Taras Shevchenko is celebrated as the Ukrainian national poet and a founder of modern Ukrainian literature.
A child of serfs, Shevchenko received a religious education before being discovered as a painter, leading to his emancipation from serfdom in 1838. After a few years of activity as a painter and poet in the early 1840s, Shevchenko was arrested by Tsarist Russian authorities for his revolutionary poetry and association with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, a secret society for the liberation of Ukraine. Subsequently, Shevchenko was ordered to be exiled to Siberia “under the strictest surveillance, without the right to write or paint” by Tsar..." data-title="Книга Poetry">