#  The Winter King: Literary Evening with Ostap Slyvynsky 

 



    ![Poetry collections by Ostap Slyvynsky](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_5_4__480x385/public/2025-03/2024.10.24%20Slyvynsky-1-1200x600-web-email-FINAL.png?h=8a0d45d6&itok=T3fwy4c8) 

 



 

####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **October 24, 2024** 

 06:00PM - 07:30PM EDT 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **Pritsak Memorial Library at HURI, 34 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138**  



 

 [ Watch on YouTube arrow\_circle\_right ](https://youtu.be/3dmrK_Eagg8) 

 



 

###   
A book talk by [**Ostap Slyvynsky**](https://pen.org.ua/en/members/slyvynskyj-ostap), Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and scholar.

In conversation with [**Oleh Kotsyuba**](https://huri.harvard.edu/people/oleh-kotsyuba), Director of Print and Digital Publications, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University.

**IN-PERSON.** All attendees are warmly invited to join us for a wine & cheese reception immediately following the event.

## About the Books

   ![Winter King. Book cover.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/wk_frcover.jpg?itok=z1FmzHAb) 

 

*Winter King* presents a selection from a decade and a half worth of work by one of Ukraine’s most prominent contemporary voices in poetry, translated into English by Vitaly Chernetsky and Iryna Shuvalova. Slyvynsky is the poet of everyday things. He writes of children’s games, old trees, and family stories. Yet, what emerges from under his pen is the portrait of an era. His writing, simultaneously delicate and unflinchingly incisive, like a surgeon’s hand, always probes for the bottomless depths gaping behind the mundane. Perhaps the greatest of Slyvynsky’s gifts as a poet is his ability to examine individual voices and memories for traces of larger historical events without ever trivializing the former in the face of the latter. His spare, lean poems unearth a complex and layered human reality that is both universal and strikingly, almost painfully, rooted in the landscape that birthed it, be it the poet’s family home in the Carpathian Mountains or the Maidan Square in Kyiv, aflame with revolution. Slyvynsky’s remarkable attention to detail results in strikingly beautiful and enigmatic texts that invite multiple re-readings, each peeling off yet another layer of reality. However, what always remains at the core after these layers are stripped off is the poet’s profound humanity. Drawing on three of Slyvynsky’s earlier poetry collections, this volume also includes some of his most recent poems­—arguably, among the poet’s best. \[[Source](https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/winter-king/)\].

   ![A Ukrainian Dictionary of War. Book cover.](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/dictionary_war_cover.jpg?itok=5Rzqmw31) 

 

*A Ukrainian Dictionary of War* began with the fragments of experiences spoken in the new language of life under war and became a way to document a nation’s shared losses, pain, and belief in victory. In 2022, poet Ostap Slyvynsky undertook the role of wartime lexicographer, carefully collecting and compiling a dictionary of witness to Russia’s invasion and war against Ukraine. Among the voices represented in *A Ukrainian Dictionary of War* are those who were forced to leave their homes and venture into the unknown, aid volunteers, medics, soldiers, social activists, and artists. All very different people connected by the experience that war has appeared in their lives. What happens to language during war? Does it become superfluous to actions? Is it twisted? Broken? Lost? In wartime, even the meaning of simple words can change, expand, contract, acquire new resonances and sounds. \[[Source](https://losthorsepress.org/catalog/a-ukrainian-dictionary-of-war/)\].


## About the Author

   ![Ostap Slyvynsky](/sites/g/files/omnuum4931/files/styles/hwp_1_1__360x360_scale/public/huri/files/slyvynsky_headshot.jpg?itok=-GRRGC0e) 

 

Ostap Slyvynsky is a Ukrainian poet, translator, essayist, and scholar. He authored five books of poetry: *Sacrifice of Big Fish* (1998), *The Midday Line* (2004), *Ball in Darkness* (2008), *Adam* (2012), *The Winter King* (2018), as well as *The Dictionary of War* (2023), a documentary book based on a testimony of participants and witnesses of the Russian aggression against Ukraine. His books have been published in the USA (*The Winter King,* Lost Horse Press 2023), Germany, Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Macedonia. He is also known for translating the works by Derek Walcott, William Carlos Williams, Charles Simic, Czesław Miłosz, Olga Tokarczuk, Georgi Gospodinov, and many others.

Slyvynsky is Associate Professor at the Department of Philology, Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv). In 2007, he earned a PhD degree in Humanities (with thesis on the silence in contemporary Bulgarian prose). The main areas of his research interests are intercultural communication, the comparative history of Slavic literatures of Central and Eastern Europe, and translation studies. He published numerous papers on comparative literature and intercultural communication. Since 2021, he is part of the international research team working on anticipation of catastrophe in Eastern European literatures before 1939. He was the editor of the bilingual Ukrainian-Bulgarian anthology *Ukrainian Poetic Avant-Garde* (2018), the anthology of contemporary *essays The Ark Named Titanic. 20 essays about humanity of AD 2020* (2020) and the anthology of modern Ukrainian poetry *Among Sirens. New poems of war* (2023).

Slyvynsky initiated and/or participated in several human rights actions and campaigns in Ukraine, including public actions in support of Oleg Sentsov (2018–2019) and Solidarity Words, a campaign in support of Crimean Tatar journalists illegally imprisoned in the occupied Crimea and Russian Federation (since 2021). Since 2015, he collaborated with fellow artists and writers on several performances and media projects: *Preparation* (2015), *The Winter King* (2018), *Windows Opened* (2021), *Return Is (Im)possible* (2023). Slyvynsky was the first program director of the International Literary Festival in Lviv in 2006–2007. In 2016–2018, he organized the public discussion platform *Stories of Otherness* (the series of public interviews with writers, intellectualists and civic activists who suffered from different kinds of social exclusion). Since 2021, he organizes PEN Ukraine’s festival *Propysy* (The Writings) aimed at novice authors. He was elected the Vice President of PEN Ukraine in 2022.

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*This event is organized by Harvard's* [*Ukrainian Research Institute*](https://huri.harvard.edu/) *(HURI) as part of the Ukraine Study Group: Literature Series and* [*HURI Books* ](https://books.huri.harvard.edu/)*program and co-sponsored by the* [*Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures*](https://slavic.fas.harvard.edu/)*.*

*Persons with disabilities who wish to request accommodations or who have questions about access, please contact Hanna Leliv, HURI Events Logistics Coordinator, at* [*hleliv@fas.harvard.edu*](mailto:hleliv@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:- [ Ukraine Study Group ](/event-type/ukraine-study-group)
- [ Art and Culture ](/fields-expertise/art-and-culture)
- [ Contemporary Literature ](/fields-expertise/contemporary-literature)
- [ Literature ](/fields-expertise/literature)
- [ Publications ](/program/publications)
 
 

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