Lina Kostenko – Ukraine’s Poetic Sphinx, Turns 95

Lina Kostenko is considered the uncompromising conscience and pride of Ukraine. The queen of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, Lina Kostenko has always been a staunch defender of her people and its culture and the embodiment of its defiant spirit.

This is a huge achievement for a poet who was effectively banned during the Soviet era for her artistic nonconformism and courageous civic and patriotic position, as well as a mother of two children and the devoted wife of a disabled person.

Rebellious in her younger and middle years when Russification and political and artistic intolerance were the norm under Soviet rule, she has remained equally critically minded during the more than three decades since Ukraine achieved independence.

While inspiring Ukrainians with more recent additions to her impressive collection of works produced over more than seven decades, she has continued to speak out candidly and rejected new forms of conformism.

Kostenko, who during the Soviet period preferred to remain unpublished rather than submit to censorship and was ready to risk everything by protesting publicly against political repression, has not hesitated to speak out against what she sees as the shortcomings of the present day.

For her, these include political cynicism, corruption, and neglect of the nation’s “ecology,” both natural and cultural. As a result. she has not looked to ingratiate herself with the nation’s new leaders. Nor to enjoy her later years as a celebrity.

 She demonstratively refused a high award from one of the Ukrainian presidents saying that she did not collect “political jewellery.” For many years she has shunned the media and made few public appearances. This chosen role as a recluse has only added to the enigma and reverence surrounding her.

Even though Kostenko became a national icon, much of her life stays shrouded in secrecy. She was born on March 17, 1930, to enlightened and patriotic parents. Her father was a self-taught polyglot, whose apparent independent-mindedness had a profound impact on her. He was imprisoned at the height of the Stalin era in 1936.

She began writing poetry at this early age when she was first exposed to pain and suffering. As a child, living on Trukhaniv Island on the Dnipro River between the two sections of Kyiv, she witnessed the ravages of the Second World War and absorbed, as she later put it, what she could not yet still fully comprehend.

Gifted, sensitive, and intrepid, Kostenko managed to have her brilliance recognized, and in 1952 she was eventually accepted to Moscow’s prestigious Maxim Gorky Literature Institute. Before that, being the daughter of a political prisoner, she was rejected by her native Kyiv University but got to become a student at Chernivtsi University. In Moscow, during the political thaw that followed Stalin’s death in March 1953, in the company of some of the Soviet Union’s brightest literary talents, she was able to blossom.

Intelligent, cultured, and strong-willed – Kostenko was also an attractive young woman. In Moscow, she fell in love with a fellow student, Jerzy Jan Pachlowski. He was Polish and in those days marriages with “foreigners” were politically disapproved of. They nevertheless married and for a while, she was torn between going to Poland with him or returning to Kyiv.

In 1956, after graduating with distinction, Kostenko returned to Kyiv. There she gave birth to her daughter, Oksana. Her husband did not want to leave Poland, nor did she want to leave Kyiv. They agreed to separate. With the support of established writers, such as Mykola Rudenko. Kostenko soon published her first anthology of poems – “The Rays of the Earth,” and in 1958, the second one, “Sails,” followed. Her career as a leading representative of Ukraine’s new generation of literati seemed assured.

But there was a big obstacle – the regimentation of literature and patriotic feeling imposed by the Soviet system and insistence on compliance with it. Kostenko’s nonconformism and prominent involvement within a circle of young Ukrainian poets and writers, who became known as the “Sixtiers,” created problems, and there were difficulties getting published again. Instead, manuscript copies of her poems, and those of her colleagues, began to circulate, fostering an image of her as an uncompromising dissenter.

When some of Kostenko’s colleagues were arrested in 1965 and subjected to political trials, Kostenko was among those who organized protests and petitions in their support.

She avoided becoming a political prisoner herself, but the penalty was 16 years of being banned from publication. In the meantime, she remarried. Her second husband, Vasyl Tsvirkunov, director of the Kyiv Dovzhenko Film Studio, provided a certain amount of protection for his firebrand wife, along with the conditions to relax and continue writing “for the drawer.”

Kostenko later recounted that the two of them used to travel all around Ukraine in his disability car (he lost one leg during WWII) and often, when she was suffering from writer’s block, he would drive her into the countryside to recover.

In 1969 the poet gave birth to a son, Vasyl. Her second marriage lasted 25 years until her husband’s death in 2012. Gradually, as the political climate began to change, Kostenko was able to publish again. Her historical work, “Marusia Churai,” which appeared in 1979, became an instant classic.

After independence was achieved in 1991, she chose to remain in the shadows. She did not hide her disappointment with the way in which she felt Ukrainians had failed to make full use of their new freedom – both national and individual. In 2010 Kostenko caused a stir with a bold novel examining the state of Ukrainian society called “Diary of a Ukrainian Madman.” 

After Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2024, the poet gradually reappeared to express her solidarity with her country. This week, on her birthday, she was in fine form at a modest reception surrounded by leading cultural figures and spontaneously reminisced and recited poems. 

As a student, Kostenko once wrote to the famous Ukrainian poet, Maksym Rylsky, that the challenge for a poet is to reconcile the pearl with the shell it is encrusted in.

In her own way, this exceptional woman has managed to shine as a lustrous pearl while relying on her armor to keep the false vanities of life at bay.

Here is one of Lina Kostenko’s short poems:

Wings

Yes, winged ones need no ground.

No ground, then the sky will do.

If no field, then there’s freedom.

If no steam, then clouds will suffice.

For a bird this is probably a given.

But for a human? What about them?

They live on the ground. Do not fly unaided.

But wings they have. Wings they have!

Wings, not of feathers and fluff,

But of truth, honesty and trust.

For some – faithfulness in love.

For some – eternal striving.

For some – dedication in work.

For some – generosity in caring.

For some – song or hope.

Or poetry and dreams.

People may not be able to fly.

But wings they have. Wings they have!

(Translated by Bohdan Nahaylo)