#  Poetry for a Totalitarian Time: Vasyl Stus and the Terror of History 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **April 24, 2024** 

 05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS-Knafel/North Building, 3rd Floor, Room K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138**  



 

 



 

 ![Bohdan Tokarskyi heashot wearing a black turtleneck and grey blazer.](/sites/g/files/omnuum2186/files/slavic/files/tokarskyi_bohdan_0.png)

 

 **Bohdan Tokarskyi**, HURI Research Fellow and incoming Assistant Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture at Harvard  
Moderator: **George G. Grabowicz**, Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

 IN-PERSON and ONLINE via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online. For more information: [Poetry for a Totalitarian Time: Vasyl Stus and the Terror of History | Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University](https://huri.harvard.edu/event/bohdan-tokarskyi-poetry-for-totalitarian-time-vasyl-stus-and-terror-of-history) .

 “The twentieth century has demanded of the artist the kind of character that is capable of withstanding superhuman overburden”, wrote Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985), Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet, dissident, and Gulag prisoner, shortly before his fateful arrest in 1972. A poignant comment on the violence-ridden past century, Stus’s words also spoke to the particular Ukrainian situation. Stus expressed this idea in his essay on Pavlo Tychyna (1891 - 1967), a Ukrainian modernist-turned-Soviet official poet who was one of the few survivors of Stalin’s Great Terror. The vast majority of Ukrainian modernists did not survive; they were executed en masse in the 1930s. Stus and his generation (often referred to as the shistdesiatnyky, the “sixtiers”) felt a profound cultural, political, and ethical bond with the generation of the 1920s. The sixtiers were confronted with the task of processing the memory of the Great Terror during yet another round of Soviet oppression. In his talk, Bohdan Tokarskyi will explore their literary resistance against Soviet totalitarianism. In particular, he will focus on Stus’s response to the trauma of Stalinist crimes as well as the poet’s alternative lyric temporality that he opposed to the official Soviet construction of time and history.

 This event is organized by Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) as part of the Seminar in Ukrainian Studies event series. It is co-sponsored by the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures.

 Harvard University welcomes individuals with disabilities to participate in its programs and activities. If you would like to request accommodations or have questions about the physical access provided, please contact the Slavic Department at 617-495-4065 or [slavic@fas.harvard.edu](mailto:///slavic@fas.harvard.edu) in advance of your participation or visit. Requests for Sign Language interpreters and/or CART providers should be made at least two weeks in advance, if possible. Please note that the university will make every effort to secure services, but that services are subject to availability.



 

 



 

 

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