HURI Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University

February - May 2024
Supported by HURI with the Orest Hladky & Maria Lubomyra Kohutiak Hladky Fund

HURI Research Project

Between Modernism and the Gulag: Vasyl Stus’s Poetics of Authenticity

The works of Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) are at the heart of this book project. Stus was one of Ukraine’s most complex and sophisticated twentieth-century poets, a Soviet dissident and a Gulag prisoner. This project offers the first comprehensive study of the groundbreaking exploration of subjectivity in Stus’s poetry. Between Modernism and the Gulag scrutinizes the poet’s unique concept of the self as samosoboiunapovnennia (“filling-the-self-with-self”) and 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 the poet’s works from the perspective of medical humanities (applying psychoanalytic theory and neuroscience) as well as phenomenology.

Biography

Bohdan Tokarskyi is an author, scholar, and translator. His research focuses on Ukraine’s modern and contemporary literature, with a special interest in underground culture, modernism, and comparative literature. With a background in international law, he went on to study European literatures and cultures at the University of Cambridge. At Cambridge, he completed his PhD on the works of the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus and taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies. He has also carried out research and taught at the University of Basel and University of Potsdam. He is the author of The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (2021) as well as a number of publications on Ukrainian dissident poetry, including his comparative study of Stus’s and Walt Whitman’s poetics of the self published in The Slavonic and East European Review in 2020. He is also co-author of the verbatim play The Summer Before Everything (2016), which shares stories from Ukraine following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in the Donbas. His essays and translations have appeared in international literary magazines such as Apofenie, Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Two Lines. He is currently working, together with Nina Murray, on the first professional English-language volume of Vasyl Stus’s poetry, a book project that has won a 2023 Peterson Literary Fund Translation-in-Progress Grant. [Photo credit: Thomas Roese]