Yet most of the older writers had been either primarily scholars or provincial writers. Few of them had travelled abroad and most of them had confined their works to the contemporary life of Ukraine, to the recording of national customs and to direct attempts to solve the most pressing problems of the day. It gave a narrowness to Ukrainian literature which prevented it from taking its rightful place in the literature of the world. There was needed a new type of writer who would be no less patriotic, no less devoted to the national cause, but who was familiar with the world, with modern literary developments, and with the aspirations of other peoples, especially in Western Europe. The person who was to exercise that influence upon Ukraine was the poetess who wrote under the pseudonym of Lesya Ukrainka. Larisa Kosacheva, for that was her real name, labored under no less difficulties than her predecessors. Yet these were strikingly different, since her greatest handicap was ill health. For practically the whole of her adolescent and adult life, she was a hopeless invalid. She never knew a healthy day, and it was the power of her mind and her own spiritual resources that kept her alive and allowed her to triumph over all obstacles and to express her faith and confidence in a better day to come. The careful reader can see the effects of her illness upon her outlook on life and yet no author has more carefully hidden her personal burdens in her devotion to a great cause. It is much harder to connect her poems and her biography than it is in the case of most writers, for in reality her mind and body were separated and the courage of the one has little relationship to the weakness of the other. She was born on February 25, 1871, in Russian Ukraine. She came of a prominent intellectual family, for her uncle was none other than Mikhaylo Drahomaniv, who was at that time at the height of his influence and was working actively to bring the Ukrainian movement in line with the other democratic movements of the world. Her childhood friends were children of similar families and formed a group that was decidedly precocious and superior.