The City by Valerian Pidmohylnyi

Book launch and lecture by Maxim Tarnawsky, Professor of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Toronto and translator of The City

Moderated by Bohdan Tokarskyi, Assistant Professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture, Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, Harvard University

Books will be available to purchase at the event.

About the Book

Valerian Pidmohylnyi’s The City was a landmark event in the history of Ukrainian literature. Written by a master craftsman in full control of the texture, rhythm, and tone of the text, the novel tells the story of Stepan, a young man from the provinces who moves to the capital of Ukraine, Kyiv, and achieves success as a writer through a succession of romantic encounters with women. At its core, the novel is a philosophical search for harmony in a world where our intellectual side expects rational order, whereas the instinctive natural world follows its own principles. The resulting alienation and disorientation reflect the basic principles of existential philosophy, in which Pidmohylnyi is close to his European counterparts of the day. [Source]

About the Author

Valerian Pidmohylnyi (1901–1937) was one of the most prominent Ukrainian modernist writers, translators, and literary scholars of the early 20th century. Born into a peasant family, Pidmohylnyi studied law and math, and made a living working as a teacher, translator, editor, and bibliographer. In 1921, he moved to Kyiv where he stayed, with some interruptions, until moving to Kharkiv in 1932, in the midst of Stalin’s manmade Holodomor famine in Ukraine. Heavily censored and incapable of publishing his own works, in Kharkiv he focused on translating a two-volume edition of the works of Denis Diderot and a treatise by Claude-Adrien Helvétius, two French philosophers he was closely familiar with, and the works of the French writers Anatole France and Honoré de Balzac. He was arrested by the Soviet authorities in 1934 and accused of working for a “nationalist terrorist organization.” Although initially sentenced to ten years in the Solovki Gulag camp in Russia’s north, he was executed in 1937 in Sandarmokh (Karelian Republic) among over 1000 other prominent Ukrainian writers, poets, intellectuals, and activists in what later was dubbed the Executed Renaissance in Ukrainian culture. Among his oeuvre, short stories were published in a number of Ukrainian journals and as separate collections, as did the novels The City (1928) and A Touch of Drama (1930); Pidmohylnyi’s numerous translations of French literature are considered the golden standard of translation for their masterful rendering into Ukrainian. [Source]

About the Speaker

Maxim Tarnawsky is a literary scholar, translator, and Professor of Ukrainian Literature at the University of Toronto. His monographs include The All-Encompassing Eye of Ukraine: Ivan Nechui-Levyts'kyi’s Realist Prose (2015) and Between Reason and Irrationality: The Prose of Valerijan Pidmohyl'nyj (1995). He is the editor of Ukrainian Literature: A Journal of Translations and the Electronic Library of Ukrainian Literature. Prizes for scholarship and translation include the 1995 American Association for Ukrainian Studies Book Prize and 2005 Volianyk-Shvabinskyi Fund of the Ukrainian Free University Foundation Award for the Best Book in Ukrainian Studies. From 1983 until 1986, Tarnawsky was the Managing Editor of the Harvard Series in Ukrainian Studies. 

 

This event is organized by the HURI Books program at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access should contact HURI Programs Manager, Megan K. Duncan Smith, at least two weeks in advance of the session.

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