Taras Shevchenko

author

Taras Shevchenko

1814–1861

Remembered as Ukraine’s national poet, he turned personal hardship into powerful verse that helped shape a modern cultural identity. He was also a gifted artist whose life moved from serfdom to literary fame.

2 Audiobooks

The Kobzar of the Ukraine Being select poems of Taras Shevchenko done into English verse with biographical fragments by Alexander Jardine Hunter

The Kobzar of the Ukraine Being select poems of Taras Shevchenko done into English verse with biographical fragments by Alexander Jardine Hunter

by Taras Shevchenko

Taras Shevchenko, the poet of Ukraine : selected poems

Taras Shevchenko, the poet of Ukraine : selected poems

by Taras Shevchenko

About the author

Born in 1814 in what is now Ukraine, Taras Shevchenko was orphaned young and spent his early life as a serf. In 1838, while studying art in Saint Petersburg, he was freed from serfdom, and soon after published Kobzar (1840), the poetry collection that made his name and became a landmark of Ukrainian literature.

Shevchenko wrote poems, prose, and plays, and he also trained as a painter at the Imperial Academy of Arts. His writing spoke with unusual force about freedom, injustice, and the lives of ordinary people, which made him a central figure in the 19th-century Ukrainian national revival.

His outspokenness brought punishment as well as fame: he was arrested in 1847 and sent into military exile. Even so, his influence only grew, and after his death in Saint Petersburg in 1861 he came to be widely honored as Ukraine’s national poet and one of its defining cultural voices.