Cassandra: A Dramatic Poem

"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. She was born in Ukraine in 1871 and chose the pen name Ukrainka, for ‘Ukrainian woman,’ at the age of thirteen. From this very early age, through her pen name and through her writing, she connected her destiny and her literary fate to the fate of the Ukrainian nation. At the time when she was writing in the Ukrainian language, Ukraine was under Russian rule, so the very writing in the Ukrainian language was risky. But what she did with this banned language was remarkable. She didn’t accept the terms on which the Russian empire permitted Ukrainian literature to exist—strictly for writing about peasants, farmers, simple folk. Instead, she turned to the big plots of European literature. The theme of Troy; the theme of Don Juan, the seducer of women; the Bible. She retold all these myths of Western culture from a woman’s point of view. 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. It will be published in February 2024 and you already can preorder it. A huge task lies ahead of all the translators from the Ukrainian language—to translate all the works of Lesya Ukrainka. She is a forgotten feminist icon of European culture who needs to be rediscovered and read. Precisely. It’s a double subversion. She refuses the parameters dictated to her by the empire for her own culture. Instead, she dares to be in conversation with authors like Byron in her rewriting of the myth of Don Juan, the legendary libertine, in Ukrainian. In her retelling of Don Juan, the attention is centered not on him but on the female protagonist, Doña Ana, a femme fatale who is seeking power. Her complicated personality completely changes the rules of the game. Yes, definitely. In Ukraine from an early age you start learning her poems, and then you learn to read her poetic dramas. Then, if you are lucky, you enter into reading her prose, and maybe her correspondence, which is fascinating. It is outside Ukraine that she is not known. She suffered from tuberculosis of the bones. At the turn of the century, if you had such a health condition, you would travel in search of a good climate and good medical treatment. She traveled all over—not only in Western Europe, but also in Egypt and in Georgia. Given the scope of her work, she only failed to be translated into other languages because of Soviet restrictions on Ukrainian culture. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine did not have many resources to invest in the international representation of its literature. What is now being translated is mostly contemporary Ukrainian writing. This astonishing classical figure signifies that Ukrainian literature did not start in the 1990s; it was fascinating and exciting back in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century, and groundbreaking in many ways, because not many authors in global literature were able to do it at that time. Queerness, anticolonialism, feminism—there are so many facets to Lesya Ukrainka that we need to explore now."