
