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FAMOUS UKRAINIAN WRITERS
TARAS SHEVCHENKO
On the 9th of March, 1814 in the village of Moryntsy Kyivsky region Taras
Shevchenko was born in a poor serf family. His childhood was very hard, but
from early childhood little Taras was fond of reading, painting and listening to
his grandfather’s stories about the heroic past of the Ukrainian people. He
wanted to study very much but he had to work. When Taras was nine, his
mother died, and at the age of eleven he became an orphan.
Every year on the 9th and 10th of March we celebrate Shevchenko days. It
is a great festival for our nation. Taras Shevchenko is a great Ukrainian poet, a
famous artist and a great thinker. He is famous for his collection of poems,
“Kobzar”. This book is dear to every Ukrainian. In his poems Shevchenko
portrayed the beauty of his native land and the oppression and sufferings of
Ukrainian poor people.
T. Shevchenko’s life was hard. He was arrested and sent far from his
motherland for ten years. The poet loved his country. He wrote many poems
about Ukraine. According to his last will Taras Shevchenko was buried on
Chernecha Hill in Kaniv. His poems have been translated into more than sixty
languages. There are many monuments to Shevchenko and we learn and read his
poems with great pleasure. There is a portrait of T. Shevchenko in almost every
Ukrainian home. His “Kobzar” has become our national bible.
THE MOST POPULAR BRITISH AND AMERICAN WRITERS
JONATHAN SWIFT was born at Dublin (Ireland), but he came from an
English family. His father died at the age of 25 and Daniel was born 7 months
after his death, on November 30, 1767. He was a secretary of Sir William
Temple, a statesman and a writer. Later he got the place of a vicar in Ireland and
in 1717 he was made a Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Swift wrote
some pamphlets criticizing the colonial policy of England what made him
popular among the Irish people. In 1726 his masterpiece “Gulliver’s Travels”
appeared. He didn’t write much after his wife’s death and died in 1745.
GEORGE GORDON BYRON (1788-1824) spent the first ten years of his
life in Scotland which rocky coast and mountains were depicted in his poems. In
1809 he left England for two years and visited Portugal, Spain, Albania, Greece
and Turkey where he started writing “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage”. His
romantic poems were admired by Byron’s contemporaries and a new mode of
thought and feeling was called “Byronism”.
OSCAR WILDE was born in Dublin on October 17, 1854. His father was
a famous Irish surgeon. His mother was well known as a writer of verse and
prose. While at the university, Wilde became one of the most famous
personalities: he wore his hair long, and his sayings were well known among the
students. His most famous works appeared over the next ten years. The most
popular are: “The Happy Prince and Other Tales”, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
and his comedies “An Ideal Husband” and “The Importance of Being Earnest”.
At the height of his popularity and success, tragedy struck. He was accused of
immorality and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. When released from
prison in 1897, he lived in Paris where died in 1900.
The Bronte sisters, CHARLOTTE (1817-1855), EMILY (1818-1848)
and ANNE (1820-1849), were three talented 19th century women novelists
whose works are regarded as classics today.
Charlotte was born in a small town in England. She and her sisters had a
very hard life. Charlotte received her education at an orphanage (which she
described in her novel “Jane Eyre”). After that she worked as a governess and a
teacher. In her works she wrote about the society she lived in and criticized it.
Her first novel “The Professor” was published only after her death. The best
novel “Jane Eyre”, published in 1847, is partly biographical. In 1849 the novel
“Shirley” was published. The last novel “Vilette” came out in 1853. Charlotte
Bronte died from tuberculosis in 1855.
JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1789-1851) was the first American
novelist who reflected the history of his country: the harm brought by European
bourgeois civilization to Indians and nature. Cooper was the creator of the
historical novel and the American frontier hero. He wrote “The Spy”, ”The
Pioneers”, ”The Last of the Mohicans”, ”The Redskins”. He showed the
desperate fight of the Indians against the lords, honesty and courage of his
heroes.
O’HENRY was born in Greenboro, North Carolina, in 1862. His real name
was William Sydney Porter. O’Henry was an outstanding humourist. He worked
out and enriched all types of the short story: the anecdote, the adventure story,
tales and sketches. He wrote 170 stories with a New York background and could
work out a plot that would keep a reader in suspense up to the surprising end.
JACK LONDON was born in 1876 in San Francisco. His real name was
John Griffit. His father was a poor farmer. After school Jack London sold
newspapers and worked at a factory. Later he became a sailor. In 1897 he went
to the Klondike as a gold miner. His first short story was published in 1898. The
difficulties he met during the first years of his literary work are described in his
novel “Martin Eden”. During the sixteen years of his career Jack London
published about fifty books: short stories, novels and essays. In his best stories
he described the severe life and struggle of people against nature. The most
famous are: “The Son of the Wolf”, ”The Call of the Wild”, ”Brown Wolf”,
”White Fang”. He died at the age of forty in 1917.
CONAN DOYLE was a young doctor who began to write stories about a
detective Sherlock Holmes. The first story was written in 1887. Holmes and
Watson lived at 221 Baker Street. There’s no house there now but a large
company that’s near that place answers about 20 letters that still come every
week to Sherlock Holmes from people who ask his help. The company answers
that “Mr. Holmes is no longer working as a detective”. There’s a pub in London
called Sherlock Holmes with his room. It has many things described in Conan
Doyle stories, pictures of Holmes and Conan Doyle, of actors who played them.
In 1961 lovers of Sherlock Holmes formed the Sherlock Holmes Society.
JULES VERNE was born in 1828 in France. Young Jules was interested
in machinery, sailing and writing. Together with his brother Paul, he explored
the river near their home in an old sailboat. Jules was sent to Paris to study law
but he joined the club of scientific writers. His first adventure story was called
“Five Weeks in a Balloon”. In his adventure stories Jules Verne forecast many
inventions that we have now. He believed that someday people would have
airplanes, submarines, television, dirigibles and powerful weapons. Verne had a
notebook where he wrote every idea he came across that might be useful for his
books. In his study he had a large map of the world with all routes of his heroes
marked on it. During his life Jules Verne wrote more then 50 books. He died at
the age of 77.
ERNEST MILLER HEMINGWAY (1899-1961) is known for his works
“A Farewell to Arms”, ”For Whom the Bell Tolls”, ”The Old Man and the Sea”.
He took part in World War I, the Civil War in Spain and World War II. At
school he was a good football player and boxer. Being adventurous, he ran away
from home twice. He devoted 36 years to journalism and wrote the absolute
truth. He devoted the short novel ”The Old Man and the Sea” to the Cuban
fisherman and after writing this book he was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature.