Date:
Location:
A lecture by
Bohdan Tokarskyi, HURI Research Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard
Moderated by George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online.
About the Lecture
“The twentieth century has demanded of the artist the kind of character that is capable of withstanding superhuman overburden”, wrote Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985), Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet, dissident, and Gulag prisoner, shortly before his fateful arrest in 1972. A poignant comment on the violence-ridden past century, Stus’s words also spoke to the particular Ukrainian situation. Stus expressed this idea in his essay on Pavlo Tychyna (1891 - 1967), a Ukrainian modernist-turned-Soviet official poet who was one of the few survivors of Stalin’s Great Terror. The vast majority of Ukrainian modernists did not survive; they were executed en masse in the 1930s. Stus and his generation (often referred to as the shistdesiatnyky, the “sixtiers”) felt a profound cultural, political, and ethical bond with the generation of the 1920s. The sixtiers were confronted with the task of processing the memory of the Great Terror during yet another round of Soviet oppression. In his talk, Bohdan Tokarskyi will explore their literary resistance against Soviet totalitarianism. In particular, he will focus on Stus’s response to the trauma of Stalinist crimes as well as the poet’s alternative lyric temporality that he opposed to the official Soviet construction of time and history.
About the Speaker
Bohdan Tokarskyi is a translator and scholar of Ukraine’s modern and contemporary literature, specializing in underground culture, modernism, and comparative literature. Beginning this July, he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, teaching courses on Ukrainian literature and culture. He is currently a HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute working on his monograph on the poetics of authenticity of the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus. Bohdan completed his PhD on Stus’s works at the University of Cambridge, where he also taught courses in Ukrainian Studies. Before coming to Harvard, he did research and taught in Europe, most recently at the University of Potsdam in Germany. Bohdan is the author of several publications, including the book-length essay The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (Berlin, 2021). His essays and translations have appeared in numerous international literary magazines. Together with Nina Murray, he is working on a volume of translations of Stus’s poetry into English. [Photo credit: Thomas Roese]
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This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures at Harvard.
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