Maxim Tarnawsky

Maxim Tarnawsky earned his Ph.D. in 1986 from Harvard and is a Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Toronto. During his four-month stay at Harvard (September–December 2007), Tarnawsky will work on the topic “The Unknown Nechui,” analyzing the writings of Ivan Nechui-Levyts´kyi, the paragon of Ukrainian realism. While Tarnawsky notes that Nechui is certainly not a modernist—he fights this tendency explicitly—he points to the author’s vehemence and passion, coupled with the ambiguity of the aesthetics and themes in his works, and argues that a far more nuanced approach is necessary to understand the mechanisms whereby Ukrainian literature crosses the historical divide from traditionalism to modernity.

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