Abstract
The paper offers a short analysis of the main subject in Taras Ševčenko’s famous ballad Topolja from 1839; in the ballad, a young girl forced to marry an older man by her own mother asks nature for help and, eventually, finds herself turned into a slim poplar. In Ukrainian philology, Ševčenko’s poetic masterpiece was initially compared to similar subjects in Ukrainian folk songs. Ivan Franko, however, already in 1890 also mentioned ancient Greek and Roman literature and Russian and Polish Romanticism as a broader European context for Topolja. Underlining this broader European approach as offered by Franko, the paper delivers further material from Greek, Russian, Slovene, and German literature from Homer and Aleksandr S. Puškin up to the German expressionist poet Georg Heym. The various works of all these writers clearly demonstrate that comparing a girl with a poplar was a poetic subject used at least up until the beginning of the 20th century. Next to this, the comparison as introduced into Ukrainian literature by Taras Ševčenko in 1839, is also typical of Pavlo Tyčyna’s early collections of poems, which are now appreciated as masterpieces of Ukrainian modernism.
