Gabfest Club meets Kobzar

Today’s session of the Gabfest Club (at Window on America center Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine) was dedicated to the up-coming Taras Shevchenko’s 200th anniversary.  We were lucky to have American guests for this session – Mrs. Linda and Mr. Joseph.
The group had a chance to explain important details of Shevchenko’s art and poetry to the foreigners. The slide show about Shevchenko’s friendship with an American actor Ira Aldridge  was the highlight of the session. This unknown fact impressed both the group and the American visitors.
 The Club’s activists prepared recitals of Shevchenko’s poems - both in the original and in the professional translation into English. The foreign guests appreciated the efforts to present the poems in English.
 
The group was familiarized with a slide presentation “Kobzar’s Testament Riddle” that offered a new approach to the background of the classical poem “My Testament”. The local historian D. Synytsia analyzed the text of the poem and suggested his own interpreting of the facts. According to the researcher Shevchenko wanted to be buried in the vicinity of the modern Dnipropetrovsk city. In the slide show we took a fresh look at the poem’s text and found confirmation to D. Synytsia’s hypothesis. The new facts from Kobzar’s biography impressed the group. The group was thrilled by the Testament’s riddle that caused so much confusion and deprived the city of the nationwide Shevchenko Memorial.
To wrap up the session the group had an opportunity to ask questions to the guests about their background, their home states and impressions about Ukraine.
Number of participants – 24.
Have a look at more pictures, please