“Give Me Your Hand”: The Poetics of Address, Memory, and Intertextuality in Mykola Bazhan’s Poem “Deborah”

Image: Mezha (1993, dir. Rolan Serhiienko; Ukrkinokhronika)

Ukraine Seminar

Bohdan Tokarskyi, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures (Ukrainian Literature and Culture), Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

In 1968, Mykola Bazhan’s long poem “Deborah” was published in the Ukrainian Soviet journal Vitchyzna. A prominent Ukrainian modernist and a Nobel Prize nominee, Bazhan had been a futurist-turned official Soviet poet who pushed the boundaries of the Socialist Realist canon in the 1960s. A complex elegy, “Deborah” came in for severe criticism and was banned from further publication, as, inter alia, it broached two highly sensitive subjects censored by the Soviet regime: the Great Terror and the Holocaust. The poem addressed these two traumas through the figures of Raisa Feinshtein, a Jewish pianist friend of the poet believed to have been murdered during the Holocaust, and the Ukrainian avant-garde theatre director Les Kurbas whose work left a deep impression on both Feinshtein and Bazhan and who was executed by the Stalinist regime in 1937. In the first Ukraine Seminar of the year, Bohdan Tokarskyi will explore Bazhan’s poetics of lyric address, memory, and intertextuality in this elaborate poem, whose text and contexts touch upon some of the major junctures of Ukraine’s twentieth-century history and culture.  

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