Hryhorenko, Hrytsko

Hryhorenko, Hrytsko (Григоренко, Грицько; pen name of Олександра Судовщикова-Косач; Oleksandra Sudovshchykova-Kosach), b March 1867 in Makarev, Kostroma gubernia, northern Russia, d 27 April 1924 in Kyiv. Writer, translator, and social activist; the wife of Mykhailo Kosach and sister-in-law of Lesia Ukrainka. Together with Kosach and Ukrainka she was active in radical Ukrainophile student circles and the writers’ circle Pleiada (1888–93). Her first collection of prose, Nashi liudy na seli (Our Rural People), was published in 1898. Hryhorenko’s naturalistic stories depict the hardship, destitution, and moral decay of life in the Ukrainian village and in exile, and have been likened to Vasyl Stefanyk’s. She also wrote eight plays (five for children) and a collection of children’s stories Ditky (Little Children, 1918), and translated French (Jules Verne), English, and Swedish literature into Ukrainian. Her complete works (in two volumes) were published in Kharkiv in 1930, and selections appeared in Kyiv in 1918, 1929, and 1959.

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