As we might expect, she was given a good education, chiefly at home, with particular emphasis on the study of modern European languages. By the time that she reached maturity, she had a good knowledge of Russian, English, German, French, Italian, Latin and Greek, and later she learned Spanish. She naturally read and knew the works of the older Ukrainian authors but she was also familiar with such writers as Goethe, Schiller, Victor Hugo, and Byron. She was thoroughly acquainted with the writers of the Romantic school and she was therefore better prepared to bring about that adaptation of their ideas that was beginning to take shape in the world. Her first poem written at the age of twelve was a translation of a poem of Heine and her first independent poem began about the same time with the phrase, “I have no freedom nor fortune, there is left only hope.” At almost the same time she was stricken down with tuberculosis of the bones of the hand and was compelled to stay in bed for months at a time while her young friends were enjoying the pastimes of youth. Finally this seemed to yield to treatment but it was not long before the disease reappeared in her feet. From then on, her life was merely the passage from one system of medical treatment to another. In 1892 at the age of twenty she brought out her first book of poems _On the Wings of Songs_ and this was followed by other volumes, _Thoughts and Dreams_ in 1896, and _Echoes_ in 1902. Meanwhile she lived most of the time in Kiev except during the winters and the long trips necessary for medical treatment. She had to go to the south and she spent her winters in the Crimea, the Caucasus, in Bulgaria where her uncle was professor at the University of Sofia, and in Egypt. She travelled in Italy and Germany and in 1900 underwent a serious operation in Berlin. In 1907 during a period of relief from suffering, she married K. M. Kvitka but the disease soon came on again. The doctors in Berlin advised against further operations and sent her to Egypt but finally even the climate there ceased to have a favorable effect upon her and she passed away in 1913. It was really her iron will that had kept her alive to the age of forty-two and had allowed her to accomplish so much. It was a heroic record of resistance to suffering and disease and undoubtedly her linguistic talents and her love of literature helped to vary the monotony of those months of suffering when she was confined to her bed and was unable to move around freely. Yet with it all she never lost her interest in life and if many of her later works show a preference for exotic and literary subjects, we can well understand it from the nature of her affliction. She was constantly in touch with the leading people of the day and was actively interested in all the reforming movements of the period. Her poems appeared in radical and progressive papers and showed that despite her physical isolation, she was not isolated in mind and thought.