The video shows a recital by Ukrainian poet Lina Kostenko at the Ivan Franko Theater on January 31, 2011.
The sixties poet Lina Kostenko was born on March 19, 1930, in the city of Rzhyshchiv, Kyiv region, to a family of teachers. Her father was sentenced as an "enemy of the people" to 10 years in concentration camps.
She moved with her family to Kyiv in 1936 and lived in a workers' settlement on Trukhaniv Island. She began publishing at the age of 16, writing in a literary studio at the Dnipro magazine. She studied at the Kyiv Pedagogical Institute and then continued her studies at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow.
Due to taboos in the publishing world, her poems were published in self-publishing. In 1965, Lina Kostenko signed a letter of protest against the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, and in 1968 she wrote letters in defense of Vyacheslav Chornovil in response to the slander against him in the newspaper Literary Ukraine.
In 1987, she received the Shevchenko Prize for her historical novel in verse, Marusya Churai, which had been in the "drawer" for 6 years.