Lesya ukrainka biography ukrainian women

AUTHOR

Dr Sasha Dovzhyk, Special projects curator at the Ukrainian Institute London and Associate Lecturer at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL

A ‘Ukrainian woman’

Lesia Ukrainka is the pen name of the iconic Ukrainian writer Larysa Kosach. The literal meaning of ‘Ukrainka’ is ‘Ukrainian woman’. At the time of Ukrainka’s debut at the age of 13, there was no such thing as the Ukrainian state. Ukrainian lands were divided between the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. In the Russian Empire, where Ukrainka lived, the very act of writing literature in the Ukrainian language was risky. Works in Ukrainian had to go through an arduous censorship process in St Petersburg. Translations of world literature into Ukrainian were strictly banned because it was important for the imperial ideology to preserve the status of the Ukrainian language as a regional dialect not fit for ‘high culture’. Having chosen the pen name ‘Ukrainka’ at the age of 13, Larysa Kosach went on to reinvent what it meant both to be a Ukrainian and a woman of her time.

A feminist who rewrote European classics 

During Lesia Ukrainka’s lifetime, her plots were deemed too ‘exotic’ by her contemporaries who, in accordance with the 19th-century populist doctrine, identified the Ukrainian nation with the peasant class. Ukrainka’s ambition lay elsewhere. Envisioning Ukrainian literature as an equal participant in the conversation with major world literatures, she almost single-handedly coined the required cultural vocabulary through her poetic dramas. Her subjects range from Homeric Greece and the ancient Middle East to the 17th-century Tsardom of Muscovy. Cassandra is just one of Lesia Ukrainka’s plays which revises a foundational story of European culture from a feminist perspective. The Stone Host reviews the classic story of Don Juan centering two powerful women characters. Her famous neo-Romantic drama Forest Song is a subtle rete

In February 2021, Ukraine celebrated the 150th anniversary of the iconic feminist and anti-imperialist writer Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913). To mark the occasion, the Ukrainian Book Institute published her Complete Works, collecting her entire output of poems, plays and prose fiction. The books were distributed to 223 libraries across the country. And yet, several things got in the way of my encountering the edition in its physical form: first the pandemic, then Russia’s all-out escalation of its criminal war against Ukraine. 

I finally saw the fourteen volumes in April this year in the Children’s Library of the frontline city of Slov’iansk in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The library’s windows were blown out and covered with plywood. The sound of not-so-distant fighting was discernible during the periods of silence between air raid alerts. The library was not in operation. Lesia Ukrainka’s Complete Works were proudly displayed between world and Ukrainian classics but there were no young readers around to discover them.

The comprehensive scholarly edition of the canonical Ukrainian writer was much needed after decades of Soviet censorship followed by decades of financial constraints on publishing in a newly independent Ukraine. Unable to disregard the author of Lesia Ukrainka’s magnitude entirely, the Soviet ideologues belittled her significance by reducing her to a fighter for the rights of the proletariat and an author for kids. In 1970, a literary prize named after Lesia Ukrainka was established for the best works in children’s literature. Although a collection of children’s folklore was among her myriad activities, they were nowhere near the centre of her achievements.  

Among other works, the academic edition of 2021 reproduces the poetic historical drama Boyarynia (written in 1910), Lesia Ukrainka’s critique of seventeenth-century Muscovy, its chauvinistic barbarism, and its subjugat

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Her real name was Larysa Petrivna Kosach. “Lesya Ukrainka” was a carefully considered pseudonym, one that spoke volumes about the Ukrainian author’s dominant priority in both her personal and artistic endeavors—the preservation and evolution of her country’s language and literature. Her noble face appears on the 200 Ukrainian Hryvnias banknote, a symbol of her triumph. She left behind a legacy of poems, plays, and essays that solidified her influence on anything and everything in printed form.

Who Was Lesya Ukrainka?

Ukrainka was born in 1871, in the town of Novohrad-Volynskyi, to a close-knit, intellectually accomplished, and patriotic family. Her mother, Otha Drahomanova-Kosach, was a respected literary figure, a composer of elegant poetry and children’s stories. Ukrainka’s father, Petro Antonovych Kosach, was a landowner and activist of considerable means, which he used to campaign for Ukrainian nationalism, against the Russian tsarist autocracy that held control over his country at the time. The Kosach family’s entire domestic life was dedicated to the cause. Ukrainka and her siblings were educated at home by their parents and a selection of private tutors, and were taught to read and write Ukrainian. This privilege would have been denied them had they been sent to a conventional elementary school, where Russian was the prevailing language of the education system. Secondary languages were not only excluded, but aggressively forbidden and tied to brutal consequences if spoken or written by students or their parents. Ukrainka’s father, fearing the permanent erasure of Ukrainian in print, funded publications out of his own pocket. It was from her parents that Ukrainka would learn that literature and politics were tightly entwined and impossible to unravel; to commit oneself to books and learning was to also commit one

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Lesya Ukrainka
(1871-1913) Biographical Sketch

Lesya Ukrainka is the literary pseudonym of Larysa Kosach - Kvitka, who was born in 1871 to Olha Drahomanova-Kosach (literary pseudonym: Olena Pchilka), a writer and publisher in Eastern Ukraine, and Petro Kosach, a senior civil servant. An intelligent, well-educated man with non-Ukrainian roots, he was devoted to the advancement of Ukrainian culture and financially supported Ukrainian publishing ventures.

In the Kosach home the mother played the dominant role; only the Ukrainian language was used and, to avoid the schools, in which Russian was the language of instruction, the children had tutors with whom they studied Ukrainian history, literature, and culture. Emphasis was also placed on learning foreign languages and reading world literature in the original. In addition to her native Ukrainian, Larysa learned Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and English.

A precocious child, who was privileged to live in a highly cultivated home, Larysa began writing poetry at the age of nine, and when she was thirteen saw her first poem published in a journal in L'viv under the name of Lesya Ukrainka, a literary pseudonym suggested by her mother. As a young girl, Larysa also showed signs of being a gifted pianist, but her musical studies came to an abrupt end when, at the age of twelve, she fell ill with tuberculosis of the bone, a painful and debilitating disease that she had to fight all her life.

Finding herself physically disabled, Lesya turned her attention to literature - reading widely, writing poetry, and translating. She shared these literary activities with her brother Mykhaylo (literary pseudonym: Mykhaylo Obachny), her closest friend until his death in 1903. When Larysa was seventeen, she and her brother organized a l