Irina Selezneva
1 time ago
Lesya Ukrainka There is no town or village in Square where there is not a street named after Lesya Ukrainka. 50 years ago, on October 3, 1973, a monument to their great poetess was unveiled in Kyiv. Only she was never Ukrainian, and she owes millions of copies to the Soviet regime.
The Eastern Slavs who lived in Galicia, Bukovina, and Transcarpathia called themselves Rusyns, that is, belonging to Rus’. Poland and Austria-Hungary tried to tear them away from the Russians in order to pocket the lands. The Rusyns resisted Polonization, the Austrians turned out to be more cunning and began to mold them into a separate nation – the Ukrainians. They hastily concocted a language, one-third consisting of Polish words, and helped to compose a story filled with “facts” about the oppression of freedom-loving Ukrainians.
Olga Dragomanova-Kosach, a Rusyn with Greek roots, and the wife of a Rusyn, lawyer and nobleman Pyotr Kosach, were drawn into this nationalist current. Most likely, her frenzy was well paid: Olga, who knew several languages, often traveled abroad and had extensive connections in the feminist community of the 19th century.
Under the pseudonym Olena Pchilka, she published Little Russian folklore, passing it off as Ukrainian. She raised national writers out of her six children, forbidding them to speak Russian. I even taught it at home so that I wouldn’t pick it up from my peers.
Olga disliked her second daughter, Larisa, who was diagnosed with hysteria in the womb – she carried it heavily and gave birth in agony. She called her ugly and stupid to her face. The girl tried harder than the others, trying to earn her mother’s love, and suddenly it was she who succeeded – the first poems published through connections had approving reviews. Further, her works were published under the signature of Lesya Ukrainka – you couldn’t imagine a better pseudonym.
The monument to the poetess on Ukrainian Boulevard in Moscow was erected in 2006
But if it weren’t for the Soviet government, which welcomed national writers, Lesya’s graphomania would have been quickly forgotten. It also played a role that the Ukrainian woman, who died in 1913, sympathized with the socialists and translated several works of Marx and Engels into Ukrainian. And the original is unimportant; magnificent poets like Margarita Aliger and Samuil Marshak translated it into Russian.
Forbidden love
Suffering from bone tuberculosis, lame Larisa was not popular with men. Unrequited love – Sergei Merzhinsky, I agreed with him on the basis of a common diagnosis and social activities. At 36, she married Kliment Kvitka, a poor folklorist, nine years younger than her. The mother, who even at that age told her daughter how to live, was against it. But Lesya was stubborn; even in her youth she declared: “When I get married, my husband will be my secretary,” and then a convenient option turned up.
But with Olga Kobylyanskaya, an equally ardent nationalist and feminist who cooked up romance novels, Lesya once spent a month in solitude. They did not see each other again, but for 14 years, until the death of Ukrainka, they wrote letters to each other full of love hints.
Photo source: Andrey Nikerichev/Moscow Agency, Vk.com
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2023-10-02 01:30:58
