Lesya ukrainka poems in english
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Lesya Ukrainka: Ukraine’s Beloved Writer and Activist
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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 tsari
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Ukrainka, Lesya (1871–1913)
Prominent Ukrainian poet whose body of work presents both universal themes and a reflection of her homeland's struggle for greater freedom. Pronunciation: LESS-ya oo-CRYEN-ka. Name variations: Laryssa Kosach; Laryssa Kosach-Kvitka; Lesia or Lessya Ukrainka; Lesëiia Ukrainka; Lesja Ukrajinka; Lesia Ukraïnka; Lesya Ukrayinka. Born Laryssa Kosach on February 26 (sometimes given as February 25), 1871, in Zvyahel' in Volynia in northwestern Ukraine; died on August 15, 1913, in the Caucasus town of Surami near Tbilisi, of tuberculosis; daughter of Petro Antonovych Kosach (a lawyer and landowner) and Olha Petrivna Drahomaniv (a writer and political activist who wrote under the name Olena Pchilka); taught by private tutors; married Klyment Kvitka (an ethnographer and musicologist), in 1907.
With family, moved to Kovel (1878); after her aunt was arrested for political agitation, wrote first poem to protest the event (1879); afflicted with tuberculosis (1881); published first collection of poems (1893); journeyed to Bulgaria to visit Mykhailo Drahomaniv ( 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 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
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Who is Lesia Ukrainka?
A ‘Ukrainian woman’
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