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became a lawyer in the Department of Foreign Affairs. His brother had a successful military career. The ideas of the French revolution permeated even the frigid Russian capital. The brothers Drahomaniv loved liberty and were inclined toward democracy. Yakiv died in Siberia, because he was part of the Decembrist uprising. Petro was dismissed from his job, cut all old ties and moved his liberal ideas to his native Hadiache. The former Petersburg aristocrat and poet married a village girl, Elysaveta Ciacka, who could hardly read. He rebuilt his homestead. His father-in-law gave him a few beehives, and life in this patriarchal environment proceeded at a sedate pace. Freedom and liberty aboun ded in the Drahomaniv homestead where the serfs lived with their masters like members of the family. However the local gentry prevented him from getting a position. Five children grow up in the Drahomaniv villa. Among them is Mykhaylo, the future political activist, and Olha, future Ukrainian writer and activist. The mother is in charge of the household, while the father concerns himself with books. Only when asked by his wife to go and check the work in the fields, he will drive the two miles to the homestead and take the children with him. The children grew, interacting with the household help, the people of Hadiache, surrounded by Ukrainian songs, folk traditions and customs. A favorite pastime was to discuss their dreams and interpret their meaning. Their mother had a nice voice, and she sang while sewing. The father was the children’s teacher. He instilled good literary taste in them, reading the works of the great Russian authors to them. The few Ukrainian pub lications available at that time, did not reach Hadiache. From their earliest years, the children knew Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol. Olena Pchilka writes in her autobiography: ’’The impression of the first time my father read to me, a small girl, Gogol’s Taras Bulba, has remained with me all my life. Father called me and began to read to me under the apple tree. It seems as if the bright images from that magnificent work imprinted themselves on my mind then and forever. And so the children grew in a Ukrainian ambience and better sampling of the highlights of foreign litera ture. They had a passionate love for their own kind, but a refined, well developed literary taste. Mykhaylo Drahomaniv and Olena Pchilka give their father credit for their cosmopolitan outlook, intellectual interests, the love of freedom and humanism. Their mother’s songs, the stories of grandmother Lizavet, the Ukrainianism of Hadiache instilled in Myk haylo Drahomaniv and Olena Pchilka a love for Ukraine and Ukrainian culture. To them they attributed their devotion to the Ukrainian cause. The School Years Of the two sisters Olha stands out as the more Olena Pchilka Олена Пчілка talented and more devoted to reading and beautiful poetry. Her father decided not to send her to the Hadiache boarding school where her older sister studied with the other provincial young ladies. He wanted Olha to go to a large city, perhaps even Petersburg. Her father wrote to various cities and told Olha to pray so that she would be accepted as a student at the prestigious Smolny Institute in Petersburg. Olha prayed quietly. ’’Merciful Lord, dear God, make it so that I would not be accepted.” Olha was not accepted into any of the boarding schools for aristocratic young ladies. Meanwhile, her older brother Mykhaylo entered the Kiev University. At Christmas time he would come home. They would sit around the stove and listened to him talk — there were never enough stories about Kiev, about students, about the new community movement which at that time, in the 60’, was beginning to emerge. The death of her father in the summer of 1860 was the first tragedy in Olha’s life. That following Christmas Mykhaylo again came home for the holiday and told Olha that the time had come for her to begin serious study. Everyone at home was very concerned that the poor child would embark on such a long journey in the mid dle of the winter. However, right after the Feast of Epi phany, they bundled Olha up in furs and sat her on a sled next to her brother. It was late in the evening on the fourth day of travel that they saw the Pecherska Lavra. Somewhat later that night the nearly frozen travelers thawed out in a warm Kiev apartment. Olha was called “ Puss in Boots” for she wore attrac tive suede boots. The Nelhovsky Boarding School where Olha stu died, was one of the better teaching institutions of its time. The noted doctor and pedagogue Pirohov taught Видання C оюзу Українок A мерики - перевидано в електронному форматі в 2012 році . A рхів C У A - Ню Йорк , Н . Й . C Ш A.
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