Lina Vasylivna Kostenko is a writer, poetess of the sixties, laureate of the Shevchenko Prize.
Place of Birth, Education
She was born on March 19, 1930 in the city of Rzhyshchiv, Kyiv region, in the family of teachers Vasyl Hryhorovych and Zinaida Yefimovna Kostenko.
In 1936, the family moved from Rzhyshchev to Kyiv.
From 1937 to 1941 she studied at school No. 100, located in a workers’ village on Trukhanov Island. In 1943, the school, along with the entire village, was burned down. These events are reflected in the poem “I grew up in the Venice of Kyiv”.
After receiving secondary education at school No. 123, she entered the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute. Subsequently, she continued her studies at the Alexei Gorky Moscow Literary Institute, which she graduated in 1956.
Sixties
Kostenko became one of the most famous representatives of the generation of young Ukrainian poets at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s. During the period of the “sixties”, new stylistic trends appeared in Ukrainian literature, which required the creation of original, non-standard works, in the spirit of the avant-garde, but at the same time sharply critical of the authorities and the ruling regime.
The poetry collections “Rays of the Earth”, published in 1957, and “Sails”, which was published in 1958, aroused considerable attention among readers. The release in 1961 of the collection “Wanderings of the Heart” not only confirmed the previous success, but also testified to the creative maturity of the author.
In the early 1960s, Kostenko participated in literary evenings held by the Kyiv Club of Creative Youth. Starting in 1961, her work began to be criticized for being supposedly “apolitical”. In the same period, the planned film adaptation of the film based on her script called “The Road of the Winds” was canceled.
On April 8, 1963, during an ideological meeting, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine on Ideology Andriy Skaba said that formalist experiments with the word inevitably distort and obscure the ideological and artistic content of a literary work. As an example, he cited the work of several young poets, including Mykola Vingranovsky, Ivan Drach and Lina Kostenko. This statement was a kind of signal for the beginning of a campaign of pressure on the “sixties”.
In the same 1963, the poetry collection “Star Integral” was withdrawn from print, and the book “Prince’s Mountain” was withdrawn at the stage of layout.
During this period, her poetry continued to appear in printed publications outside Ukraine – in particular, in Polish newspapers and Czechoslovak magazines, while in the Ukrainian press her poems appeared extremely rarely. A significant part of her works was distributed in samizdat.
In 1965, the writer signed a letter protesting against the wave of arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. She was present in the courtroom in Lviv during the consideration of the cases of Mykhailo Osadchyi and Mykhailina Zvarychevska. During the trial of the Goryn brothers, Kostenko threw flowers at their feet as a sign of support. Together with Ivan Drach, she appealed to the editors of the magazine “Zhovten” and to the writers’ circle of Lviv with the initiative to defend the arrested.
In May 1966, during a meeting in the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, when “nationalist renegades” were stigmatized, some of the young people present in the hall expressed support for Kostenko, who spoke out in defense of her own views and publicly supported Ivan Svitlychnyi, Opanas Zalyvakha, Mykhailo Kosiv and Bohdan Horyn.
In 1968, Kostenko wrote letters in support of Vyacheslav Chornovol. After that, her name disappeared from Soviet newspapers and magazines for a long time. During that period, she continued to write, but the works were not printed and were stored in a “drawer”.
In 1973, she was included in the so-called “black lists” prepared by the secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine for ideology Volodymyr Malanchuk. Only after his release, in 1977, the collection of poems “Over the Banks of the Eternal River” was published.
Two years later, in 1979, on the basis of a separate resolution of the Presidium of the Writers’ Union of Ukraine, a historical novel in verse “Marusya Churay” was published. In 1987, this book brought the author the Taras Shevchenko State Prize of the Ukrainian SSR.
Lina Kostenko’s creative work also includes the poetry collections “Uniqueness”, published in 1980, and “The Garden of Unmelting Sculptures”, which appeared in print in 1987. In the same year, a collection of poems for children “The Elder King” was published.
New century
Kostenko’s poem “Berestechko” designed by the artist Georgy Yakutovych was published in 2010 by the publishing house “Lybid”.
In 2010, the first prose novel was also published – “Notes of the Ukrainian Self-Made”. The demand for the book exceeded expectations, as a result of which the novel disappeared from the shelves of bookstores for a while.
In February 2011, Kostenko presented a new poetry collection “The River of Heraclitus”, which included both previously written works and 50 new poems. The very next year, in 2012, the publishing house “A-ba-ba-ha-la-ma-ha” published the collection “Three Hundred Poems. Favorites”.
On April 9, 2012, on the birthday of the French poet Charles Baudelaire, a presentation of a monograph about Lina Kostenko entitled “There are poets for epochs” took place.
In July 2018, Lina Kostenko joined an open letter in support of Ukrainian director Oleg Sentsov, imprisoned in Russia.
Marital Status
Lina Kostenko has been married twice and has two children.
From her first marriage to the Polish Slavist Jerzy-Jan Pachlowski, she had a daughter, Oksana Pahlovska, a writer, scientist and translator who gained recognition both in Ukraine and abroad. In 2010, Oksana became a laureate of the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine.
In her second marriage to Vasyl Tsvirkunov, a film director and director of the Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Studio in the 1960s and 1970s, a son, Vasyl, was born. He chose the technical path, became a programmer and lives and works in the United States of America (USA).
