Marko Vovchok (born Mariia Aleksandrovna Vilinskaia) was a writer of short stories and novels in Russian and Ukrainian who achieved some prominence in the mid-nineteenth century as the author of peasant tales and satirical accounts of the Russian gentry. Vovchok also worked as an editor at Otechestvennye zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland) and elsewhere, and she was active as a translator of at least five languages. Closely bound up in the literary life of her day, she was the addressee of poems by Taras Shevchenko and Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov. Briefly championed by mid-nineteenth-century radical critics as an important voice in the chorus of "denunciatory prose," Vovchok was uneven in her achievement as a writer. Her prose and its reception nonetheless suggest some of the intense forces at work in mid-nineteenth-century Russia and the ways in which ideological concerns came to impinge upon literary careers.

Mariia Aleksandrovna Vilinskaia was...