"Perebendya" () is a Ukrainian poem by

Taras Shevchenko Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (; ; 9 March 1814 – 10 March 1861) was a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, public and political figure, folklorist, and ethnographer. He was a fellow of the Imperial Academy of Arts and a member of the Brotherhood o ...

about a blind itinerant Ukrainian bard (''

kobzar A ''kobzar'' ( ; ) was an itinerant Ukrainian bard who sang to his own accompaniment, played on a multistringed kobza or bandura. Tradition The professional kobzar tradition was established during the Hetmanate Era around the sixteenth cen ...

''). The poem was written approximately in 1839 in

Saint Peterburg Saint Petersburg, formerly known as Petrograd and later Leningrad, is the List of cities and towns in Russia by population, second-largest city in Russia after Moscow. It is situated on the Neva, River Neva, at the head of the Gulf of Finland ...

. The first known publication of this poem is in the first edition of Shevchenko's best-known poetry collection. ''

Kobzar A ''kobzar'' ( ; ) was an itinerant Ukrainian bard who sang to his own accompaniment, played on a multistringed kobza or bandura. Tradition The professional kobzar tradition was established during the Hetmanate Era around the sixteenth cen ...

'', published in Saint Petersburg in 1840. Here, the poem was dedicated to

Yevhen Hrebinka Yevhen Pavlovych Hrebinka (; ; 2 February 1812 – 15 December 1848) was a Ukrainian romantic prose writer, poet, and philanthropist. He wrote in both the Ukrainian and Russian languages. He was an older brother of the architect . Life and car ...

. The poem was published again in the 1844 edition of ''Kobzar'' without the dedication to Hrebinka and with some orthographic changes. The same year the poem was published in the Polish transliteration in the collection ''Wirszy T. Szewczenka'' (the publication contained one grammatical error in

declension In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence by way of an inflection. Declension may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and det ...

.) When, after his return from the exile, Shevchenko was preparing the publication ''Poetry by Shevchenko, Volume 1'' he reworked the text again and renamed the poem "Kobzar". The new publication of the volume encountered difficulties with the censorship office, which only granted permission to reprint the previously published collection. Therefore, the compromise version of the poem was published in 1860 with only some of the poet's corrections being included. When the publication was in print, Shevchenko made several more changes. The manuscript reveals that he restored the original name while not crossing out the new one as well as several other changes.

Ivan Yizhakevych Ivan Sydorovych Yizhakevych (; January 18, 1864 – January 19, 1962) was a Soviet and Ukrainian painter and writer, People's Painter of the Ukrainian SSR (1951). Life, education and work Yizhakevych was born in the village of Vyshnopil, Kiev Go ...

has a painting with the same name based on the same poem by Taras Shevchenko.

References

.
Zibrannia tvoriv u shesty tomah
, ''Naukova Dumka'', Kiev, 2003

(with editor's notes) Ukrainian-language books Ukrainian literature Ukrainian art Taras Shevchenko 1839 poems

See also

References