St. Lysia Ukrainka & St Olha Kobylianska
Lesya Ukrainka (February 25, 1871 – August 1, 1913) was one of Ukrainian literature's foremost writers, best known for her poems and plays. She was also an active political, civil, and feminist activist.
Her mother, Olha Drahomanova, was a notable writer and publisher, known by her pen name, Olena Pchilka, and her father, Petro Antonovych Kosach, came from a Ukrainian noble family and devoted himself toward the cultivation of Ukrainian culture and identity.
Ukrainka’s poetry and plays, even from an early age, were rooted in her belief in Ukrainian national identity. She wrote her first poem, Hope, at the age of eight in reaction to the arrest an exile of her aunt, who had protested Tsarist autocracy and the Russian oppression of the Ukrainian people. Her subsequent body of work focused on her belief in the Ukrainian Independence movement.
Olha Kobylianska (November 27, 1863 - March 21, 1942) was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family descended from Ukrainian nobility. She would become a notable modernist writer and feminist. Kobylianska’s writing featured resourceful woman protagonists navigating a misogynist world. She first wrote in German, but after moving to Ukraine, wrote primarily in Ukrainian. In 1898 she wrote Valse melancolique, which included a same-sex female love story, which was partially based on her own experience. Olha and Lysia would meet each other three years later in 1901, spurring a close friendship and love affair that would last the rest of their lives.
Lysia’s diagnosis of tuberculosis prevented them from living together, but they exchanged regular and frequent correspondences which were intensely intimate and erotic. They would often write in code with each other, which when eventually decoded, revealed a deep and layered emotional relationship.
Lysia died a little more than a decade after she met Olha in 1913 at the age of 42. Olha would live on to the age of 78 in 1942.
The revelation of Ukrainka and Kobylianska’s romantic relationship was met with some resistance by some historians. Russian commentators would use their lesbian relationship to denigrate Ukrainian culture as inferior. Ukrainka’s popularity as one of Ukraine’s most prominent writers, has made it difficult for her queerness to be widely accepted.
Lysia and Olha leave behind a legacy of Ukrainian national pride, feminist advocacy, and trailblazing queer resilience. Their love for each other survives well beyond the grave, with their literary and historical legacies forever intertwined.
Artist Note
For Lysia and Olha’s halo, I chose to use Ukraine’s national flower, the sunflower, and blue hydrangeas to evoke the Ukrainian flag’s colors.