2Essay 1, “Khvoroba i tvorchist´” [Illness and Creativity (6-106)], which takes up one third of the book, offers a nuanced and theoretically savvy discussion of the subject and could be viewed as an introduction to Hundorova’s inquiry. It begins by situating Ukrainka’s personal story of coming to terms with illness and embracing creativity as a means to assert her subjectivity in the broader context of intellectual debates in the European fin de siècle, where illness was often treated as a mark of great artistic sensitivity and a vehicle to see beyond the limitations of a worldview established by society and where talent was generally viewed as a form of insanity. Drawing on Michael Foucault’s concepts of “the medical gaze” and “heterotopia,” the first essay also establishes a tangible connection between Ukrainka’s dehumanizing experience of physical disability and her “otherness” in the context of Ukrainian turn-of-the-century culture and demonstrates how the writer’s frequent trips to sanatoria and other treatment centers in various countries facilitate the formation of her nomadic identity—her “wanderlust” and her “vagabonding” (31)—and introduce “cosmopolitan imagology” and elements of “exoticism” in her artistic works (75-79). The essay wraps up with superb close readings of Ukrainka’s two early short stories, “Zhal´ [Sorrow, 1894] and “Nad morem” [Over the Sea, 1898], and her later cycle of poems, “Vesna v Iehypti” [Spring in Egypt, 1910], which barely receive any attention in previous criticism. Hundorova’s comparative reading of Ukrainka’s “Over the Sea” and Ivan Turgenev’s novella “Veshnie vody” [Torrents of Spring, 1872] and Anton Chekhov’s short story “Dama s sobachkoi” [The Lady with the Dog, 1898] is particularly insightful. It convincingly argues that the story is an emblematic text in Ukrainka’s oeuvre as it introduces elements of “exoticism” and “otherness” into her writing. Another important aspect of the opening essay is its closing discussion of Ukrainka’s own reflections on how her physical and emotional state influences her writing. Her comments on how physiological and psychological changes that she associates with perimenopause interfere with her creative productivity are most noteworthy. As Hundorova rightfully observes, a further research of the subject would not only shed new light on the last years of Ukrainka’s life and work but also make a valuable contribution to the glaringly scarce body of scholarship on how menopause affects creativity (105-106).

3Essays 2 and 3, “Shkola polityky” [School of Politics (107-165)] and “Zhinochii roman: Ol´ha Kobylianska and Lesia Ukrainka” [A Female Romance: Ol´ha Kobylians´ka and Lesia Ukrainka (166-204)], center on Ukrainka’s complex personal and professional relations with her maternal uncle, Mykhailo Drahomanov, an important Ukrainian intellectual and public figure best known as one of the first proponents of Ukrainian autonomism, his two students – Ivan Franko (1856-1916), one of Ukraine’s greatest writers and the founder of the Galician Radical Party, and Mykola Pavlyk (1853-1915), also a writer and a political activist – and Ol´ha Kobylians´ka (1863-1942), another pioneering feminist writer of the Ukrainian fin de siècle. By analyzing Ukrainka’s correspondence with her uncle and other archival materials related to the time she spends caring for him before his death, Hundorova argues that it is Drahomanov who nurtures Ukrainka’s political views and instills a firm conviction in her that cosmopolitism and rapid Europeanisation of Ukrainian culture would comprise “the most robust foundation for Ukraine’s national liberation” (118). Bringing Ukrainka’s private and public exchanges with Pavlyk and Franko in conversation, Hundorova also suggests that, in contrast to Pavlyk but not unlike Franko, Ukrainka was able to grow beyond her uncle’s teachings and develop a set of worldviews independent from his. Most importantly, Hundorova contends, Ukrainka was able to reject Drahomanov’s imperative to concentrate all creative production in Ukraine on generating culture “of the masses” and “for the masses”—something Franko never fully did—and dedicate her intellectual efforts to creating and promoting art designed for Ukraine’s intellectual elites. Like her lifelong friend and a fellow trailblazing modernist prose writer Ol´ha Kobylians´ka, Ukrainka valorized the innocence, power, and natural beauty of Ukrainian folk culture, but was critical of its coarse aspects and refused to see Ukrainian peasants as the driving force of Ukraine’s national movement. Like Kobylians´ka, Ukrainka strongly believed in the development of high culture as the main precondition for Ukraine’s liberation.

4Peppered with zesty quotations from the writers’ deeply intimate correspondence, Hundorova’s discussion dedicated to Ukrainka’s and Kobylians´ka’s intimate friendship and professional collaboration focuses mostly on the writers’ interest in the “woman question,” the role of female artists in the Ukrainian cultural paradigm, and their search for a new model of female solidarity. The author pays a great deal of attention to Kobylians´ka’s role in the formation of Ukrainka’s neo-Romantic aesthetics and the writers’ development of a particular female writing style—a style “where words fuse with gestures, merge with sensuality, absorb silence, achieve their own emotional rhythm, and engulf the whole being” of the author (184-185). Hundorova also points out that many elements of their letters, both textual and thematic, eventually make it into the writers’ creative works. For example, she claims that Ukrainka uses Kobylians´ka as a prototype for a series of her dramatic heroines such as Cassandra, Hadidzha, Johanna, Mavka, and Dolores—central characters in her dramas Cassandra, Aisha and Muhammad (1907), Johanna the Wife of Khus (1909), The Forest Song, and Stone Host (1912), respectively—and takes one of the best known lines in her oeuvre spoken by Mavka in The Forest Song from her own description of her friend recorded in one of her letters (193).

5Notably, Hundorova does not explain how exactly essays 2 and 3 relate to the central question of her study about the role of illness in shaping Ukrainka’s writing. Yet, considered together with the textual analysis in the remainder of the book, the two essays seem to suggest that in addition to stimulating Ukrainka’s intellectual growth and providing her with much needed emotional support, Drahomanov and Kobylians´ka also helped the writer to crystalize the iconic character-type of her mature dramas—a woman possessed by an alternate understanding of the world, often from a faraway place and time, who speaks back at traditional society on behalf of those marginalized by those in power. Hundorova’s meticulous discussion of Ukrainka’s correspondence with both addressees reveals that, whereas Drahomanov encourages Ukrainka’s creative endeavors from early on and urges her to look for plots and archetypal characters for her works beyond Ukraine’s cultural paradigm—in classical mythology, scripture, medieval legends, and Romantic poetry—Kobylians´ka inspires her to revisit the key myths of Western culture from a woman’s point of view and to infuse them with a national liberationist subtext.

6Essays 4-7, “‘Blakytna troyanda’: isteriia i literatura” [“The Blue Rose”: Hysteria and literature (205-233)], “‘Oderzhyma’: ieresi zhinochykh ‘strastei’” [“Woman possessed”: The heresy of female “passions” (234-254)], “‘Kassandra’: Knyha Syvily” [“Cassandra”: The book of Sibyl (255-273)] and “‘Lisova pisnya’: narodzhennia kul´tury” [“The forest song”: The birth of culture (274-288)], are interpretive and capture well the evolution of Ukrainka’s iconic tragic heroine, a defiant woman who seizes the right to tell her own story within a male-dominated society. In her discussion of Ukrainka’s first prose drama The Blue Rose, which explores popular themes of female hysteria and sexuality, heredity and madness, Hundorova revisits the subject of Ukrainka’s clinically diagnosed hysteria briefly mentioned in the first essay and reads her first drama as a psychobiography. Her analysis indicates that in addition to using her personal experience and observations made during visits to a psychiatric hospital in Kharkiv where her other maternal uncle Oleksandr Drahomanov (1859-1919) used to work, Ukrainka carefully studies available literature on the subject in preparation for her work on The Blue Rose—Richard von Krafft-Ebing, August Weismann, and possibly Joseph Bauer and Sigmund Freud among others. Ultimately, Hundorova argues, Ukrainka’s nuanced depiction of her first dramatic heroine Liubov Horshchyns´ka, who suffers from a psychological disorder, which she believes to be hereditary is, in fact, rooted in a childhood trauma and repressed sexual urges, and is not so much “psychological” as “psychiatric,” that is clinical, which makes for an original representation of female hysteria of the time. Hundorova also draws attention to the play’s representation of male hysteria, a rare case in European fin de siècle literature, a series of provocative reflections on female sexuality, maternal instinct, and motherhood, and a biting critique of patriarchal foundations of traditional Ukrainian society (207). The author concludes by describing The Blue Rose as a pointed example of the New Drama situated at the intersection of Naturalism and Symbolism and a glaring marker of Ukrainka’s transition from the nineteenth-century literary traditions to high modernism (233).

7Whereas The Blue Rose represents a pivotal juncture in Ukrainka’s literary career, her first poetic drama, Woman Possessed, Hundorova argues in essay 5, affirms the arrival of a new modernist way of thinking about tragedy in Ukraine and constitutes a defining moment in the history of Ukrainian literature. Written in one night in a state of agony by the bedside of her dying friend Merzhynskyi, the play is both an act and a product of Ukrainka’s self-fashioned art-based therapy. It rewrites the founding story of Christianity by shifting its focus from Messiah to a seemingly minor character, the New Testament’s Miriam, and explores the themes of Liebestod (love-death) and spiritual rebellion. In Hundorova’s assessment, the play’s critique of Christianity, along with its attempt at rehabilitating the mundane reality of human existence, is deeply Nietzschean, but its key theme, which addresses the questions of the impossibility of a woman to endure existing traditional roles and for her to produce knowledge in a male-dominated society, is feminist in its conceptual framework. Ukrainka’s 1907 play Cassandra, which rewrites the myth of Troy from the perspective of the tragic Trojan princess and prophetess condemned by the gods to see the future and never to be believed, further develops the theme of the credibility of a woman as an author and as a producer of knowledge. The author points out that Ukrainka expands her previous discussion in two ways in Cassandra: first, she empowers her 1907 heroine to speak on behalf of all those who remain overlooked by narratives of men in power, and then she allows her to expose the raging crisis of masculinity in the besieged Troy (266-268). As Hundorova observes, both Miriam and Cassandra represent a new type of heroine in Ukrainian literature who demonstrate strong intellectual concerns, a need for political involvement, creative ambition, and powerful emotional and sexual desires, but who are, nevertheless, driven to madness, alienation, and total destruction by the same social order they dare to challenge. The author is right to conclude that Ukrainka’s new heroine embodies a new hope and a new spirit for change of the European fin de siècle on the one hand but highlights the refusal of her society to embrace new and progressive ideas on the other.

8It is only in her late dramas The Forest Song and Stone Master (1912) that Ukrainka develops a more victorious and change-affirming heroine. In her first essay Hundorova only briefly references the latter, the first story of Don Juan in European letters revisited by a woman (103-105), but dedicates her closing essay to the former, a neo-Romantic fairy drama and Ukrainka’s best-known work, where Ukrainka rewrites the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice by transferring the poetic power to the latter. Hundorova describes Ukrainka’s Eurydice, a forest nymph Mavka, who goes to hell and back for love, asserting her subjectivity and finding her poetic voice along the way, as a Nietzschean life-affirming overhuman capable of artistic transcendence (279) and interprets the play as a “neo-romantic utopia about the power of art” (282). The author locates the key to her interpretation in the closing episode of the play, where Mavka envisions her future audience and promises to “give them back in mystic speech / All those tender songs… [Lukash, a peasant boy whose music awakens Mavka’s soul] used to sing.” Notably, as opposed to previous critics, Hundorova views Mavka’s vision of her future songs not as a feminist takeover of Lukash’s talent but a dialectical fusion of her talent with his that produces a mighty “Gesamptkunstwerk,” an “androgenous creation of two souls,” and offers an ideal communicative model capable of reaching and unifying the widest possible audience (279-283). A nuanced comparative study of Ukrainka’s play and Gerhart Hauptman’s fairy drama The Sunken Bell (1896) helps Hundorova to showcase the triumphant nature of Ukrainka’s argument. Bringing Ukrainka’s personal correspondence in conversation, Hundorova concludes somewhat dramatically that only a woman, who battled death all her life, was able to produce works of such artistic and conceptual finesse.

10In all, the book will certainly appeal to students and scholars working in the fields of European and Ukrainian studies, as well as those interested in disability and gender studies.