Taras Shevchenko, the revolutionary poet who inspired the emergence of the modern Ukrainian nation, was born on March 9, 1814.
March 9, 2026
People gather next to a bust of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, an interactive installation called “The world through Shevchenko’s eyes”, by the Ukrainian artist Sergiy Zapadnya, installed at a park in central Kyiv on August 7, 2025, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine. (Photo by Roman PILIPEY / AFP)
Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, many people around the world didn’t know much about Ukraine. For most people who weren’t involved with the Ukrainian diaspora, it was just a vague area in Eastern Europe with an unclear history, an unknown culture, and even doubts about whether it was a separate nation.
For hundreds of years, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, and finally the Soviet Union ruled over Ukraine. They systematically suppressed Ukrainian identity, erased its language from public life, and buried its culture under layers of forced assimilation.
People all over the world knew about Russia, but not many knew about Ukraine.
The Russo-Ukrainian war changed that. As Ukrainian cities were bombed and Ukrainian soldiers fought bravely to protect their country, the world learned about a country it had ignored.
Millions of people who couldn’t find Kyiv on a map were suddenly learning about Ukrainian history, waving blue-and-yellow flags, and understanding what it means for a people to fight for their freedom and identity against an empire that wants to erase them and abhors the free world.
But most people in the world still don’t know who made modern Ukraine possible. They’ve still to discover who Taras Shevchenko was and why he is so important for Ukraine, and not only.
He never held a political office or led armies and died at the relatively early age of 47. Yet to Ukrainians, he is the father of their country.
He did something much more powerful than exercising political power: Shevchenko gave his people a voice and restored their self-esteem. Through his poetry, art and political courage, he became both the catalyst and symbol of Ukrainian national awakening.
He didn’t singlehandedly create modern Ukrainian national consciousness, but his work gave it expression and staying power.
In short, Shevchenko’s works and example were the basis for what it means to be Ukrainian today.
Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814 in the village of Moryntsi, in the Cherkasy region in central Ukraine. He grew up in a world where his people were literally the property of their Russian overlords and masters. Slaves under a different name.
The Russian Empire, which ruled most of Ukraine, saw it as conquered land rather than a distinct national entity. It treated its culture as no more than peasant folklore and its Ukrainian language as a coarse dialect, quaint but unsuitable for educated conversation.
The empire’s objective was to force Ukrainians and other non-Russian subject peoples to become Russians and erase the nation’s uniqueness.
Shevchenko’s parents died before he even became a teenager. The orphaned boy was left to serve his masters in a system designed to destroy any sense of dignity or hope.
Still, young Taras demonstrated obvious talent as an artist. His owner noticed this and took him to Vilnius and then to St. Petersburg as a servant. This decision would change not only the course of his life but that of Ukrainian history.
Shevchenko’s artistic skills caught the attention of important people in Russian cultural circles while he was living in the imperial capital. These included the painter Karl Bryullov and the poet Vasily Zhukovsky. In 1838, they held a lottery to raise money to buy his freedom.
The prize was a portrait of Zhukovsky by Bryullov. Ironically, it was bought by the wife of the Russian tsar, Nicholas I.
So, at the age of 24, Shevchenko was finally freed. But instead of integrating himself into the Russian intellectual and artistic elite – as his Ukrainian contemporary, the writer Nikolai Gogol, aka Mykola Hohol, chose to do – he spent the rest of his life championing the cause of freedom.
At a time when Ukrainian was not allowed in schools or for official purposes, when educated Ukrainians were obliged to speak and write in Russian, Shevchenko had the courage to write powerful verses in Ukrainian, defiantly displaying it as a modern language, a source of patriotic pride, and a political tool.
His collection of poems, albeit censored, called “Kobzar”(The Bard), published in 1840, became a landmark. It was named after the wandering minstrels of Ukrainian tradition. It provided a sophisticated literary voice that was clearly Ukrainian in form and content.
But Shevchenko was more than just a poet. His poems became more political, and they attacked the Russian autocracy with brutal honesty. He spoke out against serfdom and called for Ukrainian freedom in works like “The Dream” (1844) and “The Caucasus” (1845).
“The Dream” used an allegory that was so clear that no reader could miss the point to show that Russia’s leaders were tyrants and Ukraine was their victim.
When the authorities discovered that Shevchenko had joined the secret Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a Ukrainian group of patriotic intellectuals who wanted to end serfdom and unite Slavic people in a confederation of free and equal states, they resorted to repression.
In 1847, Shevchenko was arrested, and Nicholas I personally added a cruel condition to his sentence: 10 years of military service in a remote garrison in Central Asia, “under the strictest surveillance, with a ban on writing and painting.”
For a poet and artist, it was a sentence meant to kill. Shevchenko spent 10 years in brutal exile in the empty fortresses of Orenburg and the Caspian Sea area.
But even these harsh circumstances, did not break him – he kept writing and drawing in secret.
Shevchenko was eventually released in 1857 after the death of Nicholas I, but not allowed to go live again in Ukraine. He spent his last years in St. Petersburg and made short, closely watched trips to his home country.
The inhuman conditions of exile had destroyed his health, leading to his death on March 10, 1861, just a few days before Russia abolished serfdom. His words had helped bring about this change.
Shevchenko’s funeral turned into a huge display of Ukrainian national pride. His body was brought back from the Russian capital and buried at Kaniv, in central Ukraine, on a hill overlooking the Dnipro River, as he had asked in one of his most famous poems, “Testament.”
Shevchenko was a genius in more than just poetry. He was also a talented visual artist who created hundreds of paintings, drawings, and engravings depicting Ukrainian life, landscapes, and historical events. His portraits and ethnographic studies captured a culture in danger, while his landscapes showed how beautiful the Ukrainian steppe and the Dnipro were.
He stood up for the poorest and most oppressed Ukrainians, like the serfs who worked the land and the women who had to deal with both class and gender oppression.
He knew that Ukraine couldn’t be free if there was injustice. The fight for national and social freedom was the same fight. This made him a hero to both patriots and progressives because he wasn’t just saying that Ukrainians were different; he was also saying what that difference should mean: a nation based on justice, democracy, and social equality, not hierarchy.
And Shevchenko didn’t limit himself to the plight and aspirations of his own people. For example, his 1845 poem “Kavkaz” (The Caucasus) was a bold anti-colonial protest against Russia’s expansionist policies being justified as a “civilizing” mission. At that time, Russia was engaged in a 30-year war to subjugate the Chechens and other peoples in that region.
In “Prometheus,” Shevchenko depicted Russian Tsarism as a “kingdom of darkness” while claiming to bring “enlightenment” to others.
So, unlike the leading Russian poet of his age, Aleksandr Pushkin, who in his later years conformed and became a defender of the Russian imperial system, or the celebrated writer Mikhail Lermontov, who fought in the Russian army’s campaigns in the Caucasus, Shevchenko called on his people and others to “rise up and break your chains.”
So for Ukrainians, probably the closest parallel figure in that part of the world then was his contemporary, Poland’s anti-imperial national poet, Adam Miczkewicz, for whom Shevchenko had great admiration.
In the 20th century, the Soviets censored his works but allowed him to be revered as a “social revolutionary,” suppressing his most outspoken condemnation of Russian imperialism.
Today, as Ukraine fights again for its independence against the same imperial power that made Shevchenko a political prisoner, his words ring out with new meaning.
He is a part of everyday life in Ukraine. His face appears on Ukrainian money. His name is found on universities, streets, museums, and theaters. Statues of him stand in cities around the world where Ukrainians have settled, from Winnipeg to Washington, and from Buenos Aires to Paris.
Yet outside Ukraine, Shevchenko still remains largely unknown. Now, as the world finally pays attention to Ukraine’s fight for survival, his story needs to be told.
Shevchenko played a crucial role in shaping modern Ukraine. He was revolutionary champion of freedom – both national and social – a martyr for this cause, and a staunch opponent of Russian despotism, imperialism, and all forms of oppression.
It was he who, long ago, called on defenders of freedom not to surrender, but to fight on.
It is particularly poignant that shortly before his death this former serf met an African-American actor, Ira Aldridge, who had escaped from slavery in the US and was starring in a touring production of Othello in St. Petersburg. The two bonded immediately and Shevchenko even drew a portrait of his black “soul-mate.”
A Ukrainian hero and poet who awoke his suppressed nation, Shevchenko deserves to be known and appreciated beyond the borders of his native land, which is once again fighting for its freedom against Russian imperialism in its latest form.
Testament
(by Taras Shevchenko, translated by Stash Luczkiw)
When I die, bury
me in a grave
amid the wide steppe
in my dear Ukraine,
so I can see the broad
fields, the Dnipro’s
cliffs, and hear
its roiling rapids roar.
When it washes
the enemy’s blood
from Ukraine
into the blue sea,
only then will I
leave the fields
and mountains, leave
it all and fly
to God himself
and pray… but until
that day, I know no God.
Bury me and rise up,
break your chains,
temper your will
with evil enemy blood.
And when with kin,
your great, free, new
family, don’t forget
to remember me
with a kind, quiet word.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
What a great man!
Death to putinaZiism in ruZZia and wherever else in the world it occurs.
“The Russian Empire, which ruled most of Ukraine, saw it as conquered land rather than a distinct national entity. It treated its culture as no more than peasant folklore and its Ukrainian language as a coarse dialect, quaint but unsuitable for educated conversation.”
There you have it : the seeds of putinaZiism.
RuZZian imperialism is why a sack of shit like Pushkin is famous and Shevchenko is not.
Fuck ruZZia; it’s just a cauldron of devilry.
Summarized in a concise and wonderful way the life of Taras Schevchenko. I grew up with his name firmly entrenched in my lexicon and in fact saw the statue of Schevchenko unveiled in Washington DC. As I recall thousands of Ukrainian diaspora were there and it was a great celebration of a great man.