Select Poems and Folk Songs of Ukraine, Select Works of Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, and There's Not A Bathing Suit in Russia

What “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” did for the negroes of the United States of America the poems of Shevchenko did for the serfs of Russia. They aroused the conscience of the Russian people, and the persecutions suffered by the poet at the hands of the autocracy awakened their sympathy.

It was two days after the death of Shevchenko that the czar’s ukase appeared granting freedom to the serfs. Possibly the dying poet knew it was coming and died the happier on that account.

But in still another way does this man’s figure stand out. In the country called the Ukraine is a nation of between thirty and forty millions of people, having a language of their own—the language in which these poems were composed.

This has been, as it were, a nation lost, buried alive one might say, beneath the power of surrounding empires.

They have a terrible history of oppression, alternating with desperate revolts against Polish and Muscovite tyranny.

In these poems speaks the struggling soul of a downtrodden people. To our western folk, reared in happier surroundings there is a bitter tang about some of them, somewhat like the taste of olives, to which one must grow accustomed. The Slavonic temperament, too, is given to melancholy and seems to dwell congenially in an atmosphere misty with tears. But he gravely misreads their literature who fails to perceive the grim resolve beneath the sorrow.

In the struggle of the Ukrainians for freedom the spirit of this poet, who was born a serf, remains ever their guiding star. It happened sometimes, when a cossack warrior found his energies failing and his joints growing stiff from much campaigning, he would bethink him of his sins and deeds of blood.

These things weighing on his mind, he would decide to spend the remainder of his life in a monastery, but before taking this irrevocable step, he would hold a time of high revel with his old comrades. This poem pictures such an event.

Back somewhere in the middle distance of European history—when the Ukraine was under Polish rule, though ever harrassed by the devastating raids of Turks and Tartars—there developed bands of guerilla fighters in the wild border-land beyond the rapids of the Dnieper.

Sometimes fighting against the Tartars, sometimes in alliance with them, they became known by the name ‘Kazak,’ a word of uncertain origin.

Fierce banditti they were, many of them serfs who had run away from their Polish masters. But they often developed great military power. At times the Poles succeeded in securing numbers of them as fighters in their army, but when the tyranny of the Polish landlords became intolerable the so-called “Registered Cossacks” would sometimes join with the “Free Cossacks” of the “border land”—which is the meaning of the word “Ukraine,” and exact terrible vengeance on the Poles.

The story of these warlike deeds of the Cossacks has the same significance to the Ukrainian people that the tales of Wallace and Bruce have for Scotchmen.

Hamaleia is an historical romance. The poet represents one of the excursions of the Zaparoggian Cossacks under the leadership of Hamaleia on Skutari, the Turkish city on the Bosphorus. The Cossacks saved western Europe from the Tartar and Turkish invasions, by fighting the invaders in the land of the barbarian. The poem describes one of these excursions where the Cossacks animated by the desire of revenging themselves on the Turks and freeing their brothers who were lying as captives in Turkish prisons, undertake a perilous trip in small wooden boats over the stormy Black Sea to Skutari, open the prisons, burn the city, and return home with rich spoils and their freed brethren.