Here is the text for Part 2 of Janice Kulyk Keefer’s Zoom lecture about Lesia Ukrainka. Click here to watch Part 2 of the presentation on video.
Janice was a professor of literature at Guelph University, with a focus on modernist authors. Of Ukrainian background, she has written two novels on Ukrainian themes, a family memoir (Honey and Ashes), and numerous other volumes of poetry, criticism and fiction.
Lesia Ukrainka, ill, with her husband in Crimea.
Places, Friends and Travel
Larysa Kosach’s first 20 years were spent mostly in the region of Volhynia, some 400 kilometres northwest of Kyiv, either in the provincial towns where her father worked (Zvyahel, Luts’k, Kovel), or on her parents’ country estate Kolodyazhne. When she came to write the drama Lisova Pisnya or Forest Song, she drew on her knowledge of the woods and lakes near Kolodyazhne and the legends and folklore associated with them. Her closeness to the natural world and the intimacy with which she writes of landscape and natural phenomena remind me of other writers closely connected to their native places: Thomas Hardy or Emily Bronte or Colette.
Yet Larysa was passionately fond of city life as well, taking an active part in intellectual and cultural gatherings in Kyiv, and making full use of the city’s museums and galleries and concert halls. And she was, in her own way, gregarious: the three volumes of her collected correspondence show that she was no recluse of the stamp of Emily Dickinson or Emily Bronte; the remarkable pace at which she wrote and published shows how necessary it was for her to make connections with, and present challenges to, the world outside her room of her own. One of her close friends was the feminist writer Olha Kobylianska, some 10 years her senior and with whom she conducted a passionate correspondance.
In 1901, Larysa spent a summer in Kobylianska’s birthplace, Bukovyna, a south-eastern “transitional” region whose borders have shifted over the years between today’s Ukraine and Romania. But as her disease progressed, Larysa had to spend more and more time abroad, travelling in search of expert medical care and warmer winter climates. It’s exhausting just to register the extent of Larysa Kosach’s peregrinations in the last 15 years of her life: from 1897-1912 she wintered three times in the Crimea, twice in San Remo, Italy, three times in Egypt, and three times in the Caucasus. She undertook her last two journeys to Egypt alone, by boat, surviving storms at sea, mined waters, and freezing fogs.
Travelling abroad, she was torn: while she welcomed as much of the cultural stimulus offered by foreign lands as her health allowed, she also saw herself as a hothouse plant, ripped from its native soil and reduced to the confines of a clay pot, carted around from one artificial atmosphere to another. What Larysa struggled with during her periods of forced exile wasn’t just the knowledge that warmer climates could never be a cure for the disease that was killing her, but also the lack of that nurturance given her by immersion in her native language, among family and friends and beloved, familiar places.
Driven and Defiant
What do we know of Larysa Kosach’s character, her temperament? She was of an age and background that demanded privacy on personal matters; her husband declined to publish any memoirs of their life together that would give an intimate or relaxed portrait of his wife. Larysa Kosach may smile in one or two childhood photographs, but never as an adult when her likeness was being taken. Like Tolstoy, did she utterly lack a sense of humour? Was she, the author of preponderantly tragic works, lacking in the kind of warmth, playfulness, ease with others that make up that elusive thing, charm? Or is it outrageous to ask for charm in the characters of exceptional people—to want to like, as well as respect them? Especially in the case of those who are seriously ill.
That Larysa Kosach described living with Tuberculosis as her “30 Years’ War” is evidence of a grim sense of humour. The “sentimental” form of TB consisting in a plaintive cough, a feverish flush, an ethereal slenderness of body is far more brutal in reality. Tuberculosis of the bone in an age without antibiotics involved painful swelling of the joints, and eventual deformation of the bones: the adult Larysa had to wear a prosthesis on one of her legs. Unchecked, the bacillus spreads to other organs; it leads to extreme fatigue and the pain it inflicts can be so agonizing that it can, as it did in Larysa’s case, cause loss of consciousness.
That Lesia Ukrainka was able to write as much and as well as she did, is miraculous. When she writes in a poem entitled “Hope against Hope,” that she will live, that she refuses to give in to despair, she writes in blood, not mere ink. Struggle was her very being, just as fire was her native element: the fire of determined, passionate attachment to Ukraine, and the tubercular fever that, towards the end, caused “throngs” of images to invade her consciousness, making sleep or rest impossible. Her Muse, she claimed, “drinks my blood, by God” (Bida, 23).
If Larysa Kosach defied her disease and the politics which circumscribed her life, she also defied social conventions and familial values when these contradicted her own deeply-held beliefs. She loved and admired her parents, but refused to be a fille bien rangée, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s term. A well-brought up daughter does not, for example, translate the Communist Manifesto (which she did in 1902), nor does she fall in love with a Marxist revolutionary and fellow sufferer from TB, whom she met in Yalta in 1897, a Belarussian named Serhiy Merzhynsky. She certainly does not travel to him as he lies dying, keeping a vigil by his bedside, nor does she spend hours after he dies writing a dramatic poem she entitles Oderzhyma, “A Woman Obsessed.”
Lesia Ukrainka was capable of creating a version of the Don Juan legend in which Dona Anna emerges as stronger and far more independent than the man who tries to conquer her; she was capable of writing a love poem that begins “My heart burns up in a rage of fire.” Reviewing her 1902 poem cycle Nevilnychi Pisni — Songs of Slaves — pre-eminent Ukrainian writer and critic Ivan Franko remarked: “Reading the light and disjointed or cold, moralistic writings of our contemporary Ukrainian writers, and comparing them with those cheerful, vigorous, and courageous writings of Lesya Ukrainka . . . one cannot help reflecting that this sick, weak girl is more of a man than anyone else in the whole Ukraine of today…. Ukraine cannot, in our opinion, boast today of a poet who can compare with Lesia Ukrainka as far as the force and versatility of her talent are concerned.” [1]
There is an adjective in Ukrainian, chemna, which means polite, well-behaved, orderly: Larysa Kosach was hardly chemna, not only in her passionate attachment to Olha Kobylianska or Serhiy Merzhynsky, but also when, defying her parents’s disapproval, she lived in a common-law relationship for five years with a penniless scholar nine years younger than she. Klyment Kvitka was a lawyer by profession but by vocation a musicologist, ethnographer and linguist—he spoke 13 languages. He was not a socialist or a revolutionary like the men she had formerly been attracted to: his surname, kvitka, means “flower.” Kosach and Kvitka married in 1907 to confer on Klyment the respectability that would allow him to secure a government job, and thus an income sufficient to meet Lesia’s mounting medical costs. For her part, once involved with Kvitka, Lesia refused financial help from her parents, earning what she could by translating and tutoring.
Her Death
Accounts of her last year of life are sobering. Disease had emaciated her to the point where she was “all spirit”; a friend described her, during a final visit to Kyiv weeks before her death, as a “pale and translucent figure with arms full of flowers, with words full of energy, love and faith, and with death in her eyes.” (Bida, 24-5). On the day she left Kyiv, she went to Volodomyrska Hirka, a hilltop park marked by a statue of Knyaz or Prince Volodymyr, the greatest ruler of Ancient Rus’. Gazing down at the Dnipro river and at the various landmarks of Kyiv, she took leave of them forever. Then she set out on the long train journey south to Tiflis gubernia—now the country of Georgia—in which, two months later, she would die in the arms of her husband and mother. Her body was brought back to Kyiv for a public funeral; her coffin was shouldered by six women as it processed to the Baykhovo cemetery, where her beloved father and older brother were buried. Police supervised the procession lest it become insubordinate: even the words on the wreaths for her grave had to be approved by the censors.
Lesia Ukrainka’s oeuvre—through pebbled glass
To get a sense of the status and influence of Ukrainka in her native land, it helps to put her into the company of her younger contemporary, Virginia Woolf. Both women have become literary icons, the familiar faces of certain kinds of literariness. In many ways they were strikingly different: Woolf wrote prose, and Ukrainka mostly wrote poetry: Woolf was an iconoclastic modernist whereas Ukrainka worked within the conventions of late 19th century aestheticism. Ukrainka read and used Biblical narratives compulsively in her work, whereas Woolf was an out and out atheist. Ukrainka’s work has none of the playfulness, mockery and sheer brio of much of Woolf’s writing. But most importantly, unlike her Ukrainian counterpart, Woolf was able to write and publish freely in her native language.
Yet there are striking similarities between these writers: both were born into an intellectual and cultural elite; both became strong feminists, devoted to acquiring the kind of learning thought unsuitable for their gender, for example, knowledge of ancient Greek. They read widely, “gobbling up” books from their parents’ libraries at an early age; they wrote articles and essays on a wide range of subjects in order to help earn their livings, and they belonged to some of the most influential cultural circles of their day. Both women struggled with severe ill-health that often confined them to bed and prevented them from writing: mental illness in Woolf’s case, and tuberculosis in Ukrainka’s. If there are fewer book and tote bags with Ukrainka’s face on them, there are far more statues of Ukrainka commemorating her importance as a writer: in any case, their physical image is “out there” in the non-literary world as well as in the pages of their books.
What of the literature Ukrainka created, so little-known outside Ukraine, compared to Woolf’s extensively-translated work? Those who have access only to the few available English-language versions of Ukrainka’s poetry will be looking at it through a shard of pebbled glass. Most translations date from the 1950s and 60s, and tend to be overly exalted; though they communicate Ukrainka’s dedication to form, they cannot duplicate the power and intricacy of her use of rhyme and rhythm. And they favour the writer’s more overtly patriotic themes.
Professor Constantine Bida of the University of Ottawa, writing in 1968 when Ukraine was still under the control of the Soviet Union, emphasised Ukrainka’s staunch devotion to her native land and stern sense of duty, citing her focus on self-sacrificing love. Critic and University of Toronto Professor Danylo Struk, writing after the demise of the Soviet Union, offers a different perspective on Ukrainka’s aesthetics. Translating key passages from her letters, he gives us a vivid sense of what she believed about her art. When, for example she was asked about how difficult it was to write poetry, she replied, “Actually, it is most difficult ‘to decide’ not to write poems, for that is not work, but rather momentary improvisations, … attacks of insanity, for which a person generally cannot be held responsible.”
As for writing by patriotic prescription, she suggested that it might be an idea to prevent Ukrainians from writing “national patriotic poems” for a certain length of time. “Then,” she observed, they might “learn more quickly the art of versification, forced into it by (reading) lyrical poems and by (doing) translations. As it is they count more on the patriotism of their readers than on their own rhyme and meter” (Struk, 9). Reproached for writing poems steeped in “snobbish intellectualism” rather than the speech of the people, or for the lack of strong messages in her work, Ukrainka replied that if she were to pull her Muse by the hair to elicit such messages, “then all will hear … her unfortunate hair … cracking” (Struk, 5).
Finally, as Struk observes, Lesia Ukrainka won for herself a place in the “ ‘pantheon’ of Ukrainian writers who advanced the cause of nationhood” without sacrificing the conviction that art had to be art, and good art, at that: “It is the duty of everyone who writes poems, and not only for a lark, to find the appropriate form…. [N]ot all of those who write among us have understood this duty and think that for such a poor literature as ours “anything will do” and for this reason print things which … they would never dare show any editorial office of a foreign publication. But I think that such writers either do not respect themselves or do not respect Ukrainian literature. I, nevertheless, do not consider our literature a beggar and, therefore, if my work is not up to standard, then it is because I cannot do it any better.” (Struk, 9)
Wide-ranging Subjects
Ukrainka’s lyrical poems range in subject from romantic love to love of her benighted, threatened country. She tackles issues of social justice and human rights, and she also immerses herself in the natural world—spring, bringing delusive hope with its brightness; dreamlike summer; autumn with its “bloodstained fingers.” She writes of exile—Dante cast out of Florence—and draws comparisons in her “Hebrew melodies” between the enslavement of Jews and Ukrainians. When, in her maturity, she turns from lyric poetry to poetic drama, she explores the psychology of painfully-conflicted characters. Critic Volodymyr Yarmolenko, who compares her best dramatic work to that of Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Racine, sums up the remarkable range of Ukrainka’s subject matter and insists on the imaginative intensity of her writing:
“She wrote about early Christians in the Roman Empire, about ancient Greece and ancient Egypt, about the Scottish wars for independence and the French Revolution, about Spanish Baroque culture, English puritans in North America, and of course her native Ukrainian folklore. She translated into Ukrainian from German, French, English, Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Egyptian and more. When Ukrainian culture was imprisoned in an artificial provinciality, she filled it with the voices of literary culture from around the world.
“But all those global topics were not merely abstract, neither to her nor to her people: she wrote about these “ancient” themes by channeling her own experience. When she was writing about early Christians, she felt herself a member of a “catacomb” people: a community of the faithful persecuted by an empire…”[2]
Some of Ukrainka’s most deeply held views may strike us in our post-postmodernity as unfashionable or untenable—that it is shameful to surrender to fate without a fight; that our task, as human beings, is to struggle towards our goals, at whatever cost to our own personal fulfilment and happiness. Among Lesia Ukrainka’s goals were freedom for her country and survival for her native culture. In this context, I offer my very free translation of one of Lesia Ukrainka’s poems that seems especially resonant now: untitled, it was written on November 25, 1896.
Words, why aren’t you tempered steel,
shooting sparks through the murk of war?
Why aren’t you the kind of merciless blade
that slices an enemy’s head from his shoulders?
You, my truthful, resilient language:
I’m ready to unsheathe and reveal you.
You alone can shed the blood of my heart
without breaking the blade of that heart.
I must sharpen and keep on polishing
this glittering weapon, with all my strength;
then hang it on a wall for the delight
of others, and for my own pain.
Words, my only weapon,
we mustn’t die together, you and I.
Perhaps, in the hands of unknown brothers
you’ll be a better sword against our enemies.
Blades ring against iron shackles,
echoing to the strongholds of tyrants,
echos rebounding from other swords clashing,
making the sound of the newly-freed—
Avengers will take up my weapon,
rush with it, braving all battlefields.
My weapon, my words: serve these soldiers
better than you’ve served my invalid’s hands.
Lesia in Bronze, on Paper, in Film
“How lovely it would be to die like a falling star,” observed Lesia Ukrainka. When an asteroid was discovered between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter on August 28, 1970, it was given her name: 2616 Lesya. Is it a more fitting tribute than a monument cast in bronze, mounted on a granite plinth? There are so many statues of and memorial plaques dedicated to Lesia Ukrainka in cities ranging from Kyiv to Cleveland, from St Petersburg in Russia to Saskatoon in Canada, from the Volhynian city of her birth to the Georgian village where she died. As welcome, and valuable as these markers are, to me the most important sign of Lesia Ukrainka’s living presence is the fact that she continues to inspire other artists: to list just two examples, Oksana Zabushko, often described as Ukraine’s Margaret Atwood, has written a magnum opus on Ukrainka entitled Notre Dame d’Ukraine, and Georgian filmmaker Nana Janelidze is in the process of making a feature film on Ukrainka’s life.
On day 20 of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I made my way to High Park, defying the double-ring of fences enclosing Chereshniovsky’s statue of Lesia Ukrainka. It was a grey, misty day; the darkened bronze seemed to mesh with the bare branches and pine boughs around her. From what I had learned about the poet’s life and work, this seemed almost criminal: fire, not mist, is her native element. I looked up at the calm, conventionally pleasing face above the high-necked collar of her madonna-like dress—remembering, all the while, her line: “my heart burns in a rage of fire.”
And then I read and actually registered, for the first time, the words inscribed on the back of the granite plinth. They pay tribute to The Women’s Council of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, who managed to raise the funds to commission this monument to mark the UN’s declaration of 1975 as National Women’s year. The inscription also acknowledges the presence, at the statue’s unveiling, of the poet’s sister Izydora Kosach-Borysova, who would have been 87 years old at the time. The fact of this meeting between Larysa Kosach’s sister—her own ‘flesh and blood’ nearing the end of her life—and the imperishable bronze woman on the plinth seemed unbearably poignant, as did the fact of Izydora’s presence among the women who had realized the idea of a bronze and granite tribute to Ukrainka’s memory. Small offerings had been left in front of the iron railing: candles, a stylized sheaf of wheat, a blue and yellow flag.
It is time, I thought, high time, to take down the wooden fence, and build a pathway to the statue; time to remove or at least, make it easier to open the railing.[3] Perhaps it is time, as well, to plant some flowers. Small gestures, but in a time of overwhelming danger and disruption, when so much is at stake, and so many lives are being wrenched out of their accustomed shape, not only in Ukraine, but wherever the brutality of war scorches all hope and turns faith in the future into something less yielding than granite, even a small gesture has value. At least, I would like to hope so.
[1] Literaturno Naukovy Vistnyk, 24
[2] Https://ukraineworld.org/articles/ukraine-explained/lesia-ukrainka
[3] See Taras Kulish http://newpathway.ca/lesya-ukrainka-prisoner-in-high-park