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FOUR UKRAINIAN WOMEN WRITERS by HELENE TURKEWICZ-SANKO Four Ukrainian women writers, three from Canada and one from Ukraine, are listed in the Guide to Women's Literature throughout the World. The guide, first published in 1992 and reprinted in paperback in 1994, is a prestigious work that recognizes the world's most accomplished and gifted women writers and it is significant that Ukrainian women writers have been included in its pages. The four Ukrainian authors to be so recognized are Myrna Kostash, Janice Kulyk Keefer, Vera Lysenko, and Marko Vovchok who appears as a contributor to Russian as well as Ukrainian literature. Marko Vovchok (1834-1907) was the pseudonym of Maria Aleksandrovna Markovych. According to the Guide, she is "an author of prose in Ukrainian and Russian." Bom in the province of Orel, she attended a private boarding school in Kharkiv from 1845 to 1848. Returning to Orel, she met her first husband, Ukrainian ethnographer and political activist, O. Markovych. They married in 1851 and moved to Chemihiv (1851), then Kyiv (1853) and finally Nemyriv (1855). In 1857, Marko Vovchok published Ukrainian Folk Tales which won her immediate acclaim among Ukrainian and Russian readers. Turgenev translated the tales into Russian with great enthusiasm. ( Ukrainian Folk Tales was translated into English in 1953). In 1859, while living in St. Petersburg, she completed her second well-received work, Instytutka (The Accomplished Young Boarding School Graduate). We know that she traveled throughout Europe, that in 1860 she was living in Paris and that her best known story, "Marusia", was translated into French. Vovchok wrote several novels inspired by the hardships of peasant life and her focus on the gender issue can be seen in many of her works. Her novels include Karmeliuk (The Peasant Karmeliuk), Nevilnytsia (The Slave Girl), Svekrukha (The Mother- in-Law), Kozatchka (The Kozak Woman), A Living Soul, and Zapysky prytchetnyka (Notes of a Junior Deacon), a satire of the clerical life. Marko Vovchok is listed in the Guide as having been among the 19th and 20th century writers to be concerned with feminism as well as the treatment of women and her focus on the gender issue can be seen in many of her novels. The second Ukrainian woman writer to be listed in the Guide is Vera Lysenko (1910-1975) whose real name was Vera Lesik. She is listed as "a Canadian novelist, journalist, and social historian, who was bom in Winnipeg of Ukrainian parents who had emigrated to Canada in 1903." She also wrote plays and poetry and was a gifted translator. One of the first Ukrainian- Canadian women to complete a university degree (from the University of Manitoba), she also worked as a teacher. Lysenko was interested in the life of the ethnic immigrant community and in the working class experience in general. Men in Sheepskin Coats: A Study in Assimilation, published in 1947, focuses on the hardships faced by newcomers from Western Ukraine and the Carpathian Mountains. The book was the first English language histoiy of Ukrainians in Canada to be written by a Ukrainian-Canadian. Lysenko's two novels, Yellow Boots (1954) and Westerly Wild (1956) were also inspired by the first generation immigrants' lives and experiences in Canada. Myrna Kostash is listed in the Guide as a Canadian journalist and creative non-fiction writer. She is considered to have been the author of "the first ethnically-centered texts to address multicultural issues" and directs her attention to people, their background and their survival under the pressure of contemporary society. The Guide characterizes her as"both energetically political, and astute in her reading of contemporary society." Bom in 1944 in Edmonton, Alberta, Kostash grew up in Edmonton's Ukrainian community and was strongly influenced by this milieu and by the parents and grandparents who kept the Ukrainian traditions very much alive. Kostash studied at the University of Alberta, the University of Washington and the University of Toronto. She began her career as a freelance journalist and was recognized for her exploratory works, such as A Long Way From Home (The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada) and 20 ’’НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ТРАВЕНЬ 1998 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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