Taras Shevchenko
Political, philosophical and aesthetic views

Shevchenko is considered to be "the founder of the revolutionary democratic trend in the history of Ukrainian social thought" and a utopian socialist. His political, aesthetic and philosophical worldview was formed under the influence of the ideas of Russian revolutionary democrats such as Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky; his views reflected the interests of the Ukrainian peasantry of the mid-19th century, the era of the crisis of the feudal-serf system in Imperial Russia.

While he tirelessly exposed the oppression of the Russian landowners and the Tsar, Shevchenko, as a pan-Slavist, fought for friendship between the Russian and Ukrainian peoples, praised the "glorious of the glorious" Bohdan Khmelnitsky, a 17th-century Ukrainian Cossack leader who had set the stage for the reunification of Ukraine with Russia. Shevchenko advocated the unification of the Slavic peoples on a democratic basis.

A serf peasant, ransomed from captivity, Shevchenko was in the words of Russian critic Nikolai Dobrolyubov, "a poet of the people... He came out of the people, lived with the people, and not only by thought, but by the circumstances of life, was closely and bloodily connected with the people."

Shevchenko was one of the most active participants in a secret political organization in Ukraine, the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius and headed the revolutionary nucleus in it. He was associated with a group of Petrashevists (the Petrashevsky Circle was a Russian literary discussion group of progressive-minded intellectuals in St. Petersburg in the 1840s, which also included a young Fyodor Dostoyevsky and radical utopian socialists) who, in their plans for a peasant uprising, hoped to use his revolutionary activities in Ukraine. After his exile, Shevchenko became close to the members of the Sovremennik literary, social and political magazine and its editors, Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobrolyubov.

Shevchenko did not consider the existing social system to be unshakable, he was convinced that the serf system would be destroyed everywhere due to the development of the steam engine, a technique that would "devour the landlord-inquisitors", and that the most important role in a radical change in social life would be played by the masses. Although he argued that the strength of the spirit cannot manifest itself without matter, he did not call his philosophical position " materialism ", understanding by this word the vulgar materialism of contemporary thinkers such as Büchner, Moleschott and Vogt, which he rejected. In his poem, "The Heretic", Shevchenko praised the struggle of Jan Hus (an early 15th-century Bohemian religious reformer) for the interests of ordinary people and the unity of the Slavs.

According to Shevchenko's aesthetic views, which the poet expressed in his Diary, the source of beauty is nature; any attempts to deviate from the eternal beauty of nature make the artist "a moral monster". Shevchenko strove for art that is both national (folkloric) and realistic, and for that he earned the praise of Chernyshevsky and the Russian itinerant painter Ivan Kramskoi, who drew the poet's famous portrait after his death.

In the 1840s and then in the 1850s, in the era of the political struggle within the Empire's intelligentsia between the revolutionary-minded radical wing and the more moderate liberal wing, Shevchenko stood on the side of the Russian revolutionary democrats. His battle poetry, which spread underground, was a sharp weapon in the fight against serfdom. Shevchenko had a great influence on the further development of revolutionary social thought in Ukraine and on Ukrainian culture in general (Ivan Franko, Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky, Lesya Ukrainka, etc.).
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