AMONG UKRAINIAN LITERARY HISTORIANS AND SPECIALISTS, there is absolutely no doubt that the 1845 poem “The Caucasus” (Kavkaz) holds a central place in the so-called political, philosophical, or ideological writings of the country's national poet, Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861) (Plate 11), and in the history of Ukraine.

Despite its brevity, it touches directly and unequivocally on a great many themes and motifs, with enormous psychological and emotional power. Moreover, its unique combination of plain language, simple exposition, and complex structure renders it an artistic masterpiece (shedevr/chef-d’oeuvre/chedeuvre) unsurpassed in his “political” verses.

Writing in the 1880s, a young Galician-Ukrainian scholar, the left-lean­ing Ivan Franko, called it “one of Shevchenko's best works,” and sixty years later a Shevchenko scholar, the right-leaning Leonid Biletsky, a political refugee who had fled Stalin's Red Army and settled in Winnipeg, declared it “a political poem with the most deep personal and philosophical tones.”¹ The western Ukrainian writer Bohdan Lepky commented: “Explosive and immediate in its power, ‘The Caucasus' has no equal [in Ukrainian litera­ture]. This poem overturns, crushes, burns, strikes with irony, freezes with truth, and blinds with sparkling comparisons, until, with its memory of a sincere friend, it ends in quiet accord. An entirely extraordinary thing.”² One of the most recent interpreters of Shevchenko, George Grabowicz, who has pioneered the concept of “myth” in Ukrainian literature, has labelled it “prophetic,” “manichean,” “millennial,” and ultimately “one great philippic against structure in its various guises, from false religion, to false enlight­enment, to finally, above all, the boundless imperial lust to aggrandize.”³

But whence came this outraged attack on falsehood, lust, and Russian “imperialism,” the last its main target? And what occasioned it? Despite its “mythic” or “millennial” qualities, the answers are both personal and political.