Women’s rights in the works of Lesya Ukrainka: Ukrainian cultural tradition or challenge?

Abstract

In the year of the 150th anniversary of Lesya Ukrainka’s birth, special attention is paid to her creative heritage. Lesya Ukrainka,is one of the most prominent figures in history of national culture. She belongs to that rather narrow circle of geniuses that by theirtalent and victorious activity glorify the spirit of native people, open wider horizons of life to them and give a shove to valuable selfconsciousnessand development. Today we have the opportunity to revise Lesia Ukrainka in a new way, without the perception of heras a fighter exclusively for the rights of peasants and workers. In her literature works there is a much more important narrative for contemporaries– the role of women in society and her rights in the imagination of Ukrainian philosophy more than 100 years ago. It isextremely important for contemporaries to study the phenomenon of Lesya Ukrainka from the standpoint of understanding her visionof the role and rights of women in society as a Ukrainian cultural tradition or a challenge of that time.The aim of the article is to offer the results of the study of Lesya Ukrainka’s literature works through the prism of women’s rightsand to find out whether the phenomenon of her work was due to Lesya Ukrainka’s personal views or the all-Ukrainian context.In the article the author analyses the following Lesya Ukrainka’s literature works: “Stone Lord” (1911) and Boyarynya (1914; TheNoblewoman). Thus, being equidistant from feminism and from the perception of the role of women in Ukrainian society on the basisof “traditional values”, it seems that women’s rights in Ukraine have always been at the center of legal and even artistic discourse.Moreover, given that in her works Lesya Ukrainka touched on the events of past centuries, she endowed her heroines with the legalpersonality that was not inherent in women at the time. The mentioned gives us reason to conclude that the phenomenon of LesyaUkrainka, as the fighter for women’s rights, has the roots in the in the legal culture of Ukrainian society, in which women have alwaysbeen a powerful subject of legal relations and played the central role the society.