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Taras Shevchenko
Bard of Ukraine

By
Dmytro Doroshenko
Professor at the University of Prague

The Author and the Book

The Ukrainian writer Dmytro Doroshenko (1882‑1951) is one of the two great Ukrainian historians of the twentieth century: a good biographical and bibliographical summary is provided by an entry in the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine. Like his liberal counterpart Mykhaylo Hrushevsky, he would serve briefly in one of the governments of Ukraine, but as a conservative, during its very brief independence bracketed by Russian dominations: that of czarist Russia before, of Soviet Russia afterwards. Both historians escaped the clutches of Russia in 1919; unlike Hrushevsky though, Doroshenko did not trust Russia enough to return to Ukraine, and thus avoided a long imprisonment and an unhappy death in official banishment: he lived the remainder of his life in Prague and in Canada, where he published his major works, and notably Нарис історії України (1932‑1933), later translated into English as A Survey of Ukrainian History.

The work we have before us here is a minor work: in its fifty-odd small pages almost a pamphlet rather than a book. It is both summary and laudatory, almost a hagiography. We are not, for example, told whether Taras Shevchenko was religious in any non-Emersonian sense, nor even whether he was Orthodox or Catholic; and important aspects of his life are summarily passed over, such as his Russian-language writings, the details of his relation­ship with Varvara Repnina, the exact nature of the charges for which he was imprisoned and deported, etc. It does remain, however, a very useful introduction for the English-speaking reader to the life and importance of Shevchenko in Ukrainian literature and history: as a quick read, I can warmly recommend it.

Technical Details

Edition and Copyright

The text on this site is my transcription of the book, published by the United Ukrainian Organizations of the United States, New York, 1936 and "Copyright by E. Wyrowyj, Prague." Notwithstanding, it was printed in English outside the United States (p60: "Printed by Emil Stiburek, Prague XVI, Pizeňská tř. 222 Czechoslovakia.") and was not published simultaneously within the United States: it has therefore, according to American law of the time, always been unprotected by copyright, and in the public domain in the United States. If, however, the law of the Czech Republic, successor state to Czechoslovakia, governs the copyright status, Dmytro Doroshenko died in 1951, and therefore the work has been in the public domain since Jan. 1, 2022, seventy years after the author's death: details here on the copyright law involved. It is unclear to me whether the author wrote directly in English or whether, as seems much more likely, the work was translated: but if the latter, no translator is credited and their work appears to be a work for hire, copyright remaining vested in the author, and now, as stated, expired.

Proofreading

As almost always, I retyped the text by hand rather than scanning it — not only to minimize errors prior to proofreading, but as an opportunity for me to become intimately familiar with the work, an exercise which I heartily recommend: Qui scribit, bis legit. (Well-meaning attempts to get me to scan text, if success­ful, would merely turn me into some kind of machine: gambit declined.)

This transcription has been minutely proofread. In the table of contents above, the sections are shown on blue backgrounds, indicating that I believe the text of them to be completely errorfree. As elsewhere onsite, the header bar at the top of each chapter's webpage will remind you with the same color scheme.

The print edition was somewhat poorly proofread, and in addition exhibits a number of errors due to the author or translator, seeming to betray in spelling and turns of phrase the influence of French. Most of these errors are mere barbarisms or typos, which I've corrected thruout with a dotted underscore like this. A few deserved special notice and are marked with a bullet like this;º as elsewhere on my site, glide your cursor over the bullet or the underscored words to read what was actually printed.

The occasional inconsistency in punctuation has been corrected to the author's usual style, in a slightly different color — barely noticeable on the page, but it shows up in the sourcecode as <SPAN CLASS="emend". Finally, a number of odd spellings, curious turns of phrase, etc. have been marked <!‑‑ sic  in the sourcecode, just to confirm that they were checked.

Any over­looked mistakes, please drop me a line, of course: especially if you have the printed edition in front of you.

Pagination and Local Links

For citation and indexing purposes, the pagination is indicated by local links in the sourcecode and made apparent in the right margin of the text at the page turns (like at the end of this line p57 ). Sticklers for total accuracy will of course find the anchor at its exact place in the sourcecode.

In addition, I've inserted a number of other local anchors: whatever links might be required to accommodate the author's own cross-references, as well as a few others for my own purposes. If in turn you have a website and would like to target a link to some specific passage of the text, please let me know: I'll be glad to insert a local anchor there as well.

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The icon I use for this book is the photograph of Shevchenko that serves as the book's frontispiece, which I reproduce at the top of this orientation page; on a background of Ukrainian blue.

Images with borders lead to more information. The thicker the border, the more information. (Details here.)
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