Woman as author and heroine in modern Ukrainian literature

The article deals with the role of women as authors and heroines in Ukrainian literature from the period of romanticism to the contemporary era. The female character changes from a stylized innocent girl to Shevchenko\u27s unmarried mothers (pokrytky), where the woman is a symbol of the Mother Ukraine to the first feminist voices in nineteenth-century prose of Ol’gа Kobyljans’ka and Lesja Ukrajinka, interrupted by the bleak frame of faceless socialist realism, focused on work and sacrifice. The female voice later appears in the 1960s in the noble poetry of Lina Kostenko and finally it freely flourishes in the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century in contemporary women\u27s prose