Olena Pchilka

(pen name of Ol’ga Petrovna Kosach, née Dragomanova). Born July 5 (17), 1849, in the city of Gadiach, now in Poltava Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died Oct. 4, 1930, in Kiev. Ukrainian writer, journalist, and ethnographer. Corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR(1917).

Pchilka was the sister of M. P. Dragomanov and the mother of Lesia Ukrainka. In 1866 she graduated from the Institute for Wellborn Girls in Kiev. She began publishing in the 1880’s. Pchilka wrote the collection of poems and fables Dumki-merezhanki (1885), the narrative poem Olena the Cossack Woman (1884), and many short stories, novellas, and plays. She also wrote reminiscences of outstanding Ukrainian cultural figures and such ethnographic works as Ukrainian Folk Ornament (1876) and Ukrainian Patterns (1912). Pchilka at first supported liberal cultural ideas but later often expressed bourgeois nationalistic views, especially in her articles and literary criticism published in the magazine Rodnoi Krai (Native Land), which she edited from 1907 to 1916.