{"id":9344,"date":"2021-02-24T04:38:50","date_gmt":"2021-02-24T04:38:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/?p=9344"},"modified":"2021-02-24T04:38:50","modified_gmt":"2021-02-24T04:38:50","slug":"lesya-ukrainka-of-ukraine-an-introduction-to-a-poetess-feminist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/lesya-ukrainka-of-ukraine-an-introduction-to-a-poetess-feminist\/","title":{"rendered":"Lesya Ukrainka of Ukraine – An Introduction to a Poetess, Feminist"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Courtesy ; www.mypoeticside.com<\/h3>\n

Lesya Ukrainka Lwas one of Ukraine\u2019s best known poets who also wrote plays.\u00a0 She was politically active, especially on feminist issues.<\/h3>\n

She was born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka\u00a0on the 25th<\/sup>\u00a0February 1871 in the Ukrainian town of Novohrad-Volynskyi.\u00a0 Her mother was a writer who used the pseudonym Olena Pchilka to write poetry and short stories aimed at children and it seems likely that she encouraged Larysa to follow in her footsteps.\u00a0 Her high school education was taken at the Chernihiv Gymnasium and she then went to the University of Petersburg to study mathematics.\u00a0 Two years later she moved on to Kiev where she gained a law degree.\u00a0 She had grown up speaking Ukrainian at home but found that she had a gift for linguistics, mastering European languages including English and Italian as well as Slavic languages such as Polish and Bulgarian.<\/h3>\n

Larysa\u2019s first attempt at poetry was a piece called\u00a0Hope,\u00a0<\/em>written when she was just 8 years old, this being her reaction to the enforced exile of an aunt who had been arrested after protesting about the autocracy of the Tsars.\u00a0 That same year the family moved to Lutsk and her uncle Mykhaylo took on the task of encouraging his niece to read the Bible in order to grasp its poetic nuances.\u00a0 He also got her reading up on Ukrainian history and folk tales.\u00a0 It only took her a short while before her first poem was published in the Lviv-based magazine\u00a0Zorya<\/em>.\u00a0 She was 13 years old when\u00a0Lily of the Valley<\/em>\u00a0appeared in print and this was also the first time that she used the pseudonym Lesya Ukrainka.<\/h3>\n

She believed passionately in the right of her country to be independent from Russia and much of her writing was patriotically-themed.\u00a0 She soon recognised the hardships that had to be borne and tried to maintain hope and optimism despite the difficulties.\u00a0 Her health was not good and tuberculosis of the bone prevented her from progressing as a pianist.\u00a0 It did not stop her writing though and a good example of her optimistic, hopeful verse was the poem\u00a0Contra Spem Spero!\u00a0\u00a0<\/em>This poem is reproduced below:\n<\/picture> Her first collection of poetry,\u00a0On the Wings of Songs<\/em>, was published in 1893 but had to be produced in the Austro-Hungarian ruled Western Ukraine and smuggled into Kiev in secrecy due to the oppressive rules of the Russian Empire which meant that Ukrainian literature was banned.\u00a0 Ukrainka took a risk being a member of the Literary and Artistic Society in Kiev but she, along with other writers, was determined that work originating in her country should thrive.\u00a0 Health issues forced her to travel to places with a drier climate such as Egypt, the Crimea and Bulgaria and these visits inspired her to write more.\u00a0 One book to come out of her travels was\u00a0The Ancient History of Oriental Peoples<\/em>\u00a0and this included poems such as\n<\/picture> She published a number of collections of poetry including\n<\/picture> Lesya Ukrainka died on the 1st<\/sup>\u00a0August 1913 while staying at a Georgian health resort.\u00a0 She was 42 years old.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy ; www.mypoeticside.com Lesya Ukrainka Lwas one of Ukraine\u2019s best known poets who also wrote plays.\u00a0 She was politically active, especially on feminist issues. She was born Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka\u00a0on the 25th\u00a0February 1871 in the Ukrainian town of Novohrad-Volynskyi.\u00a0 Her mother was a writer who used the pseudonym Olena Pchilka to write poetry and short […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9345,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,84],"tags":[988,989,270],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9344"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9344"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9344\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9347,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9344\/revisions\/9347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9344"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9344"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pakistanintheworld.pk\/live\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9344"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}