“Yuriy Tarnavskyi, one of the most prominent Ukrainian writers, died on October 14 at his home in White Plains, USA. The author of more than twenty books of poetry, prose, drama and essays in Ukrainian and English, he turned exile into a space of freedom.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
As a co-founder of the New York group of poets, émigré modernists who renewed Ukrainian literature after the war, Tarnavsky remained a tireless experimenter until his last days. His book was published only a few weeks ago Extractions in Journal of Experimental Fiction Pressand a new collection of Ukrainian poems should appear in November.
Provocative, risky in his creative decisions and precise in his writing, he proved that Ukrainian literature can be boldly modern and rooted in tradition. For him, the national was revealed not in the repetition of formulas, but in their reinterpretation, in how the form bends under the pressure of memory, irony and search, until the language itself dares to say what it once feared.
He loved Ukraine tenderly, without turning away from its shadows. It was not blind love. She was clear, exacting and honest. He saw both the brilliance and the self-destructive habits of our culture, its lyrical flair and melancholy, its devotion to word and form and its blind spots to the world beyond. Like Czeslaw Milosz, he treated language both as an anchor and as a tool to resist erasure, maintaining a conversation with world literature.
For him, loving Ukraine meant keeping it close to its own potential, pushing it out of its comfort zone, proving that Ukrainian literature can speak to Kafka and Cortázar as naturally as to Shevchenko or Skovoroda.
In spirit, he is close to Beckett, Borges and Gombrowicz – authors who made exile their address. His Ukrainian was not diaspora-provincial, archaic: it accepted modernism and absurdity, philosophy and science, Jewish and Latin American intonations. He proved that it is possible to speak to the world from Ukraine without tuning in to someone else’s hearing, without renouncing one’s own rhythm and voice.
For him, loving Ukraine meant keeping it close to its own potential, pushing it out of its comfort zone, proving that Ukrainian literature can speak to Kafka and Cortázar as naturally as to Shevchenko or Skovoroda. It was an intimate and capricious love, with the conviction that true tenderness is demanding.
At home, he was painfully underestimated. The gap between diaspora and “domestic” literature continues to hurt, in some places deeper than in Soviet times. Tarnavsky stood in the middle of this rift. He never stopped being a Ukrainian, but his Ukrainianness was not closed, focused on himself. At once his own and foreign, he moved through a culture he loved and which did not always reciprocate.
Distrust of non-conforming artists, anxiety towards those who do not fit into the image of a “healthy national poet”, unfortunately, stretches through our history.
He jokingly admitted that he felt so foreign that sometimes people gossiped: they said that he must be Jewish or homosexual, or both – as if the label could explain his otherness, creative courage, his in-between time and in-between place. By his very presence, he disturbed the comfort of literature, which had long been afraid of difference.
Distrust of non-conforming artists, anxiety towards those who do not fit into the image of a “healthy national poet”, unfortunately, stretches through our history. From the cosmopolitan irony of Antonych to the gender-free imagination of Andievska, from the urban grotesque of Pidmohylyny to the spiritual maximalism of Khvylovy, Ukrainian literature has repeatedly repelled innovators, only to later return them as prophets.
This is not only our history, but also European history: Kafka was not heard in Prague, Schulz was destroyed in Drohobych, Celan was not understood in Paris. They turned distance into insight. Tarnavsky belongs to this line of creative alienation, to those who loved Ukraine enough to ask what it was afraid of in freedom and ambiguity. The Ukraine he imagined is the country to which we are going: open to polyphony, where belonging is not measured by conformity, but by the courage to create, deny and love without conditions.
His relationship with Ukraine rested on the tension between longing and alienation, love and criticism. He could neither leave permanently nor return forever.
The incomplete recognition of his figure was not only a personal offense. This is a symptom of a wider problem. Having spent more than eighty years outside Ukraine, he not only preserved the language – he honed it and raised it to the level of world conversation. Like Milos, Schultz or Celan, he created his homeland in words. His language was not a monument, but a living nervous system, sensitive and precise, not subject to any force – a territory that no empire can occupy.
His relationship with Ukraine rested on the tension between longing and alienation, love and criticism. He could neither leave permanently nor return forever. I tried to settle in post-Soviet Ukraine in the 90s, but, not recognizing myself in this reality, I went back in a few years. From this tension, texts were born that turned pain into syntax, and despair into an experiment. His poetry was a revelation, a confession, a breakthrough, and a complaint: language became a wound and a cure. In this he is alongside Danylo Kish, Edmond Jabes and Adonis, who turned exile into optics.
Tarnavsky lived the fate of many exiles who gave their countries a voice from a distance and heard silence in return. Once he said ironically: “The Shevchenko Prize will go down in history because it was not given to Yurii Tarnavskyi”. Today, this phrase sounds like a silent and final sentence, a remark that closes the door.
But this silence is not only his. This is our silence. We are still learning to recognize those who carried Ukraine across borders. Ukraine, which he personified, remains an ideal: open, generous, multi-voiced, able to hear echoes of its own future in its exiles.
He personifies Ukraine, which does not close in on itself, but goes out into the world without losing its voice.
It was the land of thought, where many of us came for something new and fresh, and a home we didn’t know we had. The territory of the word, where language was both a refuge and a challenge. We still do not imagine the full extent of Tarnavskyi in modern Ukrainian culture: his invisible school appears in poetry, prose, theater and criticism, in Ukraine and in the diaspora, in print and new media; the circle of followers grows even where they do not always call him their teacher.
Today, when Ukraine is fighting not only for land, but for a way of being, the figure of Yuriy Tarnavsky sounds like a challenge and a signpost. He personifies Ukraine, which does not close in on itself, but goes out into the world without losing its voice. Tarnavskyi was and remains an example of a global Ukrainian – one who thinks in Ukrainian, but breathes in Ukrainian on a global scale. His exile became a form of presence, his language a territory that no empire could occupy. He proved that literature can be a weapon not of anger but of clarity, that freedom begins where excuses end. His words, written far from home, return home today – as a memory, as a warning, as a promise. They remind us that the real Ukraine is not the borders on the map, but an endless conversation between those who stayed and those who left but did not leave.
Oleksandr Averbukhpoet, professor of Ukrainian studies at the University of Michigan especially for UP.Zhyttia