Masquerade

Masquerade is a collection of selected prose by Olha Petrivna Drahomanova-Kosach, a prominent Ukrainian writer who most often wrote under the pseudonym Olena Pchilka. In the national cultural space, she accomplished a great deal not only as an author, but also as a public figure, ethnographer, translator, publisher, and patron of the arts. Olena Pchilka's multifaceted creative nature is revealed in her prose, written in various stylistic tones. Similarly, the female characters in these works are very diverse: tender, vulnerable, uninhibited, strong-willed or, conversely, narrow-minded and quarrelsome, but most importantly, all of them are very lively. In the center of the stories from the collection "Masquerade," Olena Pchilka places womanhood: ladies and peasant women, girls and married women. Some of them resist the traditional patriarchal order and bravely pave their way to self-realization. Others, on the contrary, are products, or even victims, of entrenched stereotypes. The realities of the time constantly present the heroines with new challenges, but they cannot destroy their dreams.