Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond

CREECA Lecture Series Podcast

Ostap Kin presented and read from his book, “Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond” on Thursday, April 4, 2024 at 4:00 pm in 206 Ingraham Hall, 1155 Observatory Drive. About the Lecture: On September 29 and 30, 1941, Nazis executed 33,771 Kyivan Jews in Babyn Yar. By the time the Soviet army recaptured Kyiv, the total number of people exterminated at the ravine had reached some 100,000 to 150,000. The name Babyn Yar has become synonymous with one of the most horrific massacres of World War II. "Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond" features poems by Ukrainian Jewish and non-Jewish poets from the Soviet and post-Soviet periods, written in response to the tragedy at Babyn Yar. The poems in the anthology create a language capable of portraying the suffering and destruction of the Ukrainian Jewish population during the Holocaust, as well as other people who lost their lives at the Babyn Yar site. About the Lecturer: Ostap Kin is the editor of Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute) and New York Elegies: Ukrainian Poems on the City (Academic Studies Press). He is the translator, with John Hennessy, of Yuri Andrukhovych’s Set Change (forthcoming from NYRB/Poets), Babyn Yar: Ukrainian Poets Respond (HURI) and Serhiy Zhadan’s A New Orthography (Lost Horse Press). He translated, with Vitaly Chernetsky, Yuri Andrukhovych’s Songs for a Dead Rooster (Lost Horse Press). He’s pursuing a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literatures at Stanford University.