Bohdan Tokarskyi

Bohdan Tokarskyi is Assistant Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture.

He completed a Ph.D. in Slavonic Studies and an M.Phil in European Literature and Culture at the University of Cambridge. Before coming to Cambridge (U.K.) he studied international law at the Institute of International Relations based at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv.

He is a scholar of Ukraine’s modern and contemporary literature, with particular interest in underground culture, modern poetry, modernism, and comparative literature.

He has previously taught Ukrainian literature and culture at the universities of Cambridge, Basel, and Potsdam. In the Fall Term 2024, he is teaching the seminar “Poetics of Resistance”, an introductory course to Ukrainian literature and culture. He welcomes inquiries from students interested in the literature and culture of Ukraine.  

Bohdan Tokarskyi is a leading authority on the poetry of the dissident Vasyl Stus, Ukraine’s greatest post-war poet and Gulag prisoner. He is currently working on his monograph on Stus’s poetry, which is set to be the first English-language book on the poet’s work.

His publications also include a book-length essay on Ukrainian Soviet modernism of the 1920s, The Un/Executed Renaissance. Published in hard copy and online, this essay has been downloaded over 1,000 times and quoted in the UK’s leading newspaper The Guardian.

Bohdan Tokarskyi is also a translator of Ukrainian literature into English. His co-translations of the poetry of Vasyl Stus have come out or are forthcoming in international magazines and journals such as AGNI, Apofenie, Asymptote, Los Angeles Review of Books, Modern Poetry in Translation, and Two Lines. Together with Nina Murray, he is currently finishing a volume of Vasyl Stus’s selected poetry in English.  

In addition to his academic and translation work, Bohdan Tokarskyi has also been part of various theatre and literary projects. He co-authored the documentary play The Summer Before Everything on the Euromaidan revolution and Donbas war in Ukraine that was staged in Cambridge and Oxford in 2016 and 2022. He has also (co)organised a number of impactful cultural events such as the Kharkiv International Theatre Festival Kulish. Kurbas. Shakespeare, which showcased some of the prominent works of Ukrainian modernist drama.

Selected Publications

“Dmytro Zahul: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism from Bukovyna” (in German), in: Steffen Höhne, Oxana Matiychuk, and Markus Winkler (eds.), Handbuch der Literatur aus Czernowitz und der Bukowina [Handbook of Literature from Chernivtsi and Bukovyna] (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2024)

“Vasyl Stus’ Palimpsests: ‘The Path Submerges in the Dark of Sleep’” (in German), in: Alexander Kratochvil (ed.), Interpretationen von Werken der ukrainischen Literatur [Interpretations of Works of Ukrainian Literature] (Stuttgart: Metzler, forthcoming in September 2024)

“Foreword: Measure of Poetry” (in Polish), in: Wasyl Stus, Czas twórczości / Dichtenszeit i listy do syna [Time of Creativity/Dichtenszeit and Letters to His Son], ed. Diana Krawiec (Warsaw: Staromiejski Dom Kultury, 2023)

The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies (Berlin: Forum of Transregional Studies, 2021)

Book-length essay with more than 1,000 downloads, quoted in The Guardian

“Selfhood, Body, Metaphor and Metonymy in the Poetry of Walt Whitman and Vasyl’ Stus,” The Slavonic and East European Review 98(3), July 2020, pp. 401-433

“Thriving in Isolation and Beyond: The Empowering Poetry of Vasyl Stus”, Los Angeles Review of Books, June 2020

Translations

(together with Nina Murray, Uilleam Blacker, and Julius Kochan)

“My head is weightless…” and “The Model”, Modern Poetry in Translation

“The Mummy” and “I feel as though it isn’t me who lives…”, Two Lines

The cycle “Pebbles” and “In an attempt to escape my doubts…”, Apofenie

 “Here’s the sun for you…”, Asymptote

“I wandered through the city of my youth…” and “One-thousand-year-old Kyiv…”, Apofenie

“I knew: the world concealed itself from me…” and “The path submerges in the dark of sleep…”, LARB

Image: Thomas Roese.