Day Nine. The same poet. In the city that is his.
This One Is Different
Every other story in this series has been about finding Shevchenko far from Ukraine. In Kranj and Vienna and Washington and Bratislava and Zagreb and Prague and Paris and Lisbon, the encounter has carried the particular quality of diaspora recognition: the Ukrainian abroad, arriving in a foreign city, discovering that someone put him there first, that the language and the face and the words have preceded you across the ocean or the mountain range or the river.
Kyiv is different. Kyiv is not about finding him far from home. Kyiv is about finding him at the centre of things, in the city that carries his name on its university and its park and its boulevard, in the country the rest of this pilgrimage has been circling from the outside. The emotion is not recognition across distance. It is something else, something closer to return, to the particular feeling of arriving at the place that all the other places have been oriented toward.
I have been to the Kyiv monument many times. More times than I can count exactly. Each visit was its own thing, its own moment in a life that has been shaped, in ways I am still understanding, by Ukraine and by what it means to carry Ukraine with you into the world.
2001: A Young Man Who Had Won Something
The first time I stood before the monument on my own terms, not as a child, not passing through, but as a person who had arrived with a purpose, was in 2001.
I was a second-year university student. I had submitted a research project on raising awareness about gender-based violence and had won the Ukrainian-Canadian gender research competition. It was, at that age, a significant thing: the first confirmation from outside my own sense of things that the work I was doing mattered, that the questions I was asking were worth pursuing. Someone had read what I had written and said: this is good. You should continue.
I went to Kyiv to receive the recognition. And I went, as I always go in Kyiv, to the park and the monument.
I look at the photograph from that visit now, a young man standing on the steps at the base of the red granite pedestal, the bronze figure enormous above him, the sky grey and overcast, the park still in its post-Soviet austerity before the renovations that came later. The young man is me and is also someone I barely recognize: thinner, less settled, with the particular look of a person who is still figuring out the shape his life will take. He does not yet know that in three years he will be in Winnipeg studying for his MSW. He does not yet know about Canada. He knows about the competition he has won, and about Shevchenko, and about Заповіт, which he has known by heart for as long as he can remember.
I recited it that day. Of course I did. Standing on the steps in 2001, looking up at 6.45 metres of bronze, at the coat held behind the back, at the face turned slightly, composed, looking toward the university across the street, the university that shares his name, I said the words quietly in the overcast Kyiv afternoon.
Як умру, то поховайте Мене на могилі Серед степу широкого На Вкраїні милій…
2002, 2004: The Monument Before the Departure
Over the next several years, Kyiv became a place I passed through on my way to somewhere else. The CIDA project, Reforming Social Services, brought me to the city in 2002, a three-month study abroad that was, in ways I did not fully understand at the time, my first real encounter with Canada and with the world that was waiting for me there. And then in 2004, multiple visits for the Canadian visa process, the bureaucratic ritual of proving your intentions and your plans to an institution that has the power to grant or deny the future you have imagined.
Each time, before or after the embassy, I went to the monument.
This became a private ritual that I could not quite explain but did not question. Some things you do not need to explain. The monument was the fixed point in a series of visits whose purpose was always departure, always oriented toward the next step, the next application, the next country. Standing before it felt like marking a departure properly, like saying: I am going. I will come back. Не забудьте пом’янути незлим тихим словом.
Do not forget to remember me with a kind and quiet word.
I was not yet sure, in those years, where I was going or who I would become there. But Shevchenko was always the stable thing. The place I came back to before the journey.
The Monument Itself: What It Cost
The history of this monument is a history of resistance.
Five failed attempts before 1939. Four international competitions that produced no winner. The Russian Empire’s determined obstruction at every stage: relocating the proposed site to an undignified corner of the city, insisting the Kobzar yield his place to the Princess Olga, filing nationalist denunciations against the committee members, using the weight of an entire imperial bureaucracy against a group of Ukrainian cultural figures who simply wanted to give a poet his proper place in the city he loved.
He loved Kyiv. This is documented and certain. From exile in Kazakhstan, he wrote that in his imagination he most often lingered over the images of golden-domed, garden-wrapped, poplar-crowned Kyiv. He had spent years in the city, working at the Kyiv Archaeological Commission, painting its monasteries and its river views, writing in the small house on Kozyne Boloto lane that is now the Shevchenko House Museum. He was arrested on a Dnipro crossing near what is now the Paton Bridge. He had been going to be a drawing teacher at the University. The Tsar personally intervened to send him to the steppe instead.
When the monument was finally built in 1939, the Soviet sculptor Matviy Manizer had to fight his own version of that same struggle. His first design showed Shevchenko with a fist raised above peasants and Haidamakas — too defiant, too clearly a call to resistance. Lazar Kaganovich, one of the architects of the Holodomor, looked at the design and said: this Shevchenko will call for the overthrow of the collective farm system. Manizer was made to revise. The final figure stands with hands held behind his back, head slightly bowed, the posture of a man who is still, the documents suggest, dangerous enough that the empire needed to moderate him even in bronze.
But here is what they could not moderate: the pedestal inscription. The words carved into the red granite beneath his name and dates are from Заповіт:
І мене в сім’ї великій, В сім’ї вольній, новій, Не забудьте пом’янути Незлим тихим словом.
The Soviet state, erecting a monument to the poet they insisted was safely theirs, put his most subversive line on the base. In the great family, the free and new family, do not forget to remember me. A call to a free Ukraine, carved in granite, unveiled in 1939, standing through everything that came after.
And — the final irony of ironies, the one that history saved for last — the monument stands where the statue of Nicholas I once stood. Nicholas I. The tsar who sent Shevchenko to the steppe with a personal decree forbidding him to write or paint. The tsar who was his chief tormentor and persecutor. Shevchenko now stands on the ground where his oppressor’s monument stood. He outlasted the tsar. He outlasted every empire that tried to silence him. He is still there.
Ron
I need to write about Ron.
Ron is my Canadian friend, and Kyiv was one of the places we shared. I will not put more detail here than that, because some things belong to the private record rather than to the public one. What I will say is this: we visited Kyiv together, and we went to the monument together, and I introduced him to Shevchenko the way you introduce someone to a person who matters deeply to you, with the particular combination of pride and explanation and the hope that the other person will understand why this matters.
He understood. Ron was the kind of person who understood those things.
And later, after Ron passed away, I came back to the monument. With his Ukrainian family. Near the place where his presence in my life had been marked.
I will not say more than that. Some visits to monuments are not primarily about the monument. They are about the people you brought there and what it means to return to the place where they were present with you, in the knowledge that they are not present in the same way anymore.
Не забудьте пом’янути незлим тихим словом.
Do not forget to remember me with a kind and quiet word.
I stood at the base of the pedestal and I read those words again, the same words I had read on every other visit, and this time they meant something they had not meant in the same way before.
What the Park Holds
The photographs I have from different years show the same monument under different light in different seasons. Summer, full of flowers, the park’s flower beds in elaborate colour, the linden trees in full leaf, tourists and Kyiv residents passing through the afternoon. Dusk, the long shadows of the Ukrainian summer evening, the bronze going dark against a sky that is still bright. The older photograph, the grey Kyiv sky of 2001, a young man on the steps who does not yet know what is coming.
The monument is the constant. Everything around it changes, the park is renovated, the flower beds are redesigned, the people in the photographs age or disappear, and the figure on the red granite pedestal remains, looking toward the university, hat in one hand, the other hand behind his back, the lines of Заповіт beneath him in the stone.
He was in Kyiv before the empire fell. He was in Kyiv during the Soviet period, with the words they could not remove carved beneath him. He was in Kyiv for the independence of 1991, when the park was full of people who understood what that moment meant. He was in Kyiv in 2001 when a young Ukrainian won a research competition and came to stand on the steps below him. He was in Kyiv in 2004 when a graduate student was preparing to leave for Canada. He was in Kyiv when Ron was there, and when Ron was gone. My last visit to Kyiv was in October 2019, before COVID and full-scale invasion.
After February 24, 2022, communal workers and volunteers built a protective structure around the monument, sandbags, boarding, the same material that was protecting Kyiv’s other cultural landmarks from bombardment. The bronze Shevchenko, the one who stands where Nicholas I stood, was wrapped in the architecture of war, preserved against the missiles of a new empire trying to do what the old one had tried and failed: to silence what he represents.
It did not work then. It will not work now.
What I Always Say
Every time I have stood before this monument, in 2001, in 2002, in 2004, in the years since, in the visits with friends and the visits alone, in the summer and in the grey Kyiv sky, I have said the same words. The words on the pedestal. The words that the Soviet state thought they could contain by carving them in stone and that instead became the permanent record of everything the stone could not hold back.
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.
Поховайте та вставайте, Кайдани порвіте І вражою злою кров’ю Волю окропіте. І мене в сім’ї великій, В сім’ї вольній, новій, Не забудьте пом’янути Незлим тихим словом.
I will go back to Kyiv. When the war ends and the sandbags come down and the boarding is removed and the park fills again with summer flowers and chess players and families and all the ordinary life of a city that has refused to stop being itself — I will go back.
He will be there. He was always there. He will wait as long as it takes.
He always does.
——— 🇺🇦 ———
Two more cities. The same poet, looking back.
Слава Україні. 🇺🇦
About this monument: The monument to Taras Shevchenko in Kyiv stands in Shevchenko Park, opposite the main building — the Red Building — of Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. The bronze figure, 6.45 metres tall, was created by sculptor Matviy Manizer and placed on a red granite pedestal 7.3 metres high, designed by architect Yevhen Levinson. It was unveiled on March 6, 1939, on the occasion of the 125th anniversary of Shevchenko’s birth, after five previous failed attempts dating back to 1904. The monument stands on the site formerly occupied by a statue of Tsar Nicholas I — Shevchenko’s chief persecutor, who personally ordered the poet’s exile to Kazakhstan with a ban on writing and painting. The pedestal bears the inscription Т.Г. Шевченко. 1814–1861, beneath which are carved the closing lines of Заповіт: І мене в сім’ї великій, в сім’ї вольній, новій, не забудьте пом’янути незлим тихим словом. The monument is a national monument of Ukraine. After the full-scale Russian invasion of February 2022, it was surrounded with protective structures to preserve it from bombardment.
References
KPI. (n.d.). Monument of Taras Shevchenko. https://kpi.ua/en/shevchenko-monument
Kyiv for Tourists. (n.d.). Monument of Taras Shevchenko. https://www.kiev4tourists.com/monument-of-taras-shevchenko
TyKyiv. (2025, March 6). Тарас Шевченко проти російської імперії: Історія пам’ятника, що міг не з’явитися. https://tykyiv.com/city/pamiatnik-tarasovi-shevchenku/
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Пам’ятник Тарасові Шевченку (Київ). https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Пам’ятник_Тарасові_Шевченку_(Київ)
Leave a Reply