Ostap Veresai

(1803–1890)

Kobzar Ostap Veresai was born in 1803 in the village of Kaliuzhnytsia in the Chernihiv region into a family of serfs. His father was blind and earned his living playing the fiddle. At four years old, Ostap also went blind. He learned the art of playing the bandura from kobzar Yukhym Andriiashivsky, for whom he was a povodyr (usually a sighted boy to guide a blind kobzar). He later studied under kobzar Semen Koshovy and lirnyk Nychypor Koliada.

For more that forty years, he wandered the cities and villages of Ukraine. His life changed enormously when he was noticed by Russian artist Lev Zhemchuzhnikov, who then introduced him to Panteleimon Kulish, who told Taras Shevchenko about him. In 1860, Shevchenko sent him some money along with a copy of his poetic collection Kobzar with the inscription: “To my bother Ostap from T. H. Shevchenko.” 

He married Priska Senchuk, a singer and dancer, in Sokyryntsi, Chernihiv region. Mykola Lysenko, Oleksander Rusov, Orest Miller, Porfyrii Martynovych, Opanas Slastion, and Pavlo Chubynsky all took an interest in him. Because of this, he was invited to sing at the dedication of the Galagan Collegium in Kyiv (1871), a meeting of the Southwestern (that is, Ukrainian) section of the Russian Geographical Society (1873) where Lysenko delivered a report about him, at the 3rd Archeological Congress in Kyiv (1874), and with Lysenko’s choir. Accompanied by Lysenko and Chubynsky, he had a tour of Saint Petersburg in 1875 that was interrupted by the Third Section secret police, which was worried about the increase of Ukrainian sentiments in the capital.

When he was detained in Pryluky for his song “On Justice and Injustice,” he was saved from prison by a snuff box given to him at the tsar’s palace in Saint Petersburg. Pavlo Chubynsky paid for him to have a new house built in Sokyryntsi, where he lived. Professor Louis Léger was inspired by his songs to promote Ukrainian culture in France and even teach a Ukrainian language class. Professor William Morfill of Oxford and Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who printed his photograph in his story “The Song of Justice,” likewise found the kobzar captivating. Ostap Veresai died in Sokyryntsi in 1890.