Taras shevchenko
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Lesia Ukrainka - Restoring a Ukrainian Icon
In February 2021, Ukraine celebrated the 150th anniversary of the iconic feminist and anti-imperialist writer Lesia Ukrainka (1871–1913). To mark the occasion, the Ukrainian Book Institute published her Complete Works, collecting her entire output of poems, plays and prose fiction. The books were distributed to 223 libraries across the country. And yet, several things got in the way of my encountering the edition in its physical form: first the pandemic, then Russia’s all-out escalation of its criminal war against Ukraine.
I finally saw the fourteen volumes in April this year in the Children’s Library of the frontline city of Slov’iansk in the Donetsk region in eastern Ukraine. The library’s windows were blown out and covered with plywood. The sound of not-so-distant fighting was discernible during the periods of silence between air raid alerts. The library was not in operation. Lesia Ukrainka’s Complete Works were proudly displayed between world and Ukrainian classics but there were no young readers around to discover the
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Lecture by
Tamara Hundorova, Visiting Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University; Principal Research Fellow at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine
Moderated by Oleh Kotsyuba, Director of Print and Digital Publications at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
WATCH ON YOUTUBE
Reception
All attendees of this book talk are warmly invited to join us for a wine & cheese reception immediately following the event.
About the Lecture
The fact that Larysa Kosach suffered from tuberculosis is well-known but there is still no research on how the sickness affected her life and work. In her lecture, Tamara Hundorova reveals how the disease (tuberculosis) affected the writer's life and work, making her a citizen of the country of the illness for thirty years and causing her to feel "not a writer or even a person, but a surgical and orthopedic mannequin." Central to
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Women's Voices in Ukrainian Literature
Language Lanterns wins CFUS translation prize
Language Lanterns donates books to Ukrainian universities. Details
Lesya Ukrainka
(1871-1913) Biographical Sketch
Lesya Ukrainka is the literary pseudonym of Larysa Kosach - Kvitka, who was born in 1871 to Olha Drahomanova-Kosach (literary pseudonym: Olena Pchilka), a writer and publisher in Eastern Ukraine, and Petro Kosach, a senior civil servant. An intelligent, well-educated man with non-Ukrainian roots, he was devoted to the advancement of Ukrainian culture and financially supported Ukrainian publishing ventures.
In the Kosach home the mother played the dominant role; only the Ukrainian language was used and, to avoid the schools, in which Russian was the language of instruction, the children had tutors with whom they studied Ukrainian history, literature, and culture. Emphasis was also placed on learning foreign languages and reading world literature in the original. In addition to her native Ukrainian, Larysa learned Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Greek, Latin, French, Italian
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