The Weekend That Should Not Have Been Possible
In 2007, Air Canada did something it has never done again and probably will never do again for such a low price. For a brief, improbable window, it offered a pass, an all-you-can-fly arrangement over weekends in low season that let you board any available seat on any available flight and simply go. The kind of offer that arrives once in a travelling life and, if you are paying attention, changes something about how you understand the world.
I was paying attention.
I was living in Winnipeg at the time, finishing my MSW at the University of Manitoba, deep in the research that would eventually become the foundation for my diaspora studies, which I re-started in 2020. Ukrainian immigration. Ukrainian diaspora. The ways people carry themselves across an ocean and a century and still find ways to remain themselves. I was reading about communities and diasporas and the institutions people build when the country they belong to is occupied or erased or simply very far away. I was thinking about all of this constantly, in libraries, in seminars, in the particular interior weather of a graduate student who has found the question that will not let him go.
And then Air Canada offered me the world for a weekend, and I went to Washington.
The Ukrainian Passport and the American Visa
This detail matters, so I will be precise about it.
I travelled then on my Ukrainian passport. I had a visa, the kind you had to apply for, wait for, demonstrate your intentions for, prove you were not a risk. The kind that reminds you, with bureaucratic efficiency, that you are a guest, that your presence is contingent, that belonging is something conferred, not assumed.
I had the visa. I went.
My first visit to Washington, D.C. One of the great capitals of the democratic world, the city that Shevchenko himself invoked in his poetry — Коли ми діждемося Вашингтона з новим і праведним законом? When will we live to see Washington with his new and righteous law? He had never been here. He asked the question from exile, from the steppes of Kazakhstan, from the pages of a journal he was forbidden to keep in Ukrainian. He asked it as a wish, as a prayer, as a reproach to history.
And here I was, a Ukrainian in Washington, in 2007, doing what I suppose Ukrainians have always done in that city: looking for Shevchenko.
The Ukrainian Embassy, and What Was Not Far From It
I wanted to see the Ukrainian Embassy. This was not simply tourism. I was studying diaspora institutions, the ways Ukrainian communities had built themselves into permanence in North American cities, the organizations and newspapers and churches and cultural associations that had kept the language alive when the country itself was occupied. The Embassy was part of that world, even if it came later, even if it represented a different chapter. I went there as a researcher goes somewhere, not to receive anything in particular, but to stand in a place and understand it a little better.
And then someone told me, or I had read it somewhere, or perhaps I simply knew from everything I had been studying: not far from the Embassy was Taras Shevchenko.
Of course he was.
Late Evening, No Flash, a Silhouette Against the Washington Sky
I am not a photographer, but I like taking pictures. I have never claimed to be a photographer. In 2007, I was especially not a photographer: I had a camera, which was something, but I did not yet have the knowledge of what to do with it in difficult light. And it was a difficult light. It was late in the evening when I arrived at the memorial near P Street, in the neighbourhood of Dupont Circle. The sky was doing what Washington skies do in summer, enormous and expressive, filled with that particular blue that comes just before full dark, clouds catching whatever light remained.
Shevchenko was in silhouette.
I took the photograph anyway, because that is what you do when you have come this far and the light is what it is. A silhouette against a dramatic sky. The figure of a young man, striding forward, his long coat catching the last light, his posture unmistakably purposeful. On the granite pedestal, the words I already knew: TARAS SHEVCHENKO. 1814–1861. BARD OF UKRAINE.
I told myself I would come back and take a better photograph. I have not managed it in nearly twenty years. The silhouette is what I have, and I have been thinking, lately, that perhaps it is the right photograph after all. There is something honest in it, the figure present but not fully legible, recognizable by posture and context and the weight of everything you already know rather than by clear details. That is how Shevchenko often arrives in a life. You recognize him before you can quite see him.
Leo Mol and the Winnipeg Connection
Standing there in the Washington dusk, I thought about Winnipeg.
I was living in Winnipeg. Leónid Molodozhanyn, Leo Mol, lived in Winnipeg. The man who had created this sculpture, this particular young Shevchenko striding forward in his frock coat, his left hand lifting the lapel, his face turned toward wherever he was going, that man was my neighbour, in the large sense of the word, a resident of the same prairie city where I was reading books about Ukrainian diaspora in a university library. He had been born in Poltava in 1915, had come to Canada by the long route that the twentieth century forced upon so many Ukrainians, and had settled in Winnipeg, where he became one of the great sculptors of the Ukrainian diaspora world. A Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. A man whose work now stood in the capital of the United States.
There is something I find moving about the image of a sculptor in Winnipeg creating the Shevchenko who would stand in Washington. The diaspora building its monuments across the ocean in the city the poet had dreamed of. A Ukrainian in Canada making the Ukrainian in America that a hundred thousand people came to see on a June afternoon in 1964. The distances collapse when you look at it that way. Everyone is closer than they appear.
I was a Ukrainian in Winnipeg studying Ukrainian diaspora, standing in Washington in front of a sculpture made by a Ukrainian in Winnipeg. Shevchenko would have understood this kind of threading.
What the Monument Chose
The Washington memorial is, among Shevchenko monuments, unusual in what it decided to show.
Most Shevchenko monuments show the older man. The heavy brow and the full mustache, the karakul cap, the sheepskin coat, the face that became the image, the photograph he agreed to in Petersburg as a kind of joke because his friends brought the coat even though it was warm, and that joke became the icon. That man, that face, that coat, repeated across Ukraine and the diaspora in bronze and stone and ceramic tile.
Leo Mol made a different choice. He showed Shevchenko young. Not the exile, not the man who had already paid the cost, the man who was still becoming, still moving, still full of the particular energy of someone who has understood something important and is carrying it forward. The figure is in motion. He is going somewhere. His posture is not monumental in the traditional sense of stillness and authority; it is monumental in the sense of forward force, of a man who does not intend to stop.
The Soviet authorities hated it. They complained that it did not look like their Shevchenko. They insisted the real Shevchenko should appear in the revolutionary coat, the correct posture for a Soviet cultural hero. What they could not say, but what was understood by everyone, was that Leo Mol’s young Shevchenko looked nothing like a monument to a completed, safely historical figure. He looked like someone still going, still arriving, still asking the question about Washington and the new and righteous law.
Which was, of course, exactly the point.
The History the Granite Carries
I knew some of the story in 2007, through my research. I know it better now.
The battle to build this monument was one of the defining acts of the Ukrainian diaspora in North America. It began with a letter in the newspaper Svoboda in 1956. It required an act of the United States Congress, signed by President Eisenhower. It required years of fundraising from Ukrainians across the continent and around the world: over 50,000 donors eventually, their names buried in a book sealed in the pedestal alongside earth brought from Shevchenko’s grave at Kaniv. It required fighting off opposition from the Soviet Embassy, from the editorial board of the Washington Post, from a parade of objectors who insisted that a Ukrainian poet had no business standing in the American capital.
The KGB opened an information file on the monument construction. They ran counter-measures. They attempted to discredit the committee members. They rushed to open their own Shevchenko monument in Moscow seventeen days earlier, and got the coat wrong, because they were in too much of a hurry and could not admit they were losing.
A hundred thousand people came to the unveiling on June 27, 1964. They marched from the Washington Monument, along the National Mall, to the place where Eisenhower would say: He will kindle here a new world movement toward the independence and freedom of all peoples and all captive nations in the world.
The Washington Post, which had been so hostile, was forced to concede that nothing like this had been seen since the opening of the Washington Monument in 1848.
I stood in the summer evening dusk of 2007, finishing my MSW, beginning to understand what the diaspora had built and what it had cost and what it meant, and I looked at the young man on the pedestal and thought: he was there before any of them. They were all finding him.
The Poem I Recited
I said Заповіт, of course. It is what I always say. And then I said the lines carved into the monument’s pedestal, the question from Юродивий — Коли ми діждемося Вашингтона з новим і праведним законом? А діждемось-таки колись. When will we live to see Washington with his new and righteous law? And yet we will, someday.
Standing in Washington, in front of the monument, saying those words back to the man who had written them, there is a particular quality to that moment that I cannot entirely explain. He had never been here. He had asked the question as someone asks a question from prison, from exile, from very far away, not knowing if it would ever be answered. And here were a hundred thousand people in 1964, and here was I in 2007, and here the question was, carved in granite, still asking, still insisting on its answer.
I put the camera away. The photograph was imperfect and I knew it. I said Слава Україні. I walked back into the Washington evening to catch the next flight, because that was what the weekend required.
Nearly Twenty Years Later
I have not gone back with a better camera. Life keeps intervening: conferences, caregiving, teaching, the Saturday Zoommeet and stand with Ukraine gatherings, the ten thousand things that fill a life once you have committed to living it fully. My passport is different now. My research became a PhD, and then a career with two decades of teaching and writing and advocating for a people I carry with me wherever I go.
But I have found Shevchenko in other places: Kranj, Vienna, and now, through this series, I am finding him again in memory and in the words you are reading.
The silhouette photograph sits in my archive. A young man against a Washington sky, striding forward, his posture unmistakably purposeful. Not fully visible. Recognizable by everything you already know.
He was already there when I arrived, that spring evening in 2007, an MSW student with a Ukrainian passport and a weekend flight pass and a question about diaspora that would take another decade and more to half-answer.
He will be there when I finally get the better photograph.
He always is.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
More this week. Each day, a different city. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The Taras Shevchenko Memorial in Washington, D.C. was created by sculptor Leónid Molodozhanyn (Leo Mol), a Winnipeg-based Ukrainian-Canadian artist and Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts, with the memorial plaza designed by architect Radoslav Zhuk. Standing over 7 metres tall and weighing 45 tonnes, it depicts a young Shevchenko in forward motion. Located near Dupont Circle on P Street, it was unveiled on June 27, 1964, the 150th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth, by former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower before an estimated crowd of 100,000 people. Former President Harry Truman served as honorary chair of the Shevchenko Memorial Committee. Authorization came through a bipartisan Congressional resolution signed into U.S. Public Law 86-749. In May 1965, earth from Shevchenko’s grave at Kaniv was sealed into the pedestal alongside a commemorative book listing over 50,000 donors. The memorial is currently maintained by the federal government of the United States.
References
Embassy of Ukraine in the USA. (2023, March 10). До пам’ятника Шевченку у Вашингтоні поклали квіти [Flowers laid at Shevchenko monument in Washington]. Ukrinform. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-diaspora/3680638-do-pamatnika-sevcenku-u-vasingtoni-poklali-kviti.html
Holos Ameryky. (2023, March 9). Тарас Шевченко вже понад півстоліття “розповідає” у Вашингтоні про російську імперіалістичну тиранію [Taras Shevchenko has been “telling” Washington about Russian imperialist tyranny for over half a century]. Voice of America Ukrainian. https://www.holosameryky.com/a/taras-shevchenko-i-rosijska-tyrania/6997683.html
Local History. (n.d.). Кобзар над Потомаком: відкриття пам’ятника Шевченку в столиці США [The Kobzar over the Potomac: The unveiling of the Shevchenko monument in the U.S. capital]. https://localhistory.org.ua/texts/chitanka/kobzar-nad-potomakom-vidkrittia-pamiatnika-shevchenku-v-stolitsi-ssha/
Ohorobets, O. (2018, March 9). Як з’явився пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку у Вашингтоні? [How did the Taras Shevchenko monument in Washington come to be?]. Liga.Blog. https://blog.liga.net/public/user/ogorobets/article/29724
SZRU. (2025, March 8). Шевченко у Вашингтоні: боротьба за цінності [Shevchenko in Washington: The struggle for values]. Foreign Intelligence Service of Ukraine. https://szru.gov.ua/history/stories/shevchenko-u-vashynhtoni-borotba-za-tsinnosti
Ukrinform. (2019, June 27). 5 років тому у Вашингтоні відкрили пам’ятник Тарасу Шевченку [55 years ago, the Taras Shevchenko monument was unveiled in Washington]. https://www.ukrinform.ua/rubric-diaspora/2729325-55-rokiv-tomu-u-vasingtoni-vidkrili-pamatnik-tarasu-sevcenku.html
Voice of America Ukrainian. (2009). У Вашингтоні вклонилися Тарасу Шевченку [Washington pays homage to Taras Shevchenko]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBFt2Dc3lUA
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Меморіал Тарасові Шевченку (Вашингтон) [Taras Shevchenko Memorial (Washington)]. https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Меморіал_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Вашингтон)
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