Taras Shevchenko's birthday

March, 09 is celebrated in Ukraine as the birthday of the Taras Shevchenko, the great Ukrainian poet, artist and thinker. Club member Marina briefly told the tragic story of his life to our American guests.
Born as a serf to a rich landlord he was bought out of serfdom by noted writers and artists.
The 2,500 rubles required were raised through a lottery in which the prize was a portrait of the Russian poet, Zhukovsky, painted by Russian painter Karl Bryullov.
Shevchenko began to write poetry even before he was freed from serfdom. In 1840, the world first saw the Kobzar, Shevchenko's first collection of poetry. Later Ivan Franko wrote that this book, "immediately revealed, as it were, a new world of poetry. It burst forth like a spring of clear, cold water, and sparkled with a clarity, breadth and elegance of artistic expression not previously known in Ukrainian writing." For anti-zarist activities Shevchenko was punished very severely: with an exile to central Asia as a private with the Military Detachment. Russian Tsar Nicholas I, in confirming the sentence, wrote, "Under the strictest surveillance, with a ban on writing and painting."