Ukrainian Money & Polish Literature: Who Was Lesya Ukrainka?

lesia_ukrainka_banknot_griven_2011_avers_wiki.jpg, default, A 200 hryvnia banknote featuring an image of Lesya Ukrainka, photo: Wikimedia Commons

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The only woman whose face has ever graced Ukrainian banknotes, Lesya Ukrainka was one of the most outstanding literary figures from the Dnieper region and one of the most important European modernists. What connects her to Polish culture?

She was born in 1871 in Novohrad-Volynskyi as Larysa Petrivna Kosach-Kvitka, to a well-off landowning family with intellectual, artistic and social traditions (her mother, Olena Petrivna Kosach, was also a writer and critic, while her father was a lawyer). Lesya’s childhood was marked not only by comprehensive intellectual and creative development (she published her first poem ‘Hope’ at the age of 9), but also by a serious illness – tuberculosis was a drain on her lungs, bones and kidneys. Incurable at the time, she often travelled to health resorts in Poland and abroad, including Egypt, Greece, Georgia and Italy.

It may be that these palliative travels to warmer and drier places contributed both to the development of her linguistic skills and her increased interest in other cultures. Thanks to her knowledge of French, Latin, Greek, Italian, German and English, she was able to become acquainted with the canon of European literature and was well acquainted with contemporary literary life.

These circumstances greatly influenced the artistic shape of the writer’s work, who other than Ivan Franko, made the greatest contribution to the modernisation of Ukrainian literature, developing it and leading it beyond the conventions of narrow regionalism.

The above is what Tadeusz Chrościelewski wrote about the importance of her linguistic skills. He also described of Larysa Kosach as ‘so Ukrainian and European at the same time’.

Is this love?

Thumbnail — Lesya Ukrainka, photo: public domain

A series of spa trips in the 1890s bore fruit in the form of her writing ‘Crimean Memories’ and ‘Crimean Sounds’, inspired by the famous sonnets of the Polish bard Adam Mickiewicz, in which he commemorated his stay on the peninsula. Not long after, Ukrainka wrote an homage to ‘Uncertainty’, one of Mickiewicz’s Odessa sonnets:

Text

I do not love you. I do not wish to be the chosen one of your dreams
[...]
When I ask myself: do I love? – I answer: no!...
But when I’m with you, my heart flutters like a chick.

Author

‘On a Motif from Mickiewicz - a quotation from “Uncertainty”’, trans. Culture.pl

Mickiewicz was an important figure in her creative biography from her early youth. in 1887, at the age of 16, she translated the ‘Wilja’ into Ukrainian, a song from Konrad Wallenrod, marking the beginning of her work as his translator. Two years later, as co-founder of the World Literature publishing series, she proposed translations of Forefathers’ Eve, Ballads and Romances and Crimean Sonnets. She also initiated translations of works by Maria Konopnicka, Juliusz Słowacki, Bolesław Prus, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Eliza Orzeszkowa.

Rościsław Radyszewski from the Department of Polish Philology at Kyiv University notes that evidence of a deep interest in Polish literature and language can be found in Lesya Ukrainka’s correspondence: her comments on the subject bear the hallmarks of thorough scientific analyses, and the spectrum of phraseology she used testifies to a high level of involvement in learning Polish. She probably taught herself, and as someone brought up in Volhynia, she also had contact with Polish on a daily basis.

Visiting Tworki

Миниатюра — Lesya Ukrainka, photo: Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0

In 1901, she published a pioneering article entitled ‘Notes on Recent Polish Literature’. The text was published in the progressive St. Petersburg periodical Zyzn – it appeared somewhat after the deadline, as the author had set herself an ambitious task. Despite her research (and, as Radyszewski writes, the Ukrainian ‘read practically everything that appeared in Polish literature, both in translation and the originals’), she was unable to find any Ukrainian studies on Polish literature that would go beyond superficial descriptions. So she made a fully authoritative study, stating, for example, that Polish Romanticism did not stand out from European Romanticism and, in her opinion, glorifying it is unjustified. She also discussed the literature of Positivism and Young Poland, demonstrating a thorough knowledge of the subjects. In a letter to the editor of Zyzn, in which she apologised for the delay in sending the text, she also pointed out that her article was only an introduction to further research on Polish literature.

It’s worth mentioning that Lesya Ukrainka did not know any Polish writers personally. She established a vicarious relationship with artists from the former Polish territories through literary references and critical analyses. She did, however, visit the region – in 1896, she paid a visit to her uncle Oleksander Drahomanov (brother of Mykhailo Drahomanov, a literary scholar and ethnologist), a doctor working at a psychiatric hospital in Tworki near Warsaw. This experience became an impulse to write a prose sketch translated as ‘City of Sadness’, which contained reflections on the essence of madness and the loneliness of the mentally ill. Similar themes also appear in her first play, The Blue Rose.

Female constellations

Are two poems by different authors with identical Latin titles a coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s highly likely that Lesya Ukrainka’s 1890 poem ‘Contra Spem Spero’ was inspired by a poem by Maria Konopnicka, six years older and titled the same way. There were more nodal points between the two artists. The Ukrainian poet, translator and playwright named her first volume of poetry after ‘On the Wings of Songs’, one of Konopnicka’s earlier poems.

In 1902, Ukrainka was invited by the St Petersburg literary magazine Mir Bozhiy to publish an article on the occasion of Konopnicka’s 60th birthday. Unfortunately, the extensive text spanning several dozen pages (‘the work took three weeks and spread over fifty pages of large format,’ she wrote to her sister) with her own translations of the poems by the Polish positivist never made it to print – the editors rejected it without explanation. Her translations of Konopnicka’s poetry can still be found in Lesya Ukrainka’s archive, but the article itself has disappeared and remains lost to this day.

The artistic affinity between Konopnicka and Ukrainka can be seen in the topics they tackled and in the poetics and style of their texts. In the opinion of researchers, the two artists shared several characteristics: romantic loftiness in their language, frequent use of realistic imagery, an interest in folklore and motifs of ancient origin, and an aversion to superficial floweriness and individualism. Both also expressed in their texts a belief in the revival of democratic ideals and the future of ordinary people.

Text

These two names always stand side by side when one mentions the most eminent women writers of the Slavic world.

Author

Julia L. Bułachowska in ‘Pamiętnik Literacki’

Parallels can also be seen between Lesya Ukrainka and another Volhynian, Gabriela Zapolska. ‘The works of both writers [...] show how far Volhynia’s landscape shaped their imagination, formed their identity and marked their way of looking at the world,’ writes Anna Janicka, placing the creative output of the two women within the matrix of literature with a ‘female signature’ (namely, created from a female perspective).

The researcher notes that both Ukrainka and Zapolska constructed images identifying the earth with the feminine element, creating a vitalistic-sensual frame for reading the fates of their heroines:

In the case of both writers [...] the relationship between femininity and the earth is almost organic, it also combines the modernist ambivalence of life and death, pleasure and destruction [...].

Janicka also recognises the role of the work of both women writers in the transformation of Polish theatre. She portrays Zapolska as an experimenter who liberated drama from convention, while Ukrainka, on the other hand, is an artist who ‘introduced Ukrainian drama to the path of modernity, at the same time embedding it very firmly in the best tradition of European drama’.

Sick girl Larysa

symbolism, and linguistic talent did not, however, bring her fame in Poland during her lifetime. In the first years of the 20th century, she was almost completely unknown there. The first translations of her poetry into Polish appeared just three years before her death in the Anthology of Contemporary Ukrainian Poets, the author of the translation being Sydor Tverdochlib. With time, interest in the works of this outstanding Ukrainian woman grew. In the 1940s, translations by Zuzanna Ginczanka and Stanisław Jerzy Lec appeared. In the summer of 1939, Józef Łobodowski – the poet and promoter of the Ukrainian school of Polish Romanticism – completed a translation of the fantastical drama The Forest Song, compared both to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Słowacki’s Balladyna. ‘The outbreak of war prevented the staging of this beautiful work,’ wrote the translator. Łobodowski saw Ukrainka as an extraordinary woman writer, putting her in the same league as Taras Shevchenko, who is regarded as the Ukraine’s national poet. ‘The most important and most amazing thing in the works of Lesya Ukrainka is the inner energy of her works, that flame of true poetry,’ the Polish poet and translator enthused. A similar approval of Ukrainka’s creative verve could be read in the Lviv monthly Promień (the issue dated 1st January 1900):

A strength paving the way to human hearts, along with courage and energy all found their way into the lyrical and epic poems of the sick girl Larysa Kosach, who signed her name as Lesya Ukrainka.

It’s certainly worth remembering that this ‘sick girl’, despite the burden of her health, demonstrated great diligence and unwavering commitment – even in popularising the achievements of Polish women artists. Her place in the canon of shared connections between Ukraine and Poland is well deserved.

Originally written in Polish, translated by Culture.pl; hover mouse for sources

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