O’Connor-Vilinska, Valeriia

O’Connor-Vilinska, Valeriia [О’Коннор-Вілінська, Валерія; Vilins'ka, Valerija], b 21 December 1867 in Mykolaivka, Kremenchuk county, Poltava gubernia, d 19 December 1930 in Poděbrady, Bohemia. Writer and community figure; wife of Oleksander Vilinsky, sister-in-law of Mykola Lysenko, and niece of Mykhailo Starytsky. As a young woman she ran a Ukrainian school and folk theater in Mykolaivka. Later she taught at the Kharkiv eparchial school, was a member of the Publishing Committee of the Kharkiv Literacy Society, and wrote educational pamphlets and feuilletons in the local newspaper. After the Revolution of 1905 she lived in Kyiv, where she wrote the plays Instytutka (The Girls’ School Pupil) and Storinka mynuloho (A Page from the Past). In 1917 she was in the first executive committee (later Little Rada) of the Central Rada and in the presidium of the Ukrainian National Theater society. In 1919 she emigrated with her husband to Vienna and then Poděbrady, where she wrote the novelette Skarb (The Treasure, 1924), parts of a long novel-chronicle, Na emigratsiï (In the Emigration), and memoirs of the Lysenko and Starytsky families (1936). Her works and translations of French literature appeared in Literaturno-naukovyi vistnyk (Kyiv), Siaivo (Kyiv), Volia (Vienna), Nova Ukraïna (Prague), and other periodicals. She committed suicide.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]