What Ukrainian Literature Has Always Understood About Russia

On February 26, missiles rained down on Kyiv as the Russian army tried to enter the city. During a lull in the fighting, Tamara Hundorova, one of Ukraine’s foremost literary critics, sat calmly in front of her laptop and delivered an online lecture on the Ukrainian modernist writer Lesya Ukrainka, a canonical fin de siècle poet and playwright.

Ukrainka is often reduced to her youthful patriotic verses, which every schoolchild in Ukraine reads. Hundorova, however, spoke of her as a complex dramatist, a feminist, and an anti-colonial thinker. As she ended her talk, she sighed and said:

I never thought I’d be speaking to you from Kyiv on the front line, that I’d be sleeping on the floor in the corridor in fear of bombs, waking up to the sounds of explosions, watching children play in bomb shelters instead of on the playground. But I’m