Ukrainian dissidents and the Soviet era with Bohdan Tokarsky | Literatura 2024

Ukrainian dissidents: Vasyl Stus and Vasyl Holoborodko

NB: registration will close 10 minutes before the seminar, 18:20 BST on 20 June.

The third seminar of the Literatura course will take you back to the USSR, where Dr Bohdan Tokarsky (Harvard University) will trace the footsteps of poets affected by Soviet repressions with you. 

‘We will delve into the works of Vasyl Stus (1938–1985), Ukraine’s most significant postwar poet and a Gulag prisoner, and Vasyl Holoborodko (born in 1945), a unique yet sorely underexplored underground lyrical voice from the Kyiv school of poetry. We will look into the (Ukrainian) Soviet literary landscape of the crucial period of the 1960s and 1970s, and the relationship between poetics and politics during the Thaw and Brezhnev era. Against this background, we will read and analyse Stus’s intensely existential poetry that innovatively and radically explores selfhood, and Holoborodko’s powerful poetic images and metaphors so at odds with the Soviet literary canon. Inevitably, we will also discuss the significance of Stus and Holoborodko in contemporary Ukraine and the salient ways in which the history of Ukrainian dissent casts light on the reasons and stakes of Russia’s ongoing, horrific war against Ukraine.’

Dr Tokarsky is a Ukrainian-English translator and scholar; he will be an Assistant Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard, teaching courses on Ukrainian literature and culture. You can learn more about his credentials up to that point here.