Taras Shevchenko

On February 25, 1814, in the village of Moryntsi in the Kyiv region, a son, Taras, was born to the serf peasant Hryhorii Ivanovych Shevchenko and his wife Kateryna. The Shevchenkos were the property of the actual privy councillor V. V. Engelhardt.

In Soviet literature, the notion of the life of a serf peasant was greatly distorted, and the tragic nature of their situation exaggerated. In the mid-nineteenth century, serfs, starting from the age of 14-15, had to go to corvée twice a week and uncomplainingly do whatever the estate steward ordered them to do. In addition, they were obliged to pay in money or in kind a tithe of what was grown on the land allotted to them by the landowner. Everything else that remained from the harvest, or that the serf earned on the side, stayed with him. With what he earned, he had the right to buy himself, his family, and the land on which he worked out of serfdom. The best-known sugar manufacturers of Novorossiya and Little Russia — Tereshchenko, Khanenko, Semirenko — came from among serfs. They bought themselves out…

Taras’s family was not poor either. His father, Hryhorii Ivanovych Shevchenko-Grushevsky, married for love the beautiful Kateryna Boiko, the daughter of the well-to-do enserfed Cossack Yakym Boiko from Moryntsi.

There was little room for the young couple in the parental household, since old Ivan Shevchenko had four more children. Therefore Boiko persuaded the manager of the Olshtansky cluster of villages belonging to pan Vasyl Engelhardt, retired captain Dmitrenko, to give the young couple the house and land of their neighbor Kolesnyk.

At that time Kolesnyk had gone chumakuvaty — to earn extra money. Taking advantage of his absence, the assistant manager in Moryntsi forced his wife, who was in the last month of pregnancy, to go to the harvest. There the woman died in childbirth. The child also died.

When the breadwinner returned and