The Originality of the Artistic Style of Hanna Barvinok’s Small Prose

The paper deals with the creative work of Hanna Barvinok (Oleksandra Bilozerska-Kulish), whose literature career began in 1850s and who laid alongside with Marko Vovchok the foundations of Ukrainian female prose. Readers mostly became familiar with her works because of Panteleimon Kulish, who contributed to the publication of her works in his own editions, but never edited them. The author distinguishes the main stages of the creative work of the writer, which are marked by her living on the Motronivka farm until her return to the farm and the period of Hanna Barvinok’s living there together with P. Kulish. At the introductory part, the information about the main publications of Hanna Barvinok’s stories and their assessment by the criticism of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century (including such figures of by Ukrainian literature as Omelyan Ohonovskyi, Borys Hrynchenko, Ivan Franko, Oleksandr Hrushevskyi, Mykola Voronyi and others) is provided. And yet the author of the article, taking into consideration the estimation of Hanna Barvinok’s stories by these people, goes further and focuses on the artistic specificity of Hanna Barvinok, peculiarities of her language, her mastership in revealing the fate of different women, and the uniqueness of her creative work among other authors who wrote about peasant women in the 19th c.