Shevchenko

The word under the name is shvets, the Ukrainian for a shoemaker; the -enko on top of it is the ending of central Ukraine. The shoemaker measured the foot, cut and stitched the upper, then built the sole from soft inner leathers, firmer outer ones and the lifts that made the heel; the insole went onto a wooden last, straight for a cheap pair, curved and paired left and right for a better one, and the heel was pegged with wood before the edges were pared and blacked. A pair of shoes cost about a journeyman's daily wage, and a man in mud that would rot leather wore a hollowed clog of maple or ash instead.

Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko was born on 9 March 1814 at Morintsy in the Zvenyhorodka district of the Kyiv governorate, son of Hryhoriy Shevchenko and Kateryna, born Boiko. They were serfs on land owned by Vasily Engelhardt, a nephew of Potemkin. The family had not always been called Shevchenko: his biographer Oleksandr Konysky recorded an older surname, Hrushivskyi, and said Shevchenko attached itself because an ancestor had worked in the shoemaking trade. By Taras's day it was a fossil. His father and grandfather were wheelwrights.

In 1816 they moved to Kyrylivka, another Engelhardt village, now Shevchenkove. His mother died on 1 September 1823; his father, who had taken to the road as a chumak and twice took the boy onto the open steppe, died of a chill on 2 April 1825. A stepmother ruled the house cruelly until his grandfather threw her out. Taras was put to work as a swineherd, and at twelve became servant to a drunken village teacher named Bohorsky, one duty being to read psalms over the dead. He ran off in February 1827, aged thirteen, and came back to herd sheep.

Engelhardt died in 1828 and his son Pavel inherited the family with the fields. Taras, fourteen, was made kozachok at the Vilshana estates, and in 1829 travelled in his master's retinue to Warsaw and then Vilno. On 18 December Engelhardt caught him up at night painting a portrait of the Cossack general Matvei Platov, boxed his ears and had him whipped. Then, the point made, he apprenticed him to a Warsaw painter-decorator, who arranged lessons with the Polish painter Franciszek Ksawery Lampi. There the sixteen-year-old serf fell in love with a Polish noblewoman, Dunia Gusikowska, and said afterwards that the affair first put in his head the idea that people of different classes might be equals.

The November Uprising of 1830 marched the servants out of Poland under guard to Saint Petersburg. Given four years under the painter Vasiliy Shiriayev, Shevchenko spent the bright northern nights copying statues in the Summer Garden, and fell in with Ivan Soshenko, a young Ukrainian at the Imperial Academy of Arts from Bohuslav, near his own country. Soshenko taught him at weekends and introduced him to the poet Yevhen Hrebinka. Through them, around June 1832, he was brought to Karl Briullov, the most fashionable painter in the empire, who wanted him as a student. A serf could not be one. Briullov asked Engelhardt to free him, was refused, and was given a price: 2,500 rubles.

To raise it Briullov painted a portrait of the poet Vasily Zhukovsky and put it up as the prize in a lottery among the imperial family; the tsarina drew the winning ticket. Engelhardt signed the release on 5 May 1838. Shevchenko entered the Academy at twenty-four, and from 1839 the Imperial Society for the Encouragement of the Arts kept him on thirty rubles a month. Silver medals followed for The Beggar Boy Giving Bread to a Dog and The Gypsy Fortune Teller.

The sculptor Ivan Martos saw his poems at the end of 1839 and offered to print them; Shevchenko hesitated, and it was Hrebinka who carried the manuscript to the Saint Petersburg censors. Kobzar appeared in 1840 and sold out. It called for nothing openly, but it was a protest against social injustice written in the language of people who were not supposed to have a literature, building on ground broken by Ivan Kotliarevsky and Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko.

His subjects came out of folklore and out of the villages he had left: the ballads The Bewitched and The Poplar-tree, and a run of poems built on young peasant women, Kateryna and The Servant among them, who had less protection from a landlord's will than anyone did. He paid to publish the epic Haidamaky himself in 1841. Of his 237 poems, twenty-eight were published in the Russian Empire in his lifetime and six more across the border in the Austrian one.

He went home three times, in 1843, 1845 and 1846, and what he found dismantled the romantic Cossack Ukraine he had been writing about. He wrote The Dug Grave in October 1843 after standing at the excavated burial mounds, and that autumn saw his brothers and sisters, still serfs. In 1844 he began Picturesque Ukraine, an album of etchings of the country's ruins, meant to be sold to buy his family out. Six were printed, the money ran out, and his siblings stayed where they were.

In 1845 he returned to Ukraine to teach drawing at Kyiv University, and fell in with the historian Mykola Kostomarov and the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society arguing for a federation of Slavic nations. On 5 April 1847 he was arrested; the Brotherhood had already been taken, and copies of his 1844 poem The Dream were among their papers. Nicholas I read it himself. General Orlov's report charged him with writing verse of outrageous content in the "Little-Russian language" instead of showing gratitude for having been redeemed from serfdom.

He was sentenced to serve as a private at Orsk in the Orenburg garrison, and the tsar added the clause that mattered: under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint. The fortress register put him at 164.5 centimetres, dark straw hair, dark grey eyes. Scurvy and rheumatism set in. In 1848 he was attached to the first Russian naval survey of the Aral Sea, aboard the Konstantin under Lieutenant Butakov, who set him to draw the coastline and treated him as an equal in all but rank.

In April 1850 a quarrel with an officer produced fresh charges of wearing civilian clothes and breaking the ban on drawing, the drawing the survey had ordered. He was sent that October to Novopetrovsk on the Caspian, one of the worst penal posts in the empire. He got round the prohibition sideways: a geological expedition into the Karatau in 1851, and in 1853 clay statuettes, none of which survived the journey out.

The amnesty of 1857 released him after ten years, though not to Ukraine; he was held at Nizhniy Novgorod until, in February 1858, he was let back to Saint Petersburg, which received him as a celebrity. That winter he met the African American Shakespearean actor Ira Aldridge; the two became friends through translators, over art, music and what each had lived under, and Shevchenko drew his portrait. In 1860 the Academy made him an Academician for his etching.

He wrote his last poem, unfinished, on 14 February 1861, waiting on rumours that the emancipation manifesto was near, and died in his workshop early on 26 February, aged forty-seven. Dostoevsky and Turgenev came to the funeral. His poem Testament had asked for a grave in Ukraine, so his friends moved him by train, wagon and steamboat, and on 22 May 1861 he was laid under a mound on Monk's Hill at Kaniv, which became a place of pilgrimage. Kobzar is the most read book in the country, spoken of as a national gospel; he inspired protesters on the Euromaidan, and Testament, translated into more than 150 languages, was credited with resonating again after the invasion of 2022.

Vasyl Kuzmych Shevchenko (1882-1964), among the most active bandurists of his day, went into Poltava province in 1904 to record the sung dumy of the kobzars, and published a bandura handbook in 1914. Aleksandr Shevchenko (1882-1948) of Kharkiv trained at the Stroganov academy and in Paris, and in 1913 published two treatises setting out modern painting as a compound of Cubism, Futurism and traditional popular art. Andriy Shevchenko, born in 1976, carried the name onto a football pitch.