Summary

Дмитро Донцов

The epoch-making significance of Taras Shevchenko, the great poet, fighter, martyr, prophet, and mystic, whose centennial was celebrated by the Ukrainians this year, transcends national boundaries and assumes world-wide dimensions.

It was he who had foretold the Coming of our own apocalyptic times during a gloomy period of history, when Tsarist Russia reached the apogee of its power, and the West, carried away by the ideals of the French Revolution of 1789, proclaimed its belief in materialistic «progress». It was during the dark epoch which witnessed the birth of Russian nihilism and Marxism, the fountainheads of present-day Bolshevism, that he foretold the great struggle between the forces of good and evil, of idealism and materialism – a struggle which, according to him, was to begin on Ukrainian soil. He foretold the onslaught of a new Moscow, which, in his words, would contrive to «enslave the whole world», to «to shackle the living spirit» of man and to extinguish the divine «spark of the great fire» in order to destroy the Christian civilization of the West and to reduce its peoples to a herd of slaves, subject to the will of those who consider themselves the «chosen leaders of the world».

The «Gospel of Truth», which was Shewchenko’s main weapon in his struggle against the forces of evil, took its insight, inspiration and power («the truth, the way and the life») from the Gospel of Chriest. It was to beget, with its supernatural power, a new Promethean generation in the Ukraine, which would awaken mankind from its materialistic stupor and inspire it to a victorious struggle for the triumph of the «Sun of Truth», for the freedom of nations, and for the restoration of the glory of the ancient Christian Kiev, which has always fought in the West’s front ranks against the hordes of the East – the Khozars, the Tartars and the Muscovites.

This gigantic struggle against the forces of hell was to be headed, according to Shevchenko’s «invisible tables of commandments, written with an invisible pen», by the Ukrainian knighthood, miraculously restored to life in the spirits of its descendants and led by its ancient protectors – Virgin Mary and Archangel Michael, patron saint of the city of Kiev and of the knighthood of the West in generał. The knighthood will once more, like in the days of yore go into the battle armed with the sword of spirit and with the sword of chivalry, and will not hesitate to shed their «new, pure, sacred blood» to save the Christian civilization of the West from a mortal danger.

The purpose of the present book by D. Donzow is to disclose the meaning and significance of Shevchenko’s prophecies, warnings, appeals and reproaches written down on his «invisible tables of commandments», which appear so timely in our cruel and terrible epoch.

Примітки

Подається за виданням: Донцов Д. Незримі скрижалі Кобзаря. – Торонто: Накладом видавництва «Гомін України, 1961 р., с. 223 – 224.