Thinkers Timeline

Lesya Ukrainka was a Ukrainian poet, dramatist, essayist, and political activist. She is widely regarded as the greatest Ukrainian woman writer and one of the foremost Ukrainian writers of any gender. Her real name was Larysa Petrivna Kosach. She was born in 1871 in Novohrad-Volynskyi, in what is now western Ukraine. The pen name 'Lesya Ukrainka' (Lesya the Ukrainian) was given to her by her mother and made a clear political statement: at a time when Russian imperial law banned publication in Ukrainian, naming yourself after your forbidden country was an act of resistance. Her family were intellectuals and Ukrainian patriots. Her mother, Olha Drahomanova-Kosach, was a writer who published as Olena Pchilka. Her father was a lawyer and landowner who funded Ukrainian-language publications out of his own pocket. Lesya and her siblings were educated at home in Ukrainian, which was forbidden in schools. She was an extraordinary student, eventually fluent in over a dozen languages including Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, German, French, English, Italian, Latin, and Greek. At the age of twelve she contracted tuberculosis, which attacked her bones and later her lungs and kidneys. She suffered constant pain for the rest of her life. The disease made her dream of being a concert pianist impossible. It also took her abroad constantly: to Germany, Italy, Egypt, Crimea, Georgia, and the Caucasus, in long searches for cures that did not work. She wrote constantly through pain. She died in Surami, Georgia, in 1913, aged 42. Her body was returned to Kyiv. Russian police banned speeches at her funeral. Six women carried her coffin in protest.