Abstract
The article discusses the significance of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Ševčenko for the history of the Ukrainian standard language. By the time the poet published his works, Ukrainian had still not been developed into a modern standard language. Although Ševčenko himself did not establish Modern Standard Ukrainian, his significance for its further development was decisive, because it was precisely his language that served as a model for the other writers (including those from other dialect areas), and for the codifiers of the Ukrainian language as well.
