Taras Shevchenko: What We Know, What We Don’t Know and What We’re Doing About It

Speaker: George G. Grabowicz, Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
Moderator: Serhiy Bilenky, Director of the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute at HURI
In-Person and Online via Zoom Webinar (live). Pre-registration is required to attend online, Register for Zoom 

About the Event

This talk will focus on the present state of Shevchenko studies both in Ukraine and outside of Ukraine with special attention to three ongoing projects that the speaker is involved in. The first is a seven volume comprehensive and annotated edition of memoirs devoted to Shevchenko, of which the first two have already appeared in Ukraine, and the second a multivolume edition of the reception of Shevchenko, in print and in all the available languages, of which the first two dealing with the contemporary reception of Shevchenko (i.e., 1839-1861) and the immediate posthumous reception (in 1861 following Shevchenko’s death) have also already appeared in 2013 and 2016 respectively. The subsequent two volumes dealing with the latter part of the 19th century and early 20th c. are in progress. The third project is a monograph on Shevchenko which focuses particularly on the difficulties posed by the different modes of his creativity—his poetry, his Russian language prose, and his painting — each of which highlights different facets of his personality and presents problems that notoriously elude the critics. A reexamination of Shevchenko’s biography and the pervasive autobiographical thrust of all his works will round out the monograph.

About the Speaker

George G. Grabowicz is the Dmytro Čyževs’kyj Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1965 and his PhD in comparative literature from Harvard in 1975. Professor Grabowicz has been Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard (1983-1988) and Director of Harvard's Ukrainian Research Institute (1989-1996). From 2012 to 2018 he was President of the Shevchenko Scientific Society in the US and is currently a Vice-President there. In 1997 he founded and since then has been editor-in-chief of the Ukrainian monthly Krytyka, a leading intellectual journal in Ukraine. He has written on Ukrainian, Polish and Russian literature and on literary theory. His first book on Shevchenko (The Poet as Mythmaker, 1982; Ukrainian editions: 1991 and 1997) has been voted the most influential academic book of the post-Soviet period in Ukraine. He currently heads an international team of scholars working on a history of Ukrainian literature that is due to appear shortly. In March of 2022, he was awarded the Shevchenko Prize, Ukraine’s highest award in the humanities and arts, for his series of articles on modernism and the poet Pavlo Tychyna.

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