Yuriy Tarnawsky, one of the greatest Ukrainian-American writers, died on Oct. 14 in his home in White Plains, New York. He was the author of over 40 books of poetry, prose, drama, and essays in Ukrainian and English. Born in Ukraine in 1934, he spent most of his life in the United States. A co-founder of the New York Group of Poets – a circle of Ukrainian émigré writers who reinvented the language of postwar Ukrainian literature – Tarnawsky remained, to his last breath, an untiring experimenter. Just a few weeks ago, he published Extractions: Selected Poems (Journal of Experimental Fiction Press); and a new collection of his Ukrainian poems is forthcoming this November.
Tarnawsky’s life reminds us that Ukraine’s survival depends not only on defending its borders, but also on expanding its imagination. He showed that exile can be a form of belonging; that one can speak on behalf of Ukraine to the world, without surrendering one’s own particular voice. As the country fights for its existence and freedom, his life itself stands as a cultural model of resistance through openness.
JOIN US ON TELEGRAM
Follow our coverage of the war on the @Kyivpost_official.
Provocative, dangerously innovative, and creative in every gesture, Tarnawsky proved that Ukrainian literature could be both radically modern and deeply rooted in tradition. For him, national identity was not a shrine but a dialogic crossroads. He bent language until it remembered what it once feared to say.
Other Topics of Interest
Yuriy Tarnawsky, Founder of New York Group of Poets, Dies at 91
A seminal figure in Ukrainian literature during the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Tarnawsky was hailed as Ukraine’s foremost literary innovator.
He loved Ukraine with a tenderness that did not flinch. “How much I love this beautiful and stubborn nation,” he once said – “stubborn” being the gentler word for what he meant. His love did not idealize; it was clear-eyed and demanding. He saw both the brilliance and the self-defeating habits of Ukrainian culture – its lyrical genius and its melancholy, its devotion to the word and its blindness to the world beyond the horizon. Like Czesław Miłosz, he treated language as both anchor and weapon, a means of resisting erasure while staying in dialogue with world literature.
In spirit, he stood beside Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, and Witold Gombrowicz – writers who turned exile into a metaphysical address. His Ukrainian was not provincial but cosmopolitan, porous to modernism, absurdism, science, philosophy, and more; alive, for instance, to Jewish and Latin American poetics. From his pen to the world, Ukrainian could go “untranslated,” in the deeper sense that never once did he have to renounce his rhythm or thought.
In his homeland, he was heartbreakingly underrated. The divide between diasporic and domestic Ukrainian literature remains painful, in some ways deeper than it was in the Soviet era. Insider and outsider at once, Tarnawsky moved through Ukrainian culture as someone both claimed and disowned. He often joked about the gossip that circulated about him – that he must be Jewish, or gay, or both – as if a label could “explain” his otherness. His very presence challenged the comfort of a literature anxious about difference.
Tarnawsky bent language until it remembered what it once feared to say
This suspicion toward the nonconforming artist is one of Ukraine’s most persistent reflexes. From Bohdan-Ihor Antonych to Emma Andijewska, from Valerian Pidmohylny to Mykola Khvylovy, Ukrainian culture has often expelled its innovators only to rediscover them decades later as prophets. Tarnawsky belongs to that lineage of creative estrangement – those who loved Ukraine enough to question its fear of ambiguity.
We still don’t fully grasp how many of today’s Ukrainian writers are Tarnawsky’s heirs. His invisible school stretches across continents – from the postmodern experiments of the 1990s to the wartime literature of the 2020s, which blends testimony, irony, and surrealism in the same fearless tone he pioneered. Even those who never read him directly write in the space he opened.
After more than 80 years outside Ukraine, Tarnawsky not only preserved his poetic language – he refined and transformed it. His exile became a form of presence; his language, a territory no empire could occupy. Like Miłosz or Paul Celan, he carried a homeland entirely within words. His work teaches that culture, when it refuses complacency, becomes an act of courage.
Tarnawsky lived the fate shared by many great exiles – giving his country a voice from afar, and being met with silence in return. “The Shevchenko Prize will be remembered for its not being given to Yuriy Tarnawsky,” he once said. The line now sounds less bitter than prophetic: a mirror held up to our own hesitation to claim those who made us possible.
Today, as Ukraine fights for its very being, Tarnawsky’s legacy returns with new urgency. He embodied a Ukraine that refuses narrowness – global yet rooted, critical yet faithful, a culture strong enough to face itself. His words, written far from home, return to us as a summons: to keep Ukraine as he did – restless, questioning, unbroken, and alive.
The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.
