Olha Kobylianska
Watching lying bully boys Trump and Vance insult, ridicule and humiliate Volodymyr Zelenskyy in front of the world’s press left me utterly sickened and disgusted. I cannot imagine a similar scenario taking place if the US President and VP were women. We saw the Ukrainian Ambassador to the US, Oksana Markarova, sitting alongside with her head in her hands, appalled and powerless to stop it happening.
At times like these I need a mental retreat from the current reality, so have been finding out more about Ukrainian writer Olha Kobylianska, 1863–1942. She was a modernist whose writings are celebrated for their lyrical descriptions and psychological portraits which struck a blow against prevailing populist myths about peasant life. She was the first to embrace feminist ideas in Ukrainian literature and to raise the theme of women’s emancipation.
Kobylianska was born in the southern part of Bukovina, then a province of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. She was profoundly influenced by German literature and its idealistic values, and her thinking was also shaped by her knowledge of Friedrich Nietzsche. Her first novels, dating to the early 1880s, were all written in German. George Sand was another key influence on her writing.
Kobylianska was largely self-educated in a period when Ukrainian women lived under the dual burden of patriarchal traditions and tsarist Russian attempts to destroy Ukrainian cultural independence. Yes folks, nothing much seems to have changed; for ‘Tsar’ you can now substitute ‘President’.
In 1891 she moved to Chernivtsi in Ukraine. Peasant life is a key theme of Kobylianska’s writings, which also have an element of magical realism. I was fascinated to learn about one of her key novels entitled Zemlia (The Land, 1902). It examines the ways in which the system of private ownership leads to a world in which brother kills brother. It tells a story of the destructive power of the most basic element of peasant existence—their land. In Zemlia, land is shown to be a terrible force that enslaves and brutalizes all who desire it. This struck a severe blow against the populist ideology that saw peasant existence in terms of happy patriarchal harmony. Kobylianska demythologized the prevailing notions about the idealized woman by showing that there was little romantic purity in village women’s lives.
In the summer of 1940, Romania was forced to surrender Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union and Kobylianska became a Soviet citizen. She was feted as a veteran writer of social criticism and became a member of the Writers’ Union of the USSR. However, in June 1941 Hitler’s armies attacked the Soviet Union and took Bukovina. Kobylianska was reviled as a dangerous ‘Red writer’ and the Romanian administration in Chernvitsi ordered for her to be tried by court-martial. Only her death on March 21,1942 saved her from a likely fate of conviction and execution. In 1944, soon after the liberation of Bukovina from Nazi rule, a Kobylianska Museum was opened in Chernvitsi. Occupying a building where the writer had lived from 1928 until her death, the museum included exhibits with photographs, personal belongings, papers and editions of her works.
In 2006, the Olha Kobylianska Literary Prize was founded; it is awarded for literary, artistic or journalistic work and scientific research on the topic of women in Ukrainian society. We can only hope that her legacy is allowed to live on.
It was truly vile to see Volodymyr Zelenskyy ridiculed in the White House but you have lifted spirits a little by introducing us to Olha Kobylianska.
As you say, we can only hope that her legacy continues.
Yes we keep the hope alive!
Dame B