Marko Vovchok (, ; nee Mariia Vilinskа, surname by the first marriage: Markovych, surname by the second marriage: Lobach-Zhuchenko, ; 22 December 1833 – 10 August 1907) was a Ukrainian female writer of Russian descent.Засенко О. Є. Вовчок Марко (справжнє ім'я — Вілінська Марія Олександрівна). Дзеверін І. О. Українська літературна енциклопедія. К., 1988. — Т. 1: А-Г. — С. 328-343. Her pen name, Marko Vovchok, was invented by Panteleimon Kulish.Марко Вовчок: фатальна жінка української літератури Her works had an anti-serfdom orientation and described the historical past of Ukraine. In the 1860s, Vovchok gained considerable literary fame in Ukraine after the publication in 1857 of a Ukrainian-language collection, Folk Tales.
In terms of literary fiction, Marko is considered to be one of the first influential modernist authors in Ukraine. Her works "shaped the development of the Ukrainian short story". Also, she enriched the Ukrainian literature with a number of new genres, in particular, the social story (InstytutkaNote:Institutka/Instytutka is a colloquial Russian/Ukrainian term for a student of a finishing school, colloquially called институт благородных девиц (institut blagorodnykh devits)). The story Marusya, translated and adapted into French, became popular in Western Europe at the end of the 19th century.
After a scandal over the plagiarism of her translations into Russian in the 1870s, she almost ended her literary career. Later it was uncovered that she didn't do the translations in question, but hired underpaid ghostwriters."Як Марко Вовчок "літературних негрів" наймала" Until now, there are different opinions about the authorship of Ukrainian works by Marko Vovchok. Discussions about her magnum opus Folk Tales have been going on since the middle of the 19th century: many literary critics (including the editor of the collection Panteleimon Kulish) believe that it was co-authored with her first husband, ethnographer Opanas Markovych.
Biography
Mariya Vilinska was born in 1833 in the Oryol Governorate of the Russian Empire into the family of an army officer and a noblewoman. After she lost her father at the age of 7, she was raised at her aunt's estate and then sent off to study first to Kharkov (now Kharkiv, Ukraine) and then to Oryol. In 1851 she moved to Ukraine, having married Opanas Markovych, a folklorist and ethnographer who was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius.Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak. Feminists Despite Themselves: Women in Ukrainian Community Life, 1884–1939 (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, 1988), p. 9. From 1851 till 1858 she lived in Chernihiv, Kyiv and Nemyriv, assisting her husband with his ethnographic work, studying the Ukrainian culture and language. In 1857 Marko Vovchok wrote Narodni opovidannya (Folk Stories). It was met with immediate acclaim in Ukrainian literary circles, in particular from Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish, and in Russia, after it had been translated into Russian and edited by Ivan Turgenev as Ukrainskie narodnye rasskazy (Ukrainian Folk Tales, 1859).
After a short stay in Saint Petersburg in 1859, Marko Vovchok moved to Central Europe, where she resided in Germany, France, Italy and Switzerland. From 1867 to 1878, she again lived in Saint Petersburg, where due to the prohibition against the Ukrainian language she wrote and translated for Russian magazines. Vovchok wrote in Russian Zhivaya dusha (The living soul, 1868), Zapiski prichyotnika (Notes of a junior deacon, 1870), V glushi (In the backwoods, 1875), and several other novels.
After gaining considerable publicity for her plagiarism, when she attributed other people's Russian translations to herself, and the collapse of the Translations of the Best Foreign Writers magazine, Vovchok left St. Petersburg in 1872 and settled on the estate of her acquaintances in the Tver province. Living in the "province", she continued to write in Russian. In particular, at this time her novels and short stories "Warm Nest" (Ukr. Teple Gnezdechko, 1873), "In the Wilderness" (Ukr. In the game, 1875), "Rest in the village" (Ukr. Rest in the village, 1876—1899), etc.
From 1878, after marrying the much younger Mikhail Lobach-Zhuchenko, she lived in her husband's places of service in various parts of the Russian Empire: in the Northern Caucasus (Stavropol), and 1885–1893 in the Kiev Governorate (Boguslav, from 1887 - Khokhitva), where she proceeded with her work on Ukrainian folklore and a dictionary. At the beginning of the 1900s Mariya Vilinska restored her contact with Ukrainian publishers. Later, the Lobach-Zhuchenko family settled in the Russian city of Nalchik, Terek region, living there until Maria's death on 10 August 1907.
Family Vilinska was the wife of Ukrainian ethnographer Opanas Markovych and of Russian officer Mikhail Lobach-Zhuchenko, the mother of Russian publicist Bohdan Markovych, the cousin of Russian literary critic Dmitry Pisarev, the older sister of Russian writer Dmitry Vilinsky, and the aunt of Ukrainian diplomat Oleksandr Vilinskyi.
Vovchok's Folk Stories Vovchok published several collections of short stories over her career. Vovchok published her first collection in 1858 in St. Petersburg entitled Narodni opovidannia (Folk Stories). This collection was published by P. Kulish, who had published two of her stories the year prior. Five of the stories in her first volume were about serfdom and contained anti-serfdom sentiment. In 1859, in Russian, she published a collection of folk storied called Stories from the Folk Life of Russia. She published "Instytutka" in the same year. In 1862, Vovchok published her second volume of folk stories in Ukrainian and she published a third in 1865. These collections of folk stories were Vovchok's most influential and well-known works, as well as those that contributed to Ukrainian literary culture the most.
Themes and Literary Style Vovchok tended to write three broad categories of folk stories. She often centered serfs, free peasants, or more traditional Ukrainian fables and tales. She also usually depicted women as the protagonists of these stories. Her empathetic and emotional portrayals of serf and peasant women caught the attention of many Russian and Ukrainian readers, as well as her detailed descriptions of the effects of serfdom on women. Vovchok's focus on women is present in almost all of her stories, regardless of plot and other themes. She focused often on the domestic life of women, as well as the individual and specific difficulties they faced. Vovchok also wrote many stories about freed serfs, in which she focused more on the domestic life that was possible for members of the freed serf class. These stories often overlapped with the themes and plots that were found in other typical folk stories of the time and region. She emphasizes the joys and hardships that freed serfs could face, but she often included the caveat that no matter the hardships freed serfs face, they were much happier just being out from under the yoke of serfdom. In the few English translations of Vovchok's work, often her fables and folk songs are omitted and are therefore not well documented in the English language.
Vovchok combined poetic and folk song influences with realism in many of her stories. She often placed emphasis on her serf and peasant characters by leaving members of the aristocracy and landed gentry unnamed (referring to them as "master", "mistress", "old lady", etc.). In addition, her stories are often narrated by serf or free peasant women with an emphasis on Ukrainian vernacular. Vovchok's stories often have a rhythmic narration and many epithets, calling back to her folk song influences. In her stories about freed serfs and free Ukrainian peasants, Vovchok's plots also often leaned toward Romanticism.
Anti-Serfdom Themes Many of Vovchok's stories containing anti-serfdom themes were published in the years before the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861. In her stories about serfdom, Vovchok focuses on the cruelty of the nobility and the resilience of the serfs. She outlines the way that masters often treated young girls on their estates, and the attitudes of other serfs in the household who are unable or unwilling to look after each other.
"Odarka" (1858) from Narodni opovidannia (Folk Stories) "Odarka" tells the story of Odarka, the young daughter of a serf family. Having just turned fifteen, she is requested by the landlord of the estate, a man who had "destroyed more than one girl's happiness." After she is taken to the main house, her parents and aunt hear nothing of her for a long time until she sneaks home. Odarka tells the family that she was threatened, beaten, and finally raped. Nobody in the household would help her out of fear of the master and because she was not the first girl to be used in such a way. The next day, she is collected back to the house by two servants who again emphasize their lack of agency in the matter. Instead of being taken back to the old master, Odarka and her aunt are given to the young master and his Polish wife, who was convinced to save Odarka by taking her as her servant. Vovchok also highlights the cruelty and violence that can be performed by mistresses. At the new manor, she is humiliated and forced to dance by her new mistress and the children of the other nobles. In "Odarka", although the young master's wife initially seems to help Odarka by removing her from the old master's household, she eventually turns cruel toward to girl, calling her lazy and taking pleasure in her humiliation. She likes to make her dance until she collapses and the children of nobility throw stones at her. Odarka eventually falls ill from their torment and her homesickness. She dies soon after, wishing to return home to her mother and father.
"Instytutka"(1859)
The novel was translated in English as After Finishing School and in French as Une Dame Instruite Une Dame Instruite It is the story of a Ukrainian serf maidservant to a cruel mistress who came back home from a finishing school.
Plot