Title of Research

Monograph: ‘A Fragment of Wholeness’: The Making of Self in the Works of Vasyl’ Stus

Abstract

At the heart of my book project are the works of Vasyl Stus (1938-1985), one of Ukraine’s most complex and sophisticated twentieth-century poets, a Soviet dissident and a Gulag prisoner. My project offers the first comprehensive study of the groundbreaking exploration of subjectivity in Stus’s poetry. A Fragment of Wholeness scrutinizes the poet’s unique concept of the self as samopromynannia (the non-coincidence of the self), which is constantly en route between Platonism and existentialism, modernism and postmodernism, romanticism and phenomenology, the Baroque and the Gulag. From this perspective, I seek to showcase Stus’s contributions to world literature and to underscore his key position in the landscape of modernist European poetries and in Soviet dissident literature. Drawing upon extensive archive materials and various genres of Stus’s writing, my reading investigates the poet’s innovative language, his original use of metaphor and self-address, while also regarding Stus from the perspective of medical humanities (applying psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience, psychiatry) and phenomenology.

Short Biography

Bohdan Tokarsky is a literary scholar specialising in Ukraine’s twentieth-century and contemporary literature, with a research interest in the intersections between poetry, philosophy and psychology. He completed his doctoral work on the poetry of the Soviet dissident poet Vasyl Stus at the University of Cambridge where he also taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies. He was a Prisma Ukraїna Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and a URIS Fellow at the University of Basel. He has also organised and participated in a number of poetry, theatre, translation and cultural diplomacy projects. Currently, Tokarskyi works as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Potsdam as part of the project “Europäische Zeiten/European Times”.   

Research Interests

Ukrainian twentieth-century poetry; the Garrotted Renaissance; modernism in Europe and beyond; ecopoetics; medical humanities; law and literature; a history of laughter