A Lady of Virtue
HER UNIVERSITIES
Although this article concerns a classic of Ukrainian literature, we should start with some biographical facts. Olha-Maria Kobylianska was born on November 27, 1863, in Gurahumora, a small town in Bukovyna (now in Romania), which was then part of Austro-Hungary. The future author completed only elementary school and acquired further education on her own. Olha’s self-education was encouraged by her mother, a Polish German, who revered her daughter’s literary talent, and worshipped her, especially when she read out loud. Olha’s father, a petty bureaucrat, was convinced that while his sons needed a good education, women did not. This may explain why there was little love lost between the young Olha and her father. Nevertheless, he did ensure that she learned Ukrainian, his mother tongue, by arranging for her to study first in Campulung and then Chernivtsi.
Interestingly, Olha Kobylianska was originally fluent in German only and her earliest writings were written in that language. The young author was almost 20 when she heeded the advice of her relative Sofia Okunevska and another female writer Natalia Kobrynsky and realized that she badly needed to learn to write in Ukrainian, the language spoken by her people. She lived in a multilingual environment where Ukrainian was hardly heard, so studying the language was far from easy. Eventually, she mastered the Ukrainian language through the assiduous efforts of the writer Osyp Makovei.
Olha Kobylianska, who was a devout feminist, was strongly influenced by the German writers Heinrich Heine, Gottfried Keller, and E. Marlitt, the Danish novelist and poet Jens Peter Jacobsen, and the Russian writers Ivan Turgenev and Fedor Dostoyevsky. Her thirst for knowledge was such that she decided to marry a middle-aged university professor named Wrobel and wrote him a letter that the professor never received.
Spiritual solitude and the sense that she was living in an alien environment led her to write novellas unbeknownst to anyone, with no intentions of publishing them. Those stories were spurred by feelings rather than reflections. Olha would later write that she shed tears of poetry in her prose. The short novels Liudyna [Man] and Tsarivna [The Princess] marked her creative summits, in which the extraordinary heart of the author beat with feelings and the conviction that women were people, too, and they deserved as much respect as men; they had rights and could be engineers of a better destiny for themselves. Addressing a meeting of the Ruthenian Women’s Association in Bukovyna, she declared: “By bringing a woman into life, Mother Nature doesn’t say, ‘Here you are, destined to be the wife of this or that man!’ No, she says instead, ‘Here you are, destined to live your life!’ And she says the same to every man.” She gave this speech in 1894, and from that time a free and intelligent human being became the ideal for the young writer, who would remain unmarried for the rest of her life.
FOSTERING FEELINGS
Olha’s eldest brother Maximilian was the first to bring up the matter of the need and importance of fostering the young writer’s feelings. He was also her first tutor in the literary field. “Preserve your passion, because in my opinion, it alone breathes life into dead letters,” he begged his beloved sister. Indeed, passion was the main driving force behind Kobylianska’s creativity.
Her diaries, little known to the general reading public, show exactly how painfully aware she was of people’s aloofness from each other, how she hated pettiness in all forms, and what great importance she attached even to the slightest affection. Between the age of 20 and 25, Olha would fall in love every year, maybe several times a year. These affairs would not last long, as is often the case at this age. The Lady of Virtue’s diaries are fraught with egoism. Somehow she believed that every young man who acted embarrassed in her presence, or even blushed, was actually in love with her and therefore had to be especially keenly aware of her feelings; moreover, he had to belong only to her. Already at the age of 20 she admitted: “I don’t want to get married to live in peace; I would want to get married to be happy.” However, happy marriage was not uppermost in Kobylianska’s mind and she eventually decided that as a writer she didn’t need it.
After her feminist writings appeared in print, she found herself faced with serious opponents. Mykhailo Hrushevsky, the distinguished historian and politician, albeit a mediocre populist writer, declared that what Olha was writing about was not characteristic of Ukraine. The influential critic Serhiy Yefremov interpreted Olha Kobylianska’s maturing talent and literary skill as a dangerous — even pathological — phenomenon in Ukrainian literature. Feelings and women’s reverence for beauty over social problems were perceived as degradation of an artist, his insignificance, and abandonment of issues relating to the people.
Soviet literary critics also disparaged the new current in Ukrainian literature that permeated the creativity of Olha Kobylianska. It was only in the late 1990s that Solomea Pavlychko grasped the extremely complex situation in which the writer had lived and worked: “In Serhiy Yefremov’s rhetoric we find a typical populist desire to speak on ‘our behalf’ and that of ‘our literature.’ Behind all this is a concept of literature as a single current, and of authors as an army of sorts. Just as language unites us all, so, too, there must be a single trend for all of us to follow. Besides, literature is the property of all its recipients, meaning the people. The role of a writer’s “I” should be very small. Almost no one relies on this “I.” It is underdeveloped and suspect to any populist ideologue.” (From A Discourse on Modernism in Ukrainian Literature).
The “new people” in Olha Kobylianska’s Liudyna and Tsarivna — women — appear as a challenge to society, resistance to the male gender. Ivan Franko characterized the ideas of both these works as vague, while Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky refused to publish her works simply because they were modern and the general reading public would only perceive them as hostile.
BITS AND PIECES
Feminist issues ceased being predominant themes in Olha Kobylianska’s works in 1895, as the question of equal rights for women no longer required the same emphasis as earlier because it was now regarded as self-evident. However, she remained glaringly distinct from all the other writers of Bukovyna and Halychyna — and from all Ukrainian-language writers — and this distinction was a mote in the eye of critics, publishers, and colleagues alike. She was continuously blamed for her “German bias.” Lesia Ukrainka’s consoling words did little to comfort the author of Liudyna and Tsarivna. But Lesia Ukrainka did more than that. In 1899 she told Mykhailo Pavlyk that Olha Kobylianska’s works were not amateurish but genuine literary endeavors and suggested that Olha’s “exotic” trends be left alone and the place she really deserved in Ukrainian literature be acknowledged instead.
However, feminist radicalism remained present in both of these authors’ works; neither would regard it as a trend because the spirit of their works never changed. Olha Kobylianska and Lesia Ukrainka will forever remain inseparable. In April 1912, when both were well advanced in age, Olha Kobylianska called her friend and fellow writer “khtosichok,” [tiny little someone], or rather “khtosichok bilenky” [little white someone], while referring to herself as “khtos chornenky” [little black someone]. Olha Kobylianska entrusted Lesia Ukrainka with converting her story V nedilyu rano zillya kopala [On Sunday Morning She Gathered Herbs] into a play. In her comments on the work she wrote: “Khtosichok will do it the way her little soul dictates, for she will make it better anyway; I only hope that she doesn’t make too great an effort...” Is it possible to find such goodness and gentleness in the correspondence of fellow writers?
In the 1890s Olha Kobylianska often mentioned Lesia Ukrainka in her correspondence with other people, saying that Lesia was the only one who really understood her. Ostap Lutsky and Osyp Makovei would eventually abandon the friendship, but not Lesia Ukrainka. She was more than a friend, sister, or colleague. When Olha Kobylianska was asked to submit a photograph for a postage stamp (which meant decent royalties), Olha refused, although she was living in poverty. She made it clear that she would agree only if Lesia approved; she wanted the postage stamp to show the photograph of her and Ukrainka.
Vasyl Stefanyk was the only man Olha and Lesia believed could understand them and in whose company they felt really comfortable. Shortly before Lesia Ukrainka left Olha Kobylianska’s house (July 1901), the latter turned to Vasyl Stefanyk for his heartfelt sympathy. Only he could offer consolation during this trying period. Kobylianska wrote to Stefanyk: “Send the white clouds of your good, silken soul to me and console me. So I can stop mourning the loss of my happiness...” She was so inconsolable that she was ready to die. Her request contained a very strange message. Besides explaining the reason for her grief — Lesia Ukrainka’s departure — she asked Vasyl Stefanyk to do something she would never ask anyone else: “Bury this letter or burn it.”
This was a period of nervous stress and complicated relationships between her, Osyp Makovei, and Lesia Ukrainka. It was then Kobylianska realized that fate had compelled her to submit to a man, although her soul protested; she was in solidarity with Ukrainka’s soul. Lesia was leaving and Olha felt there was no future for her and Makovei. Stefanyk was the only one capable of giving her moral support; the man had “a big heart and a rich soul.” Osyp Makovei eventually figured out the situation and would later comment ironically on Olha Kobylianska’s feminist stand. He would even write a short story about an “emancipated man.” But this did not change the situation. Olha and Lesia could not live without ideals that were higher than those held dearest by the people and its worthiest representatives. They both knew that the people needed more than happily married couples living in comfortable homes and speaking Ukrainian. What both authors had in mind was cultured ethnic identity. The passage that Ivan Franko would one day delete from Olha Kobylianska’s short story “Ideas” (about this very identity) proved immune to both editing and the passage of time.
