This year Taras Shevchenko Prize laureates were ceremoniously awarded on March 9. Among them was The Day’s contributor Oxana Pachlovska. She was unable to attend the awarding ceremony because the new semester had started at the university in Rome where she is a lecturer. She asked Maria Matios, a writer and member of the Shevchenko Prize Committee, to convey her gratitude to the organizers and wrote a brief comment on the symbolic aspect of this award.
Named after Taras Shevchenko, this prize is not so much an award as a moral imperative, a degree of one’s responsibility before the eternity and the present of this poet.
Ukraine is once again besieged by rhetoric, simulation, deceit, and vehement misrepresentation of its history.
It is besieged by fake love and actual hatred for Ukraine.
The main reason is the same as in the 17th, 19th, or 20th century: Ukraine is in the epicenter of confrontation between Russia and Europe.
And so on The Day of birth of this great Ukrainian poet we must hear his words, words he left to guard our nation, like a prophet from the Old Testament. Our intellectual honesty makes us do so.
This poet was feared by the Russian government so much that he was forbidden to write and to paint. While in exile, in the faraway steppe, he saw a new Ukraine and the future of Europe. In Europe at the time, Shevchenko ranked with Mickiewicz, Byron, Heine, and Leopardi as one of the most radical champions of freedom for every individual, every people, from Finland to the Caucasus, from the Asian countries to Moldova, Bohemia, and Poland. Freedom is the underpinning value of European civilization.
Shevchenko never met the powers that be halfway. His King David says:
Blessed is he who does not join
The assembly of the evil…
That was why his verse shook the foundation of the [Russian] empire and later broke down the walls of a prison known as the USSR. Both antihuman political systems collapsed. This poet is still with us, yet his vision of today’s society is ruthless:
All men are deaf, no ears disclose me;
Men stand and trade their mutual chains
And barter truth for filthy gains…
His laser-sharp view on the Ukrainian political community is full of scorn:
Slaves, grovellers of Muscovy…
His verdict on state-controlled Orthodoxy is relentless:
And the Byzantine Sabaoth as well
Will cozen you. But God will not deceive you —
Nor will he punish us nor show us favor:
For we are not his slaves — but human beings!
He was anxious to know
When shall we get ourselves a Washington
To promulgate his new and righteous law?
And answered his own question in the affirmative:
But some day we shall surely find the man!
The Virgil of Ukrainian hell, Shevchenko left his behest:
Come to your senses! Human be,
Or you will rue it bitterly…
Only this will give us the right to hope [for the best]:
For good men by their deeds shall live,
The bad meet endless doom.
This genius left a burning seal on the scroll of national history:
Struggle, and ye shall overcome the foe!
