In 1838 a portrait was raffled in Petersburg for two and a half thousand roubles, and the money bought a man out of serfdom. Two years later Taras Shevchenko published Kobzar, and Ukrainian literature had its national poet. In 1847 he was arrested with a Kyiv society that wanted a federation of Slav republics and the abolition of serfdom; because poems were found on him his sentence was the heaviest of the group, and Nicholas I added an instruction in his own hand that the prisoner be forbidden to write or to paint. He served ten years as a private soldier in the Orenburg garrisons.

This is the jubilee volume, prepared for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth and sponsored by the Ukrainian Shevchenko Jubilee Committee, and its facing title page is in Ukrainian down to the publisher's own name. It gives the poems at length, including the whole of Haidamaki, The Caucasus, the satire A Dream, and Testament. It then adds what no later selection does: the autobiography, a novel, the diary, a historical sketch of Ukraine, and forty pages of notes.

The editors also set out their own method, which almost no volume in this series does. They explain their transliteration, stopping to note that Ukrainian sounds an h where Russian, English and others use a g, and choosing to follow the Ukrainian. They state which works were written in Ukrainian and which in Russian, and they admit in as many words that the translations fall short of the original.

Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964. Foreword by Yevhen Kyryliuk; the diary translated by John Weir.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.