This year marks the 155th anniversary of the birth of Lesia Ukraїnka (1871-1913), one of Ukraine’s most distinguished writers and intellectuals. Born Larysa Kosach on 25 February 1871 in Novohrad-Volynskyi (now Zviahel) in today’s Zhytomyr region in north Ukraine, Ukraїnka is best known for her poetry and plays. On the occasion of her birthday, Timothy Snyder, IWM Lesia Ukraїnka Permanent Fellow, met with Olesya Khromeychuk, the institute’s inaugural Lesia Ukraїnka Senior Visiting Fellow, to talk about Ukraїnka’s intellectual legacy and her relevance today.
In her prolific if relatively short career, questions of spiritual courage, illness and disability, national independence, female emancipation, and cosmopolitanism were central to her writing. Active in Ukrainian intelligentsia publics across both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, Lesia Ukraїnka’s feminism and anti-imperialism—her commitment to the political and social emancipation of Ukrainian lands and people—were inseparable from her engagement with European socialist movements and the modernist literary and intellectual currents of her time that transcended any single national or imperial frame. She read, translated, and traveled widely. Her visit to Vienna in 1891, at the age of twenty—one of many journeys across Europe in search of a cure for her bone tuberculosis—sharpened her emancipatory convictions, underscoring as it did the repressive character of Russian tsarism.
In September 2024, the IWM launched a new research program, Ukraine and the World. Building on the IWM's decade-long engagement with Ukraine and Ukrainian scholars, the program seeks to foster intellectual enquiry about Ukraine in a global context by supporting research that aims to reconsider Ukrainian history, society, and culture through a global lens—and vice versa. The IWM has also named its residential fellowships within the program after Lesia Ukraїnka, whose literary work and political thought encapsulate the interconnections and entanglements that the program is committed to exploring.
Further reading and listening
- On Hope and Democracy by Olesya Khromeychuk
- Flieg, mein Lied: Tanja Maljartschuk und Juri Andruchowytsch präsentieren die "Ukrainische Bibliothek in deutscher Sprache" - Mitschnitt aus dem Großen Sendesaal des ORF-RadioKulturhauses vom 15.11.2025
- Lesia Ukraїnka: Am Meer (Wallstein Verlag, 2025)
