DISSIDENT POETESS

 

Contemporary Ukrainian writer LINA KOSTENK is in her 90s, but is already one of the most inspiring women in the country’s history. For many years, her work remained unpublished, since in the 1960s she participated in the dissident and “Sixties” movements. This period spurred the newest styles in Ukrainian literature, forced to create something avant-garde and critical in relation to the authorities and to the then-totalitarian regime. She wrote hundreds of poems but only one novel (Notes of the Ukrainian Insane), which instantly became a bestseller.

She was born in 1930 in Rzhyshchiv, Kyiv Oblast (not far from the Chernobyl Zone, and in the 1990s she worked in the affected area on the preservation of cultural heritage) into a family of teachers.

In the 1930s her father was sent to the Gulag as ‘an enemy of the people’. After WWII Lina graduated from the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute and in 1956 from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow.

 Her first book of poems, Rays of the Earth, was published in 1957.  In the early 1960s, she faced an onslaught from the Soviet critics accusing her poetry of ‘disconnection from the real life’ and ‘formalistic experimentation’.

Her refusal to give into ideological criticism and the demands of Soviet censorship led to her work being blocked from publication until 1977. During this time she was an active and outspoken member of the Ukrainian dissident movement. She continued publishing into the post-Soviet period, and in 2010, she published her first novel, "Notes of a Ukrainian Madman", an account of the social and political upheaval in independent Ukraine, which immediately became a bestseller.

In 1987, she was awarded Shevchenko National Prize for the same novel.Beside poetry, Kostenko wrote prose. Her novel Notes of a Ukrainian Madman (2010) was the only prominent work trying to explain the events of the Orange Revolution of 2004. The novel was an immediate bestseller and gained popular and critical acclaim.

 She is an Honored Professor of Kyiv Mohyla Academy, Honorary Doctor of Lviv and Chernivtsi Universities. In the modern Ukrainian tradition, she is among the most famous women of ancient and modern Ukraine. Her  works have been translated into many languages: English, Belarusian, Estonian, Italian, Lithuanian, German, Russian, Slovak and Spanish

Her poetry consists primarily of intimate, lyric poems and ‘social’ poems on the role and responsibility of a poet, particularly in a totalitarian society. Employing diverse rhythms, sophisticated language, it   ranges from playful irony and humor to scathing satire. She is acknowledged as one of the best current Ukrainian poets. A wise and prophetic woman, she writes:…the worst is not that everything might be changed but that everything might stay the same…

Her poem “A terrible kaleidoscope,” was published a year after the Chernobyl disaster. (Translation by Uilleam Blacker).

A Terrible Kaleidoscope

In this moment somewhere someone dies.
In this moment. This very moment.
Each and every minute
A ship is wrecked.
The Galapagos burn.
And above the Dnipro
Sets the bitter wormwood star.
Explosion. Volcano.
Ruin. Destruction.
One aims. Another falls.
“Don’t shoot!” a third implores.
Scheherazade’s tales run dry.
Lorelei sings by the Rhine no more.
A child plays. A comet flies.
Faces bloom, not erased by dread.
Blessed is each moment we’re alive
On these worldwide fields of death.

 

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