It was not long after this that the boy was sent to study with a deacon to learn to read and write. He was one of twelve village boys studying, out of some one hundred of that age. This in itself, shows that Taras was exceptional amongst his peers. He excelled at his studies and was sometimes sent to read psalms for the dead in the deacon's place. By this stage, young Taras was already sketching and wanted to become an artist. He often would copy liturgical materials and illustrated the margins of his pages with various designs.

When Taras was nine, his mother died. Soon after, his father remarried, but life was unbearable with his new stepmother. She had brought three children with her and, as perhaps is natural, favoured her own over the Shevchenko children. When Taras was eleven, his father died.

Shevchenko later summed up his childhood and his feelings in the following words:

I don't describe that little cottage
Beside the pond, beyond the village,
A paradise right here on earth.
That's where my mother gave me birth,
And singing, as her child she nursed,
She passed her pain to me. T'was there,
In that wee house, that heaven fair,
That I saw hell... There people slave
from morn till night... There to her grave
My gentle mother, young in years,
Was sent by want and toil and cares.
There father, weeping with his brood
(And we were tiny, tattered tots),
Could not withstand his evil lot
And died at work in servitude.

It was soon after this that Taras, fleeing the now intolerable home life as well as the constant abuse and beatings of the drunken deacon, ran

away to a second one who painted and allowed the boy to mix colours. Before he left, however, Taras administered a whipping to his drunken abuser and took with him an illustrated book. Experiencing similar treatment from his second teacher, Taras ran away again to yet a third deacon who painted, but who, after examining the boy's hands, declared him unfit to be an artist. Taras returned home from these deacons around the age of twelve or thirteen and spent some time as a shepherd, work which allowed him the opportunity to sketch.

It was around this time that Taras came to the attention of Paul Engelhardt who had just inherited the estates of his late father. Taras was now at the age when he was expected to enter formal servitude. Taras had finally found a deacon who had agreed to teach him to be an artist, but had to obtain the written permission of his master. Paul Engelhardt, not about to lose a servant, refused the permission and Taras was assigned to be his kozachok, or houseboy, performing various menial chores.

At this stage in his life, the young boy had already learned that he could not pursue his dream openly. He began stealing prints and, with a stolen pencil, made copies of them which he hid from the view of his master.

In 1829, at the age of fifteen, Taras travelled in his master's entourage. first to Kiev, and then to Vilnius in Lithuania, the Engelhardt ancestral homeland. It was in Vilnius that Taras ceased to be a boy and began entering his adult life.

One evening (in his autobiography Shevchenko gives the date as December 6, 1829), the master and his wife went out to a ball. In their absence, Taras pulled out his materials and began sketching by candle light. He was so engrossed in this that he didn't hear the Engelhardts' return. What ensued Shevchenko described in the following words:

The master savagely pulled him by the ears and slapped his face, on the pretext that not only the house, but the whole city could have burned down. The next day the master ordered the coachman Sidorko to give him a good whipping, which was properly administered.

Although this incident remained with him throughout his life, Shevchenko continued to draw surreptitiously. Finally, aware of his servant's behaviour, Paul Engelhardt relented and agreed to allow Taras to study with a professional artist, Jan Rustem, at Vilno University. It was here that Shevchenko's boyhood ends. It seemed that fate had finally smiled on the talented, but abused peasant boy. A new world opened up in front of Taras, but despite his elation at the time, it was but an opening into a world of further hardship and distress.

When I was Thirteen

By TARAS SHEVCHENKO

My thirteenth birthday soon would come.
I herded lambkins on the lea.
Was it the magic of the sun,
Or what was it affected me?
I felt with joy all overcome
As though in heaven...
The time for lunch had long passed by,
And still among the weeds I lay
And