At times this fall, Bohdan Tokarskyi has felt split between two contrasting worlds.
On one side is Cambridge, where he works as a new assistant professor of Slavic languages and literatures. On the other are the sirens, bomb shelters, blackouts, and flattened universities that flash across his phone each morning when reading about Russia’s war with Ukraine.
“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships,” said Tokarskyi. “It is really humbling for me what impressive work the educators and students in Ukraine continue to do against all odds and in spite of the horror of the war. This is a gigantic reminder that education is a privilege.”
“I feel great responsibility to be teaching Ukrainian literature and culture at a historic moment like this, when Ukraine is at the forefront of the clash between democracies and dictatorships.”
Tokarskyi started his new role in July. This semester he is teaching “Poetics of Resistance: An Introduction to Ukrainian Literature,” an ambitious “crash course,” by his own telling, covering 12 centuries in 12 weeks.
“I want to provide a bird’s-eye view of Ukraine’s centuries-long literature and culture,” said Tokarskyi, who was a fellow at Harvard’s Ukrainian Research Institute in the spring. “Because Ukraine’s lands have been subjected to different imperial powers over the many centuries, there has been a lot of oppression of the Ukrainian language and culture. In my course, I show to my students how time and again in Ukrainian literature we find themes like solidarity, human rights, the pursuit of justice, feminism and, of course, resilience.”
Literature has played a central role in shaping Ukraine’s history, Tokarskyi said, and still does. During the 2013-2014 Euromaidan demonstrations, graffiti portraits, and quotes from Lesya Ukrainka, Taras Shevchenko, and other writers were used as inspiration to protesters. This past January, poet Maksym Kryvtsov read works by the 20th-century poet Vasyl Stus in videos posted to social media. The very next day, Kryvtsov was killed on the frontlines.
“This reminds us that even nowadays Ukrainian writers are fighting and being killed defending their country and their culture,” Tokarskyi said. “But it also shows what great importance this cultural tradition has in Ukraine. It connects cultural thought across history, even when the producers of this culture were oppressed and executed.”
Tokarskyi is currently writing the first-ever English-language book on Stus, a dissident poet who spent more than a decade in Soviet prisons. He is also collaborating with poet and translator Nina Murray on an English-language volume of Stus’ selected works.
“Picture a poet of the stature of T.S. Eliot or Rainer Maria Rilke, working deep in the mines of a Gulag labor camp with an 80-kilogram-heavy rock bolt, managing nonetheless to produce some of the most exquisite post-war poetry in Europe,” Tokarskyi said. “You would expect that someone with a biography like that would create a work that is overtly political. But in his case, his response to the extreme conditions in which he found himself was instead producing this highly introspective poetry.”
“One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”
The book is a passion project for Tokarskyi, who said Stus’ work helped inspire him to switch fields and pursue literature after completing an international law degree at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv in 2014.
“To me, Stus is a paragon of moral imperative and the pursuit of authenticity that is not only fighting against something but also asking oneself ceaselessly, ‘How can I become my true self?’ — and doing that by creating an absolutely innovative poetic language,” he said. “One of the extraordinary things about Stus’ poetic style is the sheer number of neologisms — new words he coined to be able to capture these between states of our own identity, of these not-yet-crystallized selves.”
Next semester Tokarskyi will teach the graduate-level seminar “Modernisms: Ukrainian, Soviet, European.” Also on the agenda is a first-year seminar titled “Making the Self: Poetics of Authenticity,” which will examine how writers and philosophers seek to answer the question “What does it mean to be authentic?” which Tokarskyi says is all the more urgent in the era of social media and artificial intelligence.
Tokarskyi is excited about introducing graduate students to a “treasure trove” of potential Ph.D. projects. “My door is always open for students, and I cannot wait to help them explore and discover Ukrainian literature.”
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