Lesya Ukrainka

Lesya Ukrainka (1871-1913) was the pen name of Larysa Kosach-Kvitka, and one of the founding figures of modern Ukrainian literature. She was born in Zviahel, in Volhynia, into a family at the centre of Ukrainian intellectual life: her mother was the writer and ethnographer Olena Pchilka, her uncle the political thinker Mykhailo Drahomanov. Tuberculosis of the bone, contracted in childhood, kept her out of school and ended an intended career as a pianist; she educated herself instead, reading in some ten languages and translating Heine. Ukrainian-language publishing was banned in the Russian Empire for most of her working life, and her first book had to be printed abroad and smuggled in. Her mature work is almost entirely verse drama - Cassandra, The Stone Host, In the Catacombs - and the best loved of it is The Forest Song (Лісова пісня), written in 1911, a drama-fairy play built from the folklore of the Volhynian forests, whose heroine Mavka has become one of the most recognisable figures in Ukrainian culture. She died at Surami, in Georgia, aged forty-two.