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This book is an attempt to rethink Lesya Ukrainka's biography, in which illness and creativity, Ukraine and the "foreign", politics and literature, classics and modernity, love and death are intertwined.

Illness and writing. The birth of creativity from the trauma experienced at the bedside of the terminally ill Merzhynsky. Spiritual and intellectual closeness to Drahomanov. Relationship with Kobylianska as a metaphor for female culture. The fate of artistic madness, which she experienced in moments of creative exaltation. Travelling around Europe and sanatorium tourism. The status of "otherness" as a recognition of a "new woman" and a "stranger" in the homeland. "Our own" through the prism of historical and cultural exoticism. All of this enabled Larysa Kosach-Kvitka to follow her own path and become a prophetess of the emerging twentieth century.

In the last year of her life, Lesya Ukrainka confessed to her mother: "...only a woman can write the story of Mavka". But the truth is that all her works could be written only by a woman who lived and worked with Todesverachtung, that is, despising death.