Kovalenko, Liudmyla

Kovalenko, Liudmyla [Коваленко, Людмила], b 25 September 1898 in Mariupol, Katerynoslav gubernia, d 13 June 1969 in Trenton, New Jersey. Writer, journalist, and community figure. Her short stories and translations of such French writers as E. Zola, Honoré de Balzac, Voltaire, and Guy de Maupassant appeared from 1926 in the Soviet Ukrainian journals Chervonyi shliakh, Zhyttia i revoliutsiia, and the journal Nova hromada. After her husband Mykhailo Ivchenko was arrested in 1929, she did not publish prose again until she was in Lviv during the German occupation in 1943. She was an organizer of the Ukrainian Red Cross in Kyiv in 1941. As a postwar displaced person in Germany, she edited the women’s journal Hromadianka (1946–9), was vice-president of the Ukrainian Women's Alliance in Germany, and belonged to the literary organization MUR. In 1950 she immigrated to the United States, where she worked for the Voice of America, contributed to émigré periodicals, and headed the Ukrainian Orthodox Sisterhood. She was a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States, the Association of Ukrainian Journalists in America, the Slovo Association of Ukrainian Writers in Exile, and International PEN. Her major works are the collection of six plays V chasi i prostori (In Time and Space, 1950); the science fiction novel Rik 2245 (The Year 2245, 1958); three story collections on religious themes— Vita nova (1957), Davni dni (Olden Days, 1961), and Dvi krasy (Two Beauties, 1965); and the historical trilogy Nasha ne svoia zemlia (Our Native Land That Is Not Ours), consisting of Stepovi obriï (Steppe Horizons, 1964), Prorist’ (Sprout, 1966), and Ïï okradenu zbudyly (Awakened in Flames, 1968).

Danylo Husar Struk

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 2 (1988).]