Day Seven. The same poet. The city that gave him a square.
The Long Way to Paris
I did not plan Paris. Paris arrived the way certain gifts arrive, sideways, through the logic of a schedule that was already full, through an itinerary that had been built around something else entirely and then suddenly, improbably, opened a door.
I had been at a conference in Bulgaria. The European Association of Schools of Social Work was gathering in Paris in 2017, and the dates overlapped with where I already was, which meant a flight from Sofia, a short, improbable arc across the Balkans and into France, and then Paris, which is always Paris, which is always a thing you did not entirely expect to be standing inside.
It was my second time in the city. The first time I was coming from Strasbourg to catch a bus to Lviv. I had read about Paris for decades. I had read what Ukrainians had made of it: the interwar émigré community that settled in the 16th arrondissement and the suburbs and built churches and publishing houses and cultural associations and the particular infrastructure of a people who do not know how long they will be away. I knew that Paris had been one of the great capitals of Ukrainian exile. I knew that somewhere on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, there was a small garden with his name on it.
What I did not know was Olga.
Olga
She is one of those people who make a city legible. Not a tour guide, not an explainer, simply a person who has lived somewhere long enough and loves it fully enough that when she walks through it with you, you stop seeing a city and start seeing a place. She is Ukrainian. She lives in Paris. She had offered to share parts of Paris with me, and after the conference morning sessions, we found ourselves with a lunch hour and the particular freedom of two Ukrainians in a French city on a summer afternoon.
We went to a café first. This was mandatory and correct. Boulevard Saint-Germain does not release you without coffee, without the particular ritual of sitting at a small table and letting the city present itself at a pace it chooses rather than one you impose. We sat. We talked. The war in Ukraine was already three years ongoing, this was 2017, Donbas already burning, Crimea already gone, the world not yet fully grasping what was coming, and we talked about that too, the way Ukrainians abroad always talk about it, with the particular combination of grief and determination that is the inheritance of a people who have learned that the only way through is through.
After coffee, I asked Olga what she would show me of Ukrainian Paris.
She smiled the smile of someone who has been waiting for exactly this question. She said: the church, and the square.
The Ukrainian Catholic Church of Saint Volodymyr the Great
The chapel at 186 Boulevard Saint-Germain has been many things. In its oldest incarnation, the grounds held the cemetery of the Saint Peter Chapel, the place where plague victims and Protestants were buried in the old city, interred at night without ceremony, without noise, without the civic dignity that the living were sometimes permitted. During the French Revolution the chapel became a clinical school. Over the centuries it changed and changed again, the way buildings in very old cities absorb history by accumulating purpose.
By the time I arrived in 2017, it was the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Saint Volodymyr the Great. Walking through the gate from the boulevard into the enclosed garden courtyard, the noise of the city falling away behind you with an abruptness that Paris achieves nowhere else, felt like crossing a threshold into a different kind of space. The Haussmann facades gave way to something older, quieter, more inward. Lavender growing along the walls. Green benches. The particular cool of a courtyard that gets shade at midday.
And there, against the wall of the building, on a red granite pedestal: Shevchenko.
TARASS CHEVTCHENKO. POÈTE UKRAINIEN. 1814–1861.
The French spelling of his name has always moved me slightly. Tarass. Chevtchenko. The transliteration trying to reach across two orthographies toward the same man, the same face, the same brow and mustache we recognize everywhere. The bust was made by Kyiv sculptor Mykhailo Lysenko and unveiled in 1978, in a detail that carries its own historical irony, by the Soviet Embassy. The Soviet Embassy inaugurating a monument to the poet who had spent his life resisting the empire that the Soviet Union claimed to have superseded. They thought they were commemorating a safely historical figure. They were, as empires always are when they co-opt the poets they tried to silence, wrong.
The square itself, Square Taras Chevtchenko, had been named earlier, inaugurated by the City of Paris on March 29, 1969, the 155th anniversary of his birth. Paris gave him a square before it gave him a bust. The square came first, then nine years later the bronze arrived to inhabit it. He had been officially present in this courtyard, in name at least, for nearly a decade before his face appeared.
What I saw in 2017 was the face Lysenko made: the older Shevchenko, the one we know, the heavy brow and the composed gaze, the face that has looked out from a hundred pedestals across Ukraine and the diaspora world. He was looking across a Parisian courtyard toward the windows of a chapel that had been a cemetery and then a school and then a Ukrainian church. He looked, as he always looks, like someone who has already seen everything and is still watching.
Two Poems in a Paris Garden
I did what I always do. Standing in the enclosed garden with Olga beside me and the summer Paris afternoon filtering through the plane trees, I recited.
Заповіт first, as always:
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій, Щоб лани широкополі, І Дніпро, і кручі Було видно, було чути, Як реве ревучий.
And then, because the war was already three years in, because Crimea was gone and the Donbas was burning and we were standing in the capital of a country that had not yet fully understood what was happening, because Заповіт speaks of death and burial and the steppe, and what the moment required was something about resistance, about continuing, about the force that does not stop, I said the lines from Кавказ:
Борітеся — поборете! Вам Бог помагає! За вас правда, за вас слава І воля святая!
Fight — and you will prevail. God is with you. Truth is with you. Glory is with you. And holy freedom.
Standing in a Paris garden, on a lunch hour at a social work conference, in 2017, those lines did not feel like poetry from 1845. They felt like a transmission. Like something addressed specifically to the moment we were living in, from a man who had lived under a version of the same empire and had understood, with the particular clarity that exile and imprisonment and prohibition sometimes give a person, that the only possible answer to what was being done to Ukraine was to keep going.
Olga stood quietly beside me. She knew the words. We did not need to discuss them.
What Paris Gave Him
There is something particular about this monument’s location that I keep returning to. It is not on a grand boulevard in the middle of a traffic roundabout. It is not in a public park where strangers walk past without stopping. It is in an enclosed courtyard, behind a gate, tucked against the wall of a Ukrainian church, in a space that requires you to choose to enter.
You do not stumble upon Shevchenko in Paris. You have to know he is there, or you have to have an Olga who knows, and who takes you through the gate and into the garden where the noise of the boulevard disappears and the bronze face is waiting in the particular quiet of a place that has been holding memory for a long time.
That is, I have been thinking, a certain kind of presence. Not monumental in the civic sense, not the Washington kind, with its hundred thousand people and its act of Congress and its Eisenhower. This is the intimate kind. The kind that belongs to a community rather than to a public, that exists for the people who know the gate is there and choose to walk through it. The Ukrainian Catholic church of Paris. The interwar émigré community that built itself into the fabric of the Saint-Germain neighbourhood. The Ukrainians in Paris who have a square with his name and a courtyard with his face and know, in the way diaspora communities know their geography, exactly where he is.
He was there before any of them arrived. He will be there after.
Lunch Hour, and the City After
The conference sessions resumed in the afternoon. I went back to social work, to the conversations about European frameworks and field education and the things that had brought me to Paris in the first place. But the lunch hour had given me something that the conference could not: the garden, the bronze face, the two poems said quietly into Paris summer air, and Olga beside me, knowing the words.
I hope to go back to Paris. I hope to sit again in that café on the boulevard, to talk again about Ukraine and about what it means to be far from it and to carry it with you everywhere. I hope to walk again through the gate into the courtyard where the noise falls away. I hope to find Olga there.
And I know, because it is always true, that Shevchenko will be there already. Against the wall of the church was a cemetery that was a school. On his red granite pedestal. Tarass Chevtchenko. Poète ukrainien. Looking across the garden toward whoever has come to find him.
He is always there. He will wait as long as it takes.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
Three more cities. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The bust of Taras Shevchenko in Paris stands in the Square Taras Chevtchenko at 186 Boulevard Saint-Germain, in the 6th arrondissement, within the courtyard of the Ukrainian Catholic Church of Saint Vladimir the Great. The square itself was inaugurated by the City of Paris on March 29, 1969, on the occasion of the 155th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth. The bronze bust was created by Kyiv sculptor Mykhailo Lysenko and unveiled in 1978. The pedestal inscription reads: Tarass Chevtchenko — poète ukrainien — 1814–1861. A copy of the same bust exists in Kyiv, in the courtyard of the National Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. The courtyard grounds occupy the site of the former Saint Peter Chapel cemetery, where plague victims and Protestants were buried in earlier centuries. The nearest Métro station is Saint-Germain-des-Prés (Line 4). The square is open to the public during daytime hours.
References
EuTouring. (n.d.). Square Taras Chevtchenko, Paris. https://www.eutouring.com/square_taras-chevtchenko.html
Nova Circle. (n.d.). Monument to Taras Shevchenko, Paris. https://www.novacircle.com/spots/europe/france/ile-de-france-region/paris-municipality/paris/monument-to-taras-shevchenko-3b7286
Odkryjsviat. (2020, May 25). Пам’ятник Тараса Шевченка в Парижі. https://odkryjsviat.com/ua/pomnik-tarasa-szewczenki-w-paryzu/
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку (Париж). https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пам’ятник_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Париж)
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