Olha Kobylianska was a Ukrainian writer, intellectual and advocate for women's equality who imagined a different future for women at a time when both women's freedom and Ukrainian cultural identity were constrained.
She used literature to make that future visible.
Kobylianska's heroines were cultured, independent and self-aware. They questioned the roles society prescribed for them, sought intellectual and personal freedom and, perhaps most radically, understood themselves as the authors of their own lives.
Like the women she created, Kobylianska lived according to many of those same principles. In 1892, she published Equal Rights of Women and helped found the Women's Association of Bukovyna.
In Tsarivna, she writes of the desire to have the freedom to be one's own goal and, above all, to cultivate one's own spirit.
It is a striking idea: A woman as her own goal.
Not defined by whom she marries, serves or belongs to. A person with an interior life, ambitions and a vision for who she might become.
Kobylianska understood that before we can create a different world, we have to be able to imagine ourselves living differently within it.
In this Garden of Even™ portrait, she stands against the mountains and waters of Bukovina, surrounded by vivid colours and ornamentation reinterpreted from the folklore of her community. The landscape grounds her revolutionary vision in the culture and place from which it emerged.
