b. 1930
Lina Kostenko
Poet of the Sixtiers
A poet and one of the earliest of the Sixtiers. Soviet censorship kept her poems out of print for more than ten years, and her historical novel in verse Marusia Churai earned her the Shevchenko Prize.
Key accomplishments
- The collections Rays of the Earth (1957), Sails (1958) and Wanderings of the Heart (1961)
- The historical novel in verse Marusia Churai (1979) and the Shevchenko Prize (1987)
- The novel in verse Berestechko, written mostly in the late 1960s and published in 1999
- The novel Notes of a Ukrainian Madman (2011)
Who she is
Lina Kostenko was born in 1930 in Rzhyshchiv in the Kyiv region into a family of teachers, and from 1936 she lived in Kyiv. She published her first poems in 1946. She studied at the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute and then, in 1952–1956, at the Literary Institute in Moscow. She is called one of the earliest of the Sixtiers, the writers who made their name during the Khrushchev “thaw.”
Her story
Her collections Rays of the Earth (1957), Sails (1958) and Wanderings of the Heart (1961) quickly found readers. But in 1963 Andrii Skaba, a secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine, accused the poet of “ideological vagueness.” Her collections The Stellar Integral and The Princely Mountain were pulled from production, and for many years her poems stopped being published. In 1965 and 1968 Kostenko signed open letters against the arrests and closed trials of Ukrainian intellectuals.
Her next book, On the Banks of the Eternal River, came out only in 1977, 16 years after the previous one. It was followed by the historical novel in verse Marusia Churai (1979), about a semi-legendary Cossack woman songwriter of the 17th century. For it and the collection Uniqueness, the poet received the Shevchenko Prize in 1987. The novel in verse Berestechko, most of which she wrote in the late 1960s, was published only in 1999. Since the Chornobyl disaster of 1986, Kostenko has devoted much work to preserving the heritage of the Chornobyl region. In 2011 her prose novel Notes of a Ukrainian Madman came out.
Why it matters today
Lina Kostenko’s life shows that an honest word can be silenced for years but cannot be destroyed. Her lines from Berestechko, “For only nations revealed in the Word can live with dignity on earth,” remind us that language and literature are part of a people’s freedom.
