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Today, Ukraine celebrates the Day of Ukrainian Writing and Language. It is difficult to overstate the importance of a figure like Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s great national poet, to the Ukrainian language, literature, and indeed to Ukrainian identity and statehood as a whole. I don't think it would be particularly controversial to say that Taras Shevchenko occupies a place in the Ukrainian national tradition at least as important and fundamental, if not more so, as Adam Mickiewicz does in Poland, Shakespeare in England, or Walt Whitman in the United An ordinary orphan boy born into a poor family of serfs in the very heart of Ukraine, a land shackled by the Russian Empire in the first half of the 19th century, he was fortunate enough to be bought out of serfdom by sympathetic members of high society in imperial St. Petersburg, thanks to his remarkable talent for painting. And this young man, who had received little more than a basic education from village church clerks, also wrote deeply moving, epic poetry about the fierce battles of Ukraine's Cossack past, the mighty, roaring Dnipro River, and the tragic fate of Ukrainian women and mothers, bound by the chains of serfdom. His verses moved his contemporaries to the depths of their souls, both in his homeland and far away from it. He was not the first to pick up a pen around the turn of the 19th century, return to his people's roots, and begin writing poetry in Ukrainian: the language of ordinary people, of peasants, of the very earth and sky of Ukraine. A language routinely mocked with condescension and arrogance, dismissed as nothing more than a "peasant dialect" of Russian. But Shevchenko, himself only recently a serf and aspiring artist in the service of a wealthy landowner, managed to accomplish something extraordinary: he became not merely one of the founders of modern Ukrainian literature and literary language, but the true spiritual father and prophet of the emerging Ukrainian nation. He never stopped creating his remarkable poetry, even behind prison walls, and later when he was condemned to military service in the Russian army, seemingly for life, in the remote steppes of Central Asia, thousands of miles from his homeland. Tsar Nicholas I personally ordered that he be forbidden to write or paint. Yet Shevchenko continued composing poetry in secret, hiding his tiny notebooks in his boots. His poetry contains dozens, even hundreds, of iconic lines and expressions that every Ukrainian knows from early childhood. He did not merely create his celebrated collection of poetry, Kobzar, whose very title evokes one of the central figures of Ukrainian folk tradition: the blind, wandering bard who sang ballads of Ukraine's long and sorrowful history. Like a blinding flash of fire in the darkness, Shevchenko inspired other great writers and thinkers of the 19th century to rediscover their Ukrainian roots, not only to begin creating literature in Ukrainian, but also to contemplate Ukraine's independence, statehood, and liberation from imperial rule. He did not simply give Ukrainians great poetry in their own language. He helped an entire people see themselves as a nation, with their own history, dignity, and future. In my upcoming book, an entire major section is devoted to Taras Shevchenko, his extraordinary life, and his legacy for Ukraine. It is titled "A Ukrainian Prayer." And I am also delighted that the entire book is illustrated with drawings and paintings by Shevchenko himself. Because, really, who could possibly be better suited to illustrate a book about Ukraine's historical destiny than perhaps the greatest Ukrainian in history, the spiritual father and great poetic voice of his people?