Day Two. The same poet, a different city, a different kind of finding.
The City I Lived In Without Exploring
For one month, Vienna was my address.
I had an Airbnb there, a base, a place to return to between trains and planes, the kind of temporary home that a certain kind of traveller accumulates in a life of moving. From Vienna, I went east and west and north and south. I went to conferences and cities and meetings, and I came back to Vienna between each one, changed my bag, slept, and left again. In this way, I lived in one of Europe’s great cultural capitals for thirty days without ever quite being a tourist there.
I went to the Opera once, because Vienna and the Opera are an arrangement that even a traveller in transit cannot entirely refuse. Beyond that one evening, I did not do the museums, the walking tours or the imperial apartments at the Hofburg. Vienna was not my destination. It was my fulcrum. The city I passed through on the way to everywhere else.
But there was one thing I had been meaning to do since I arrived, one errand that kept getting deferred by departures and postponed by arrivals, and with the month almost gone, I finally had a free afternoon. I had the address of the University of Vienna’s Institute of Slavic Studies. I had read about the sculpture. I put on my coat, and I went.
The Institute and Its Redirections
The University of Vienna is not one building. It is a constellation of faculties scattered across the inner city, wearing centuries of scholarship like a comfortable coat. I found the right building without difficulty. What I found inside was a succession of helpful people, each of whom knew approximately where Shevchenko was, and each of whom sent me somewhere slightly different.
Reception pointed me down a corridor. A colleague there sent me to another floor. Someone on another floor, genuinely apologetic, said: have you tried the library?
The library.
I had not tried the library.
The Library, and What Was Waiting There
I do not know exactly how many rooms I moved through before I arrived. What I know is that at a certain point, I turned a corner, and there he was.
And the first thing that stopped me was that I almost did not recognize him.
We are accustomed to a particular Shevchenko. The older man. The heavy brow, the full mustache, the face of someone who has already lived through exile and imprisonment and the steppes of Kazakhstan. That is the face on the monuments, on the coins, on the covers of editions of the Kobzar. That is the face we carry in memory.
Ihor Grechanyk gave us a different one.
This Shevchenko is young. He stands in a vyshyvanka, the embroidered Ukrainian shirt, its intricate pattern rendered in bronze with extraordinary care. His face is unlined. His gaze is forward and steady, but it is the gaze of a young man who is still becoming, not yet the poet of exile and lamentation, but already the poet of something essential and enduring. He looks like someone who has just understood something important and has not yet decided what to do with the knowledge.
And in his hands, outstretched, offered, he holds an open book.
I stepped closer to read what was written there. On the left page, in letters cast into the bronze as though still being written:
Наша дума, Наша пісня Не вмре, Не загине.
On the right page, a signature. Шевченко.
I stood with those words for a long time. Our thoughts, our songs will not die, will not perish. The line that fed directly into the spirit of what became the national anthem of Ukraine. The words of a young man in an embroidered shirt, holding out a book in a library in Vienna, telling everyone who passed: this language will not be silenced. This memory will not be erased.
The sculptor understood something profound in choosing to depict him young. The older Shevchenko already knew the cost of those words, the years in exile, the ban on writing, the slow erosion of his health. The young Shevchenko did not yet know the cost. He was only certain of the truth. And there is something in that certainty, rendered in bronze, held out in open hands, that is more defiant than any monument to suffering could ever be.
But then I turned around.
The shelves. The Ukrainian books. Rows and rows and rows of them. Scholarship and poetry and history and literature in Ukrainian, texts I recognized, texts I had never encountered, works in Cyrillic that felt like transmissions from a world I carry inside me, arriving here into the heart of a German-speaking imperial capital. Vienna was the city of the Habsburgs, the city that governed half of Ukrainian territory for over a century, and here, in this library, centuries later, was the written record of what Ukrainian intellectual and literary life had produced, preserved, catalogued, and made available to anyone who looked.
I am a reader. I have always been a reader. I was living a short tram ride from this room and I almost left Vienna without finding it.
What Grechanyk Understood
Ihor Grechanyk created this sculpture in 2013 for the approaching 200th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth. The ceremony had diplomatic weight: the sculpture was first presented to the Mayor of Vienna at the Rathaus before finding its permanent home at the university. A gesture that said, this poet belongs in your city. This memory belongs in your institution.
That the university placed him in the Slavic library, among the books, among the languages, seems to me entirely right. But what Grechanyk understood goes deeper than placement. He chose to show Shevchenko not as a completed monument to a completed life, but as a young man holding out the words before the cost had been paid. Не вмре, не загине. Will not die. Will not perish.
Standing in that library, surrounded by shelf after shelf of Ukrainian writing, I thought: he was right. It did not perish. Here is the proof, all around him.
I thought about the month I had spent using Vienna as a hub. All those mornings leaving for somewhere else. All those evenings returning. A city I inhabited without exploring, which is perhaps the most honest description of my relationship with it. And here, on one of my last free afternoons, was the thing that Vienna had been holding for me all along: not the palaces, not the coffeehouses, not the imperial grandeur, but a young man in an embroidered shirt, holding out a book with both hands, in a room full of the language he refused to let die.
The Hours I Did Not Want to End
I lost track of time entirely. I moved between the bronze figure and the shelves, pulling out volumes, reading spines, tracing Cyrillic letters with the particular pleasure of a person who loves books and suddenly finds themselves somewhere they did not expect to feel at home.
It was the library staff, kind and apologetic, who eventually reminded me that closing time had arrived.
I went back to Shevchenko one last time. I took my photograph, the young man in the vyshyvanka, the open book in his hands. And I recited back to him the words he was already holding, and the verse that follows:
Наша дума, наша пісня Не вмре, не загине… От де, люди, наша слава, Слава України!
Без золота, без каменю, Без хитрої мови, А голосна та правдива, Як Господа слово.
Without gold, without stone, without cunning words, but resonant and true, like the word of God. Standing in a library in an imperial capital, surrounded by Ukrainian books that survived centuries of being told they should not exist, those lines do not feel like poetry. They feel like a verdict.
Then, as always, Заповіт:
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій…
I said Слава Україні. I put on my coat and walked back out into a city I had lived in for a month and was finally, on one of my last afternoons, beginning to understand.
I will go back to that library. Not to Vienna as a destination, Vienna and I have our arrangement, and it suits us both. But to that room, to those shelves, to the books I only glimpsed and did not have time to open. There is reading there I have not finished.
And there is a young man in an embroidered shirt who will be waiting, holding out the words with both hands, certain of something the world kept trying to disprove.
He was already there when I arrived. He will be there when I return.
He always is.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
More this week. Each day, a different city. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The bronze sculpture of Taras Shevchenko at the University of Vienna’s Institute of Slavic Studies was created by People’s Artist of Ukraine, sculptor Ihor Grechanyk. Standing 110 cm tall, it depicts a young Shevchenko in an embroidered vyshyvanka, holding an open Kobzar inscribed with the words “Нашіа дума, наша пісня не вмре, не загине” and his signature. It was presented to the Mayor of Vienna at the Rathaus and installed permanently at the university in November 2013, in connection with the 200th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth.
References
Embassy of Ukraine in Austria. (n.d.). Taras Shevchenko — svitovyi rekordsmen. Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine. https://austria.mfa.gov.ua/news/taras-shevchenko-svitovij-rekordsmen
Grechanyk, I. (n.d.). Taras Shevchenko, Vienna, Austria. Grechanyk Studio. https://grechanyk.com/ua/ukrainian-saga/taras-shevchenko-vienna-austria/
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