# Dream (Taras Shevchenko poem)

"Dream" is a poem by Taras Shevchenko from 1844, a lyrical pamphlet, the first work of satire in his work and in new Ukrainian literature directed against social and national oppression, against the then socio-political system, autocracy, serfdom, the church, against "the slavish obedience of the masses" and "the national treason of the top of Ukrainian society, which went to the service of the imperial power."

## History of creation and publication

The original manuscript from the album Three summers is dated July 8, 1844 Saint Petersburg. Numerous copies of the work have been preserved. Shevchenko created his acutely political poem without expecting it to be printed. "Dream" was first published as a separate booklet in 1865 in Lviv. In Russia, the poem was printed as a censored excerpt (lines 75-156) for the first time in Kobzar (St. Petersburg, 1867). Then, the entire poem was printed in Kobzar edited by Vasyl Domanytskyi (St. Petersburg, 1907).
The poem is a kind of summary of the author's thoughts about the time and fate of his people. Shevchenko wrote the poem after his first trip to Ukraine under the direct impression of the social reality of that time. The creation of the poem was prepared by all the previous development of the author of Kobzar: his assimilation of the traditions of Ukrainian satirical literature, folk humor, burlesque, parody, satirical work of Mykola Gogol (there is a certain connection between Gogol's grotesque and the fantastic-grotesque images of "Dream" ), Russian freedom-loving poetry (Pushkin, Lermontov, the Decembrists, anonymous anti-tsarist works). The work has many typological features in common with the poems of Adam Mickiewicz (Dziady) and Heinrich Heine (Germany. A Winter's Tale). During the investigation into the case of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the poem "Dream" was one of the main pieces of evidence of Shevchenko's anti-government activities and the basis for the severe punishment of the author.

## Plot

In the prologue, Shevchenko reflects on the fact that each person has his own destiny and depicts the social and moral sins that flourish in the country. After that, the drunken antagonis of the work dreams that he is flying over Ukraine, then over Siberia and eventually reaches St. Petersburg. He looks around the city, and then, having become invisible, he enters the royal palace. In the palace, he sees how an angry tsar kicks his dignitaries, and then he sees the most incredible. The tsar turns into a kitten. Looking at this metamorphosis, the hero laughs. The tsar glanced at the main character, waking him up. In the poem Shevchenko depicts the life in the times when the common people were enslaved by the autocracy and satirically ridicules executioners and robbers of the people.
Shevchenko called his work a "comedy" (in the sense in which Dante called his work), depicting the sufferings of his soul tormented by the national tragedy. The author's preface indicates both the genre properties of the work and the nature of the reflection of reality.

## Cultural significance

The poem Dream is the first political poem in which the autocracy is exposed from the standpoint of the serf peasantry, which realized itself (in the person of Shevchenko) politically. This work put the author on a par with the most outstanding satirists of world literature. The poem testified to the final crystallization of the anti-imperial core of Shevchenko's democratic worldview, and was a response to the most pressing problems of the social and political life of Ukraine as part of the Russian Empire in the 1840s.

## Cultural references

The poem Dream was widely illustrated by artists Ivan Yizhakevych, Vasyl Kasiian, Oleksandr Pashchenko, Kazymyr Agnit-Sledzevskyi, Volodymyr Masyk, Yuriy Severyn and others.
Episodes of the poem and the title were used by the scriptwriters of the movie Dream Dmytro Pavlychko and Volodymyr Denysenko.