Maxim Tarnawsky

Maxim Tarnawsky

Maxim Tarnawsky

Maxim Tarnawsky earned his Ph.D. in 1986 from Harvard and is an associate professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. During his four-month stay at Harvard (September–December 2007), Tarnawsky will work on the topic “The Unknown Nechui,” analyzing the writings of Ivan Nechui-Levyts´kyi, the paragon of Ukrainian realism. While Tarnawsky notes that Nechui is certainly not a modernist—he fights this tendency explicitly—he points to the author’s vehemence and passion, coupled with the ambiguity of the aesthetics and themes in his works, and argues that a far more nuanced approach is necessary to understand the mechanisms whereby Ukrainian literature crosses the historical divide from traditionalism to modernity.