Authors

Discussion

This paper examines the triple marginalisation of nineteenth-century Ukrainian women writers: by gender, by empire, and by canon formation. Focusing on Pershyi vinok (1887), the first Ukrainian women’s anthology edited by Nataliia Kobrynska (1851-1920) and Olena Pchilka (1849-1930), it explores how female authors forged creative agency at the intersection of patriarchal constraint, imperial subordination under both the Russian and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and exclusion from the emerging Ukrainian literary canon. The paper argues that Pershyi vinok functioned simultaneously as a premodernist and a feminist project. It anticipated modernist aesthetics while articulating a pragmatic feminism grounded in education, self-help, and national survival. By situating Kobrynska and her contemporaries within multi-imperial and transnational contexts, the paper challenges Eurocentric models of feminist historiography and world literature, revealing how Ukrainian women transformed marginality into a locus of authorship, solidarity, and cultural resistance.