# Keeping the Fires Burning: Studying Ukrainian Literature Through Censorship, Independence, and War ![Fire burning in a Ukrainian residential building after a Russian missile strike](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-04/8.png?itok=KXBLZyGi) #### calendar\_today Date and Time **August 5, 2024** 05:00PM - 06:30PM EDT #### pin\_drop Location **CGIS-Knafel/North Building, 3rd Floor, Room K-354, 1737 Cambridge Street, Cambridge, MA 02138** [ Watch on YouTube arrow\_circle\_right ](https://youtube.com/live/kL6pEaFOdMQ) #### George Grabowicz in conversation with Bohdan Tokarskyi. #### [**George G. Grabowicz**](https://huri.harvard.edu/people/george-g-grabowicz), Dmytro Čyževs’kyi Research Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Professor Emeritus, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. #### [**Bohdan Tokarskyi**](https://slavic.fas.harvard.edu/people/bohdan-tokarskyi), Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University. Moderated by [**Oleh Kotsyuba**](https://huri.harvard.edu/people/oleh-kotsyuba), Director of Print and Digital Publications at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University **IN-PERSON and ONLINE** via Zoom Webinar (live). Registration is required to attend online. ## About the Lecture How have Ukrainian literary studies evolved in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? What role has Harvard University played in preserving and sharing Ukrainian culture? What does it mean to study Ukrainian literature during the epoch-making Russo-Ukrainian war and in the shifting landscape of Slavic Studies? In this lecture, George Grabowicz, a groundbreaking scholar of Ukrainian Studies and the Dmytro Čyževs’kyj Emeritus Professor of Ukrainian Literature will reflect on these and other salient questions, drawing upon decades of his widely influential work on some of the greatest Ukrainian poets such as Taras Shevchenko, Pavlo Tychyna, and Mykola Bazhan. Professor Grabowicz will share his uniquely rich perspective in conversation with Bohdan Tokarskyi, the incoming Assistant Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture at Harvard. ## About the Speakers ![George Grabowicz, 2015](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/grabowicz_2015_web.jpeg?itok=DwJ_tInO) 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 Ph.D. 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. ![Bohdan Tokarskyi](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/tokarskyi-square-bio.png?itok=U7TLx0AA) 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*. \[[Source](https://slavic.fas.harvard.edu/people/bohdan-tokarskyi)\] ────────────────── *This event is organized by Harvard's* [*Ukrainian Research Institute*](https://huri.harvard.edu/) *(HURI) as part of the HUSI Public Lecture Series.* *Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Megan Duncan Smith, HURI Programs Coordinator, at* [*duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu*](mailto:duncansmith@fas.harvard.edu) *at least two weeks in advance of the session.* *Watch videos of past HURI events on our* [*YouTube Channel*](https://www.youtube.com/user/huriyt) *and* [*subscribe*](https://web.lists.fas.harvard.edu/mailman/lists/huri-events-list.lists.fas.harvard.edu/) *to our email list to receive announcements about events and other activities.* See also:- [ HUSI Public Lecture ](/event-type/husi-public-lecture) - [ Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute ](/program/harvard-ukrainian-summer-institute) - [ 2024 ](/husi-year/2024) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#) Save: [ Add to calendar calendar\_today ](https://www.huri.harvard.edu/node/1579576/event-feed.ics) Copy link link