Literatura: Ukrainian dissidents
Date and time:
Thursday 8 July, 2021
18:30 - 20:00
Location:
In our seminar, we will delve into the poetry of Vasyl Stus (1938-1985), a Soviet Ukrainian dissident and one of Ukraine’s primary twentieth-century poets, who wrote his most distinct poetic works and prepared his exquisite translations of Goethe and Rilke whilst serving his brutal sentence in the Gulag. We will place Stus in the context of the oppressive Soviet politics of the 1960s and 1970s and the Soviet Ukrainian poetry of this period. Above all, we will explore Stus’s poetics – his unique metaphors, innovative poetic language, and rhetoric of self-address – and read his work alongside the works of Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, and modern Chinese poetry. By investigating Stus’s poetry we will try to answer Friedrich Hölderlin’s famous question: “What are poets for in a destitute time?”
You can either sign up to this seminar as a one-off via eventbrite, or enrol in the full Literatura course - full info here.
If you are a friend or benefactor of the Institute, you are entitled to a discount for the course. Please email us on info@ukrainianinstitute.org.uk to claim your discount and pay directly.
Included in the cost of the seminar:
- course handbook and materials, including English translations of texts studied as part of the seminar.
- access to video recording of the presentation by Prof Hundorova.
Lecturer
Dr Bohdan Tokarsky
Bohdan Tokarsky works at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Potsdam as part of the research project “Europäische Zeiten / European Times – A Transregional Approach to the Societies of Central and Eastern Europe” (EUTIM). He has been a 2020/2021 Prisma Ukraїna Fellow at the Berlin Forum for Transregional Studies. Dr Tokarsky completed his doctoral work as a Gates Cambridge Scholar at the University of Cambridge, where he also taught as Affiliated Lecturer in Ukrainian Studies. In his doctoral thesis, he explored the works of the Soviet Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus. He was also awarded the fellowship of the Ukrainian Research in Switzerland initiative at the University of Basel, where he taught and pursued further research on Vasyl Stus and Soviet (Ukrainian) modernism. In addition to his academic work, Bohdan Tokarsky has also been part of various translation, theatre and poetry projects. He co-authored the verbatim play The Summer Before Everything on revolution and war in Ukraine that was staged in Cambridge and Oxford in 2016, and has been engaged in literary translation, in particular working on the translation of the poetry of Vasyl Stus.
