Marko Vovchok
Marko Vovchok (, birth name: 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. Her pen name, Marko Vovchok, was invented by Panteleimon Kulish. 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 (Instytutka). 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 even didn't do the translations in question, but hired ghostwriters, underpaid, too. Vilinska's 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 a Ukrainian diplomat. Until now, there are different opinions about the authorship of Ukrainian works by Marko Vovchko. 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 this collection was co-authored with her first husband, the 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 Aphanasyy Markovych, a folklorist and ethnographer who was a member of the Brotherhood of Saints Cyril and Methodius. From 1851 till 1858 she lived in Chernihiv, Kiev and Nemyriv, assisting her husband with his ethnographic work and learning the Ukrainian culture and language. In 1857 Marko Vovchok wrote Narodni opovidannya (Folk Stories). It 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