Solomiia Pavlychko

Solomiia Dmytrivna Pavlychko (; December 15, 1958 – December 31, 1999) was a Ukrainian literary critic, philosopher, feminist, and translator. She is considered as one of the pioneering scholars to introduce gender studies and feminist analysis to Ukraine.

Biography Solomiia Pavlychko was born December 15, 1958, in Lviv. Her father was the Ukrainian poet Dmytro Pavlychko, and her mother was Bohdana Pavlychko, a doctor. She graduated in English and French from the Romance-Germanic Faculty of Kyiv University, earning a PhD in English literature in 1984.

From 1985 she worked at the National Academy of Science of Ukraine. She was a Doctor of Philosophy, a professor at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, who in 1990, launched an initiative to found women's studies in Ukraine. Inviting scholars Vira Ageyeva, Tamara Hundorova, and Natalka Shumylo to participate, Pavlychko established a feminist seminar at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine in September 1990. It was the first time the methodology of feminist analysis and gender criticism was introduced in the country. These same women established a feminist section in the academic journal Slovo i Chas (Word and Time) and began publishing works such her 1991 article Is a Feminist School Necessary for Ukrainian Literary Studies? The work of these scholars inspired other academics throughout Ukraine to establish women's and gender studies programs. and also taught at the restored Kyiv Mohyla Academy. She was also a prolific translator: among her Ukrainian translations are William Golding's Lord of the Flies (Kyiv, 1999) She left unfinished a biography of the Ukrainian poet and orientalist Ahatanhel Krymsky.

Solomiia Pavlychko died on December 31, 1999, of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning and was buried on 4 January 2000 in Kyiv's Baikove Cemetery.

Work Already as a high school student, Solomiya consulted her father, who during that time worked as chief editor of Vsesvit magazine, on the topic of contemporary British literature. During her studies of Romance and Germanic philology she researched new English novels, reflected on the works of Byron, edited translations of T. S. Eliot and translated works of Emily Dickinson. Following her doctor's thesis, she continued her research of foreign literature, but in 1990 started working in the sphere of literary theory at the invitation of Viacheslav Briukhovetsky. Concentrating predominantly on Ukrainian literature, Pavlychko studied its works with the use of theories such as structuralism, psychoanalysis and postcolonialism, which had been unavailable in Soviet times. She was known as a collector of books and art, loved sushi and attended football games.

Her first marriage was to Mykhailo Zahrebelny, son of Ukrainian writer Pavlo Zahrebelny. The couple had one daughter Bohdana (Dana), born in 1987. After divorcing Zahrebelny in 1990, Pavlychko married her publishing companion, Canadian political scientist Bohdan Krawchenko. Solomiya's daughter Dana continued her mother's work and headed the Osnovy publishing house from 2011 to 2024.

Publications The Philosophical Poetry of American Romanticism (in Russian, Kyiv, 1988) Byron: His Life and Works (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 1989) Letters from Kyiv (in English, Edmonton, 1992) The Labyrinths of Thought: The Intellectual Novel of Contemporary Great Britain (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 1993) The Discourse of Modernism in Ukrainian Literature (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 1997, 2nd ed. 1999)

Posthumous publications Nationality, Sexuality, Orientalism: the Complex World of Ahatanhel Krymsky (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 2000, 2nd ed. 2001) Foreign Literature: Studies and Critical Articles (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 2001) Theory of Literature (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 2002) Feminism: Articles, Studies, Exchanges and Interviews (in Ukrainian, Kyiv, 2002)