From Heart to Heart: Selected Prose Fiction by Hrytsko Hryhorenko and Lesya Ukrainka (Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature, Vol. IV)

This is the fourth volume of a six-volume series entitled Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature. The purpose of the series is to make the short fiction of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Ukrainian women writers - early feminists and social activists - accessible to readers of English. The works selected range from vignettes and sketches to novelettes, and together they constitute a compelling social history of an era during which the mortar of social mores, religious beliefs, and gender distinctions began to crumble, wreaking havoc with personal and societal relations.

What these authors had in common was an appreciation of the power of literature as a vehicle of social and political activism, and a commitment to the amelioration of the position of women. Their exploration of gender issues cuts across ethnic and social divisions, describes the often devastating consequences of social conditioning, and documents both the promise and the human cost of change. The translation of these works permits the message of these women to transcend temporal, geographical, and linguistic boundaries.

The first author in Volume IV, Oleksandra Sudovshchykova-Kosach (1867 - 1924), is known by her male literary pseudonym, Hrytsko Hryhorenko. She was born in northern Russia, where her parents had been exiled in 1866 for their involvement in Ukrainian organizations. The father died in 1868, and the infant Oleksandra and her mother were allowed to return to Kyiv. After completing high school, Oleksandra joined the Pleyada [The Pleaides], a literary circle promoting Ukrainian literature and introducing Ukrainian readers to foreign authors, and wrote poetry in Ukrainian, Russian and French. In 1893, she married Mykhaylo Kosach, who moved to Estonia to escape political persecution. Oleksandra began writing prose fiction, and in 1898 she published her first collection of realistic ethnographic narratives about peasant life. After Kosach's death in 1903, the young widow and her daughter lived with the Kosach family while Oleksandra completed a law degree. Writing in a modern, impressionistic style, she broadened her themes to include stories about the intelligentsia, and explored the concept of psychological individualism. The greater part of her literary legacy consists of works documenting the harsh conditions and moral decay of peasant life at the turn of the century, and to detailing the desperate measures to which the peasants, especially the women, were driven by adversity. She wrote with such brutal honesty that critics and readers of her day accused her of dwelling solely on the dark side of life. Her later writing, in which she examined the impact of technological and social change on individuals from all levels of society, was no less moving and candid.

The second author is Lesya Ukrainka (1871 - 1913), the literary pseudonym of Larysa Kosach-Kvitka. Her parents were Olha Drahomanova-Kosach (literary pseudonym: Olena Pchilka), a writer in Eastern Ukraine, and Petro Kosach, a senior civil servant. In addition to Ukrainian, Larysa learned Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, and English. She began writing poetry at the age of nine, and at 13 saw her first poem published under the name Lesya Ukrainka. When she was seventeen, she and her brother organized a literary circle called Pleyada [The Pleiades] to promote Ukrainian literature and translate classics into Ukrainian. Lesya published her first collection of lyrical poetry, On Wings of Songs, in 1893, a year after her translations of Heine's poetry, The Book of Songs, appeared. Ukrainian publications were banned in the Russian Empire so both books were published in Western Ukraine and smuggled into Kyiv. Ukrainka wrote epic poems, prose dramas, prose, literary criticism, and sociopolitical essays. In her dramatic poems, her greatest legacy to Ukrainian literature, she developed the themes of national freedom, dignity, and personal integrity, and called on people the world over to throw off the yoke of oppression. In 1907, she married the ethnographer and musicologist Klyment Kvitka. Upon her death at 42 after a lifelong struggle with tuberculosis of the bone, Ukrainka left behind a rich and diversified literary legacy. While it is the deep philosophical thought and the perfection of her poetic form that have assured her place in world literature, her prose works provide a fascinating insight into the inner life of this gifted, multifaceted writer, and reveal her perceptions of the multi-layered society in which she lived.