It makes no difference to me, If I shall live or not in Ukraine Or whether any one shall think Of me ’mid foreign snow and rain. It makes no difference to me. In slavery I grew ’mid strangers, Unwept by any kin of mine; In slavery I now will die And vanish without any sign. I shall not leave the slightest trace Upon our glorious Ukraine, Our land, but not as ours known. No father will remind his son Or say to him, Repeat one prayer, One prayer for him; for our Ukraine They tortured him in their foul lair. It makes no difference to me, If that son says a prayer or not. It makes great difference to me That evil folk and wicked men Attack our Ukraine, once so free, And rob and plunder it at will. That makes great difference to me. At times as the difficulties and hardships of life descended upon him in the faraway districts of Orenburg and Aral, he became discouraged but the vast bulk of his poetry was a lamentation for his absence from his beloved Ukraine. He dreamed of the beauties of its fertile soil now that he was in an arid and desolate region and he lamented the sad fate of his beloved country as well as his own. A surprising number of poems deal also with the hardships and the troubles of a young girl who has been left an orphan to make her way in a cruel and unfeeling world. Perhaps in some of these we may easily imagine that the girl symbolizes Ukraine, for the two themes of the ruined country and the ruined girl more than once merge in the thoughts of the sympathetic poet. As the rigors of imprisonment became still more severe, Shevchenko tried his hand at prose in various stories which he dated from before his imprisonment but he seems to have done this in an effort to avoid the tsar’s prohibition of writing and drawing. These stories, while they are good, add little to his reputation. Shevchenko was primarily a poet and the prose which he wrote contains little new, either in ideas or content. They are largely reworkings of the same themes of the suffering girl, the tyrannical landlord, the Muscovite seducer and oppressor that he had dealt with earlier in more concentrated form in his verse. They have attracted less attention than his poetry and as in the case of Pushkin form the minor part of his work.