Olha Kobylianska

Olha Kobylianska
1899 (at 36)
Born
Ольга Кобилянська

27 November 1863
Died21 March 1942 (aged 78)
CitizenshipCisleithania (before 1918)
West Ukrainian People's Republic (1918)
Kingdom of Romania (19181940)
USSR (1940–1942)
Occupationswriter, feminist

Olha Yulianivna Kobylianska (Ukrainian: Ольга Юліанівна Кобилянська; 27 November 1863 Gura Humorului, Bukovina, Austro-Hungary – 21 March 1942 Cernăuți, Cernăuți County, Romania) was a Ukrainian and Soviet modernist writer, nationalist and feminist. Kobylianska was a daughter of a Ukrainian nobleman and a Polonized German mother. Kobylianska was mainly self-educated, receiving only four years of formal schooling in the German language. She wrote her first works in German, beginning in 1880. Besides her fluency in German, she learned to speak in both the Ukrainian and Polish languages. In 1898, she published a pioneering treatment of same-sex love, based partly on her own lesbian experiences.