Books by Lesia Ukrainka
“Ukrainka is a feminist and anticolonial Ukrainian writer who is at the very top of the national canon. We are more used to finding great men at the top of national canons, but in Ukraine we have a woman who subverted all the canons of patriarchal literature…The book I would like to recommend is Cassandra, which is about the Trojan War. The protagonist is the tragic Trojan prophetess who is cursed to always know the truth and never be believed. Through her eyes we see this tragedy unfold. It’s one of Ukrainka’s many significant poetic dramas. I chose this one because it has recently been brilliantly translated by Nina Murray, and it is about to be published by the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.” Read more...
Sasha Dovzhyk, Literary Scholar
Interviews where books by Lesia Ukrainka were recommended
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1
Voroshilovgrad
Serhiy Zhadan, Reilly Costigan-Humes & Isaac Stackhouse Wheeler (translators) -
2
Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem
by Lesia Ukrainka & Nina Murray (translator) -
3
The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister
by Olesya Khromeychuk -
4
The Moscoviad
by Yuri Andrukhovych, Vitaly Chernetsky (translator) -
5
The Torture Camp on Paradise Street
by Stanislav Aseyev, Nina Murray & Zenia Tomkins (translators)
The Best Ukrainian Literature, recommended by Sasha Dovzhyk
The Best Ukrainian Literature, recommended by Sasha Dovzhyk
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last year, many people around the world have become more familiar with the country’s recent history, but many of us still don’t know much about its literary traditions. Academic and activist Sasha Dovzhyk introduces five works of Ukrainian literature, from an early 20th-century dramatic poem to devastating first-person accounts of the war that started in 2014.
