Poetry against the system: Vasyl Stus and the untold story of Ukrainian dissidents
Date and time:
Thursday 12 March, 2020
19:00 - 20:00
Location:
Ukrainian Institute London
79 Holland Park
London
W11 3SW
In the late Soviet period, Vasyl Stus was a leading Ukrainian dissident. In over a decade of imprisonment in the Gulag, Stus managed to write his magnum opus, securing his position as one of Ukraine’s most sophisticated twentieth-century poets. Stus’s story is as pressing as ever – with his hometown Donetsk occupied and more than 100 Ukrainian political prisoners currently in Russian prisons.
Join us for a thought-provoking talk with Bohdan Tokarsky and Uilleam Blacker, featuring poetry readings and a short screening of documentary footage.
This event is held in partnership with PEN International. PEN members provided moral support for Stus and his fellow Ukrainian political prisoners in the Gulag. PEN’s commitment to supporting imprisoned writers around the world remains of vital importance for Ukraine today.
All proceeds will go towards supporting the work of the Ukrainian Institute London.
The event will be held in English.
£10 standard / £7 concession
Speaker
Bohdan Tokarsky
Bohdan Tokarsky is an Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies at the University of Cambridge, who has recently completed his doctoral thesis on the poetry of Vasyl Stus. He is a literary scholar, writer and translator.
Speaker
Uilleam Blacker
Uilleam Blacker is Associate Professor in comparative East European culture at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. His areas of research interest are the literatures and cultures of Ukraine and Poland and cultural memory in eastern Europe. His monograph Memory, the City and the Legacy of World War II in East-Central Europe was published by Routledge in 2019. He is co-author of Remembering Katyn (Polity, 2012) and co-editor of Memory and Theory in Eastern Europe (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2013). He has published widely on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and culture. He has also translated the work of several contemporary Ukrainian writers, including, most recently, Oleg Sentsov’s short story collection Life Went On Anyway (Deep Vellum, 2019).
