Uilleam Blacker

Tamara Hundorova’s monograph Lesya Ukrainka: The Book of the Sybil is a landmark new critical biography of one of Ukraine’s greatest writers. Lesya Ukrainka is a canonical figure in Ukrainian literature, yet her works remain almost unknown outside of Ukraine. She was a ground-breaking modernist and feminist, a writer who was committed to European culture and European values as she was to her own national cause. Her plays, which reimagine European cultural myths from the female perspective, are among the great unknown works of European early modernist drama. In analysing Ukrainka’s life and work, Hundorova’s book follows number of key themes, including feminism, madness, illness and motherhood; it also places Ukrainka in her historical and cultural context as a political thinker.