Freedom and Friends
He is introduced, too, in Russian or Polish translations to the great authors of other lands and times,—Greece and Rome, Germany and Britain offer him their treasures.
To us it is interesting to know that Byron, Walter Scott, and Shakespeare profoundly influenced him.
But a conflict of spirit now faces him. His worldly interests and his judgment advise him to go on with his painting. But strange music seems to ring in his ears. It is the music of his beautiful and suffering Ukraine. Songs seem to come to him from the wind and he writes them down.
They are in the peasant language of the Ukraine.
His 'Kobzar' appears in its first edition, with eight poems, in 1840. It is like a lightning flash through Russia.
Great Russian critics sneered at it, saying it was in the longuage of the swineherds. But the whole Ukraine recognized it as the voice of their suppressed nation. The down-trodden masses of all Russia knew that they had found a spokesman.
Shevchenko was now famous but he had chosen, without knowing it, 'The Way of the Cross.'