In this sense, it belongs to the global tradition of abolitionist writing, akin to the struggles against slavery in the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil.
Ukrainian anti-serfdom literature serves both as testimony and transformation: it gives voice to the silenced and redefines the cultural language of political subjugation.
Although serfdom in Ukraine was not legally equated with slavery, it functioned as a regime of systemic dehumanization.
The kripak (from prykripyty - “to bind” or “attach”) was a peasant legally tied to a landowner’s estate, denied the right to freely leave or own land, and subject to the economic and legal control of a feudal lord.
The word itself reflects the core condition of this social class: attachment - not to family or community, but to the land, and by extension, to the will of the landholder.
Serfdom in Ukrainian territories emerged gradually as a process of feudal subjugation that intensified from the 16th to the 18th centuries.
Paradoxically, the institutionalization of serfdom coincided with the rise of Enlightenment thought across Europe - a period that loudly proclaimed liberty, individual dignity, and the universality of rights.
While Western thinkers were formulating theories of social contract and emancipation, Eastern European elites were entrenching a system of bondage that subjugated peasants.
Serfs were deprived of autonomy, mobility, education, property rights, and often bodily integrity.
Formally abolished in the Russian Empire in 1861, serfdom had for centuries been the dominant mode of social and economic organization in much of Ukraine.
It treated the peasant not as a citizen or subject with rights, but as an object of economic exploatation and legal subjugation.
Serfs could not leave the land without permission, had no control over their labor, and were subject to corporal punishment. Although not legally defined as chattel, the serf was functionally unfree.
Ukrainian anti-serfdom literature emerged as a moral and intellectual protest against this system, giving voice to the silenced and constructing a counter-memory to official imperial narratives.
Taras Shevchenko, the central figure in Ukrainian anti-serfdom literature, transformed the cultural and ethical dimension of national identity.
In works such as The Dream, Kateryna, The Servant Girl (Naimychka), and To the Dead the Living and the Unborn, he expressed not only compassion for the oppressed but righteous anger against systemic injustice.
His peasant figures are not mere victims; they are actors whose suffering depicted to show the systematic violence. Worth noting, Taras Shevchenko was himself a kripak. In 1838, Shevchenko’s freedom was purchased by Karl Bryullov and poet Vasyl Zhukovsky who recognized his talent.
Just a decade later, in 1847, Shevchenko was arrested for his affiliation with the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius - a secret society advocating for Ukrainian cultural revival.
As punishment, he was forcibly conscripted into the Russian Imperial army and sent to serve under strict surveillance in Orenburg, with a personal ban from writing or painting.
Taras Shevchenko lived a brief, but emblematic life - just 47 years, of which 34 were spent in some form of unfreedom. Born in 1814 into serfdom, he endured 24 years under the yoke and 10 years in the Russian Imperial army. Thus, out of 47 years of life, Shevchenko was truly free for only about 13 years.
An interesting episode in Shevchenko’s life is his friendship with Ira Aldridge, the African-American actor and abolitionist.
Their meeting in 1858 in St. Petersburg, where Aldridge was performing Othello, became a moment of encounter of two men marked by systems of unfreedom. Shevchenko, born as a serf, and Aldridge, born into racial oppression, both understood bondage as lived experience. Their connection symbolized a transborder solidarity.
There are also remarkable biographical parallels between Taras Shevchenko and Frederick Douglass, the renowned African-American abolitionist, writer, and orator. Both men were born into systems of hereditary serfdom and slavery respectively. Each of them achieved legal freedom around the same time: Douglass escaped bondage in 1838, the same year Shevchenko’s friends ransomed him from serfdom.
Crucially, both used language and art as tools of emancipation - Douglass through speeches and autobiographies that revealed the violence of slavery, and Shevchenko through poetry and painting that condemned the injustice of serfdom and imperial domination.
Their life stories testify to a shared 19th-century global structure of oppression, where empires and plantation economies alike depended on the dehumanization of laboring bodies - and to the moral and creative agency of those who broke those chains.
This re-centering of the peasant experience serves both as a denunciation of serfdom and as a claim for a new social contract within the Ukrainian polity. Shevchenko’s contribution is thus comparable to that of Frederick Douglass or Sojourner Truth - not only in theme but in the courage to write against the dominant narrative of their time.
The anti-serfdom narrative did not vanish after the formal abolition of serfdom in 1861. On the contrary, it evolved into a post-emancipation critique of structural injustice.
Writers such as Panas Myrny (Do the Oxen Bellow…), Ivan Nechui-Levytskyi (Mykola Dzheria), and Borys Hrinchenko (At the Crossroads) chronicled the moral vacuum left by legal emancipation without real transformation. It poses the question: what is the life under juridical freedom and existential alienation?
Moreover, Marko Vovchok (the pen name of Mariia Vilinska) brought anti-serfdom literature into the domain of realist prose. Her Narodni opovidannia (Folk Tales), published in 1857, offered intimate portrayals of serf life, especially from the perspective of women and children through psychological lens of the humiliation, fear, and endurance.
In tales such as "Karmeliuk," "Instytutka," and "Marusia," Marko Vovchok dramatized the intersections of gender, power, and class within the serfdom system. Her narrative strategy resembled that of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though it emerged independently: both authors sought to bring out empathy and moral outrage through storytelling.
Importantly, Marko Vovchok’s protagonists often bear traces of Cossack pride - figures like Karmeliuk are at once folk heroes and reminders of a lost social autonomy. Here again, anti-serfdom literature reactivates the memory of freedom to delegitimize the order.
Writers such as Olha Kobylianska expanded this tradition into the gendered dimension of serfdom. In Tsarivna, Kobylianska’s protagonist wrestles not only with social conventions but with internalized unfreedom.
She embodies a dual resistance - to patriarchal domination and to a cultural ethos that normalizes subordination. This feminist strain in Ukrainian abolitionist literature underscores the broader structures of unfreedom beyond class alone.
Having said this, we see how though rooted in a distinct historical and linguistic context, Ukrainian anti-serfdom literature parallels the abolitionist traditions of other societies.
Like Frederick Douglass or Harriet Jacobs, Shevchenko and his literary descendants offer testimony that is both particular and universal. They speak from Ukraine but toward a global vision of freedom grounded in the rejection of hierarchy and the affirmation of human worth.
Today, in the context of renewed attempts of cultural erasure, Ukrainian anti-serfdom literature returns as a resource. It teaches that dignity is not an abstract ideal but a lived, historical practice. It reminds us that freedom is not granted but demanded.
This article was produced in partnership with the Ukrainian Institute, Ukraine's major cultural and public diplomacy institution, and NGO Cultural Diplomacy Foundation.
