Nataliya Kobrynska

As mentioned earlier in this section, I don’t know much about my family past my grandmother. It’s a regret of mine that I cannot talk more about my female ancestors. I can rattle off basic facts for my great-grandmother Olena: she was born in 1894 in Sniatyn, came from a family of farmers, got married at 24, moved to Ivano-Frankivsk sometime afterwards, was a housewife throughout her life, etc. But Olena never learned English after moving to the US, cutting her off from most of her descendants, and by the time I was born 20+ years after her death, not much would be said about her personally. She’s a frustratingly empty space that will most likely never be filled.

For the last few years, I’ve tried to piece together my family’s life before WW2 disrupted us. Part of that, of course, is stored in demographic information – names, dates, and places. But history and culture provide the next largest collection of hints after family and archival records fail. In researching Western Ukrainian culture during the 19th and early 20th centuries, I stumbled across one figure who was contemporary with Olena and her parents and surprisingly close to us: Nataliya Kobrynska (nee Ozarkevych).

For the last several months, Nataliya Kobrynska has been a companion of mine, connecting me to the wider culture, society, and even some distant relations of mine in Western Ukraine in the late 19th century. So, I thought it would be fair to give her some space on this site and tell people about one of the more obscure female writers and feminists in Ukraine’s history. This page will not be exhaustive, however, so I do recommend checking out my sources below.

Sources

To do this biographical research on Nataliya Kobrynska, I consulted a few different sources. I will link in any extra sources that I used, but my primary sources are as follows:

Nataliya Kobrynska’s Biography 

Nataliya Ozarkevych was born on 8 June 1851 (1855 in some sources) in Beleluia, in what was then the Halychyna Province of the Habsburg Monarchy, commonly known as Galicia. Beleluia is one of the villages just outside of Sniatyn. Her father was Ivan Ozarkevych, a reverend of the Greek Ukrainian Catholic Church and member of the Austrian Parliament, and her mother was Teofilia Okunevska. Reverend Ozarkevych, like many other priests in his community, was an activist for social progress and, more specifically, advocated for the inclusion of women in higher education and public life. Nataliya also had 4 younger brothers, who were university-educated and participated in public life to a lesser extent. During this time, women were not allowed to have a formal education past the elementary level. Thanks to her father and brothers’ support and resources, Nataliya was able to be educated at home. From a young age, Nataliya was deeply interested in women’s rights and used her informal education to learn how she could advocate for equality in her lifetime.

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In 1871, at the age of 20, Nataliya married Teofil Kobrynsky (1852-1882) and moved to Sniatyn. Kobrynsky was a seminarian – and later, a priest – as well as a musician and folklorist. Luckily, he supported Nataliya’s feminist and literary interests and joined her in her pursuits. Instead of starting a family, they spent their time advocating for women’s liberation and equality in Ukraine as well as translating J. S. Mill’s On the Subjection of Women into Ukrainian. This close marriage and partnership was cut short early, however, by the death of Kobrynsky in 1882, when Nataliya was 31.

Unwilling to remarry (despite multiple proposals from colleagues) and with no other means of support, Nataliya moved back in with her parents, now in Bolekhiv. Bolekhiv is a town in the Kalush region, in the northwest of the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast, so not far from her home village of Beleluia. In the years following Kobrynsky’s death, however, she spent some time traveling abroad and making connections with other Ukrainian national activists. She first visited Vienna with her father, where she met Ivan Franko, one of Ukraine’s most well-known writers, and political writer Ostap Terletsky. Afterwards, she traveled to Geneva and Zurich, where she became acquainted with Mykhaylo Drahomanov, a Ukrainian scholar, historian, and political activist, as well as the brother of Olena Pchilka (an ethnographer, writer, and Lesya Ukrainka’s mother). Her new acquaintances encouraged Nataliya to advocate for women’s social and political rights and to organize a women’s movement to accomplish these goals. Upon returning home, Nataliya lived a modest life in Bolekhiv and devoted her resources to supporting women’s rights and publishing literary works.

Nataliya believed that writing literature was the best way to spread her ideas of feminism and national consciousness to Ukrainian women. This approach was further developed by Franko’s advice to focus more on writing compelling fiction than her drier political works. She chose middle-class women as her primary readership, believing that they were in the best position to bring her proposed changes to the villages. During this time, Nataliya not only advocated for the rights of women but also for the national and civil rights of Ukrainians. This is further evident by the fact that Nataliya only wrote in Ukrainian, despite speaking multiple other languages (Polish, Russian, German, and French).

Nataliya did not rely on only her writing and her connections with other intellectuals to begin her women’s movement. She first gained local prominence when, in August 1884, she participated in a rally for universal suffrage. After the rally, she decided to use this experience to found the Society of Ruthenian Women (Товариство руських женщин) in Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk) on 8 December 1884. This was the first secular women’s organization in Western Ukraine. It was open to all women in Western Ukraine, though, due to Nataliya’s primary language being Ukrainian, it was mostly geared towards Ukrainian women. The primary goal of the society was to assess new literary trends that discussed the place of women in society and promote them to the people, so as to guide them away from more old-fashioned literary works. The main methods for accomplishing this goal were reading circles and discussions. Nataliya’s society would continue meeting until 1932, when it was brought under the larger women’s movement of Western Ukraine. In conjunction with this society, Nataliya headed a women’s delegation to petition for women’s right to study at the university level in 1890 and rallied for the introduction of high schools for girls in 1891. Her other activist efforts included organizing daycare centers and communal kitchens for women in local villages.

Nataliya was also publishing her own works during this time. In 1884, she published The Spirit of the Times (which has been translated, as linked above), and in 1887, she edited and published Pershy vinok (The First Garland) with Olena Pchilka. The First Garland is actually a collection of works by various Ukrainian women from Western and Eastern Ukraine (which was under Russian rule at the time) and is one of the first of its kind in all of Europe. Having embraced her identity as a Ukrainian woman, Nataliya chose to include women from both Western and Eastern Ukraine to unite Ukrainian women’s voices. She would publish 3 more collections like this one between 1893 and 1896, under the title Nasha dolya (Our Fate) and issued by her own publishing house, Zhinocha Sprava (Women’s Cause). More prominent figures at the time, such as Ivano Franko and Lesya Ukrainka, were supportive of Nataliya’s efforts.

After these publications, Nataliya moved to Lviv for about a year in order to continue advocating for women’s rights. However, the women of Lviv were not interested in her works, and she shortly thereafter returned to Bolekhiv. During her lifetime, Nataliya was often dismissed by her other women. For conservative women, Nataliya’s ideas, such as universal suffrage and a separation of politics and church, were unacceptable. For radicals, Nataliya’s support for the family structure and critique of socialist tactics barred her from their favor. And gaining favor with Polish women was impossible because they could not accept a separate Ukrainian people and identity at the time. In consequence, Nataliya had a difficult time finding widespread support during her lifetime.

For a while after this experience, Nataliya stopped writing. This, fortunately, did not last long. Nataliya was still supported by several other Ukrainian writers, such as Lesya Ukrainka and Olha Kobylianska (who Nataliya had previously convinced to write in Ukrainian instead of German), and they encouraged her to continue advocating for women’s rights and writing fiction. She would continue her work until her death.

Nataliya’s final years of life were spent mostly isolated in Bolekhiv, where she died on 22 January 1920. Her tombstone is inscribed with the quote, “My heart no longer aches.” Despite the obscurity and rejection that she faced during her lifetime, her fight for women’s rights has been recognized and celebrated in the century since her death. Nataliya now stands as one of Ukraine’s earliest female national writers and pioneers of women’s rights.

Reflections

Okay, so why did I take up so much space to talk about Nataliya Kobrynska? Why bother going through this much trouble?

1. Most simply, I wanted to give some space to a female Ukrainian writer and activist, especially a lesser known one. There’s so many strong Ukrainian women in our history, and not just Nataliya Kobrynska, but also Olena Pchilka, Olha Kobylianska, Uliana Kravchenko, Lyubov Yanovska, Marko Vovchok, and so many others going back almost 2 centuries. Nataliya is who I have chosen to focus on here, but for anyone looking at older Ukrainian culture, it’s crucial to also give attention to the women who have been fighting for the rights of Ukrainians and women. This especially goes for anyone trying to trace the history of their foremothers, like I have been.

2. Nataliya Kobrynska is one part of the wider Sniatyn culture, which I wanted to acknowledge. Although this site heavily focuses on the folk dress of Sniatyn, there’s more to the local culture and history than just the textiles. Sniatyn has its own version of the Pokuttia-Bukovynian dialect. It has been home to prominent writers such as Marko Cheremshyna, Vasyl Stefanyk, and Nataliya Kobrynska, as well as composer Roman Simovych and contemporary pop singer Iryna Zinkovska. Most notably to me, it was also the hometown of diaspora historian Mykhailo Bazhans’kyi, who memorialized Sniatyn and its diaspora in the decades following his escape from Soviet rule. Sniatyn was also a shtetl before WW2; this has been written about extensively elsewhere. Though small, Sniatyn has a history and culture that, for me, is worth looking into in order to understand the broader context.

3. During her lifetime, Nataliya Kobrynska made a lot of connections and was tied to a lot of names in the Ivano-Frankivsk oblast. While this was surely useful for her while she was advocating for women’s rights, it also left a trail for people like me a century later. Historical records don’t often take the time to note down the activities of women, so information left behind by women like Nataliya Kobrynska is helpful for learning about the women at the time – who they were and what they were doing. Nataliya even left us some really specific information. When she convened the very first meeting for the Society of Ruthenian Women in December 1884, 94 names of women were noted down as having participated. Among these names was one familiar surname: Бурачинська (Burachyns’ka). My great-grandmother Olena was maternally connected with the Burachyns’ka family, and most likely had some familial connection with the two Burachyns’ka women present at Nataliya Kobrynska’s meeting. It even turns out that one of the Burachyns’ka women there, Tsetsylia, was a folklorist! Very cool to know that we had female folklorists working in the Pokuttia & Hutsul regions during the 19th century!

4. Knowing that Nataliya Kobrynska was able to reach and gather women together, I wonder whether Olena and her mother ever included themselves. While living in Stanyslaviv as a middle-class housewife in the late 1910s and 1920s, did Olena ever go to one of the society’s meetings (which continued to run after Nataliya’s death)? Did she read any of Nataliya’s short stories or collections? Did her relatives send word or materials to her and keep her informed? Was she interested in women’s liberation in her free time? And is she the reason why my grandmother Ali and her sister Myroslava started learning foreign languages like English before the possibility of immigration westward ever cropped up? Nataliya Kobrynska provides a glimpse into the lives of many local women in the region at this time, opening some speculation into the lives of my foremothers that is otherwise impossible. And while it is just speculation at the end of the day, it still brings me one step closer to understanding the cultural context of my great-grandmother’s life in Ukraine.

5. And finally, I have my own reasons for interest in Nataliya Kobrynska, beyond just the fact that she is from Beleluia and lived in Sniatyn. Nataliya pushed aside building a family and focused on her research and activism throughout her entire life. She spent her time developing her own beliefs, writing and publishing her works, and actively rallying for equality in her homeland. Considering my own devotion to my research and craft, is it surprising that I find her inspirational? Even as I read through her short stories today, over a century after their publication, I find my own stubbornness and belief in social justice rooted in her words. Despite the chasm of time between us, I can still look at her writings and find something familiar within them. I’m proud that my family’s region has as compelling a figure as Nataliya Kobrynska.