About this ebook
The boy is apprenticed to a house painter, and draws the garden's statues early on Sunday mornings, before anyone is about. He comes to the painter's lodgings with a roll of his drawings, and over tea he tells the story of his life. "He was a serf."
The painter shows him to Karl Bryullov — "Karl the Great" — who praises his drawings, asks for the name of the boy's owner, drives off to see him, and comes back calling the man "the biggest swine in Torzhok slippers". Then Bryullov and his friends set about getting the boy his freedom. The boy falls ill and lies in hospital; Bryullov paints a portrait of the poet Zhukovsky, and the boy is told nothing; and on 22 April 1838 a note comes in Zhukovsky's own hand. For days afterwards he takes his letter of manumission out of his pocket, reads it through almost syllable by syllable, crosses himself, kisses it and weeps.
The painter hands him over to Bryullov "as a father hands over a beloved son to his teacher", leaves the capital in May, and asks him to write as he would write to his own father. The rest of his story comes in his own letters.
His freedom is not where the story ends.
The man who wrote it
Taras Shevchenko (1814–1861), the poet of Kobzar, was born a serf, and was bought out of serfdom in 1838, at twenty-four: his owner signed the letter of manumission on 22 April, with Zhukovsky and Bryullov among its witnesses, and a lottery of Bryullov's portrait of Zhukovsky raised part of the money. In 1847 he was arrested and sent to the Orenburg Corps as a private soldier, forbidden to write and to draw. He wrote The Artist in Russian in 1856, at the Novopetrovsk fort on the Caspian, eighteen years after he was freed. It was not printed until 1887.
What is in this edition
· The novella, translated from the 2003 scholarly text, every passage of the English read again against the Russian — a second edition, revised, with a passage of some 850 words the first edition left out
· An introduction that describes the opening and does not give away the end
· 347 notes on a word, a name, a custom, a picture or a place — no note sends you to the back of the book
· 35 essays at the back, following the story in order, for after you have finished
· Notes on the edition, the second edition and the translation, and a chronology of Shevchenko's life
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About the author
Taras Shevchenko was born a serf in 1814, in the Kyiv province. In 1832 his owner, Pavel Engelhardt, contracted him for four years to Shiryayev, a master painter in Petersburg. There, between 1834 and 1836 by the reckoning of the 2003 editors, he met the painter Ivan Soshenko. On 22 April 1838 his owner signed the letter of manumission, for 2,500 roubles, with Zhukovsky, Bryullov and Count Velyegorsky as its witnesses. Bryullov had painted a portrait of Zhukovsky, and a lottery of it in the imperial family brought in part of the money. He studied under Bryullov at the Academy of Arts until 1845, and two years after he was freed he published Kobzar, his first book of poems.
On 5 April 1847 he was arrested at the Dnipro crossing by Kyiv as a member of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, and was sent to the Separate Orenburg Corps as a private soldier, under an order that he was not to write and not to draw. From October 1850 he was held at the Novopetrovsk fort on the Caspian, where he remained nearly seven years. He wrote nine novellas in Russian in the years of his exile. The Artist was written there in 1856, and the 2003 editors of his collected works call its first part plainly autobiographical, and the book a source for his years in Petersburg and at the Academy.
He was released in 1857 and died at Petersburg in 1861, aged forty-seven. He was reburied, as he had asked, on a hill near Kaniv. The Artist was not printed in his lifetime; it first appeared in 1887.
Serhii Sakal was born in Ukraine in 1987 and lives in the United States. He read the Ukrainian classics at school, as everyone there does, and came back to them as an adult, from a distance. The Artist was his first published translation, and this is its second edition. His other translations are Taras Shevchenko’s The Twins, The Hired Girl and Varnak and The Diary, Lesya Ukrainka’s The Forest Song and The Boyar’s Wife and In the Catacombs, Osyp Turiansky’s Beyond the Limits of Pain and The Thought of the Primeval Forest, Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s Notes of a Snub-Nosed Mephistopheles, Andrii Chaikovsky’s After His Sister, Ivan Franko’s For the Hearth, Oleksa Slisarenko’s The Black Angel, Yevhen Hrebinka’s Aleksei Chaikovsky, Panteleimon Kulish’s The Black Council, and Olha Kobylianska’s The Land.
He came back to this one because the scholarly text of 2003 had never been set beside it, and because a book about a serf boy freed to be an artist, written by a man forbidden to draw, deserves to be read as Shevchenko wrote it.
