'The Gift of Reincarnation': Ukrainian Dissidents' Articulations of the Great Terror

• In Event: Representations of War Crimes and Political Violence in Eastern European Literatures, Films, and Arts

Abstract

“The gift of reincarnation” is a metaphor that Vasyl Stus (1938-1985), a twentieth-century Ukrainian poet and dissident, used in his elegiac poem dedicated to Mykola Zerov (1890-1937), a key figure of Ukraine’s “cultural renaissance” in the 1920s. Like a host of other leading Ukrainian modernists, Zerov was executed in the Stalinist Great Terror. In his poem, Stus draws a pivotal connection between the two generations (evidenced by the powerful notion of “reincarnation”) and reflects on the trauma of Stalinist violence in Ukrainian history and literature. How did Stus and his generation process this extreme violence? How did they articulate the trauma caused by it? These are the central questions that I will explore in my paper.

Author

• Bohdan Tokarskyi, Harvard U