Vasyl’ Stus

The poet Vasyl’ Stus. Source: Еncyclopedia of  Ukraine.

Vasyl’ Stus (1938-1985) has been defined as the greatest Ukrainian poet of the second half of the twentieth century. In spite of the importance of his literary output in the history of modern contemporary poetry, his fame in the Ukraine is linked to his activity as a dissident and his participation in the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
Stus was born in the Vinnytsia region of western Ukraine, but his family moved to Donbas when he was a child. He studied at Donets’k (then Stalino) Pedagogical Institute and planned to move to Kyjiv to undertake graduate studies at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. He managed to move to Kyjiv in 1963, when the local literary scene was undergoing a conservative restructuring after experiencing the relative artistic freedom brought about by the Thaw between the late Fifties and the first two years of the Sixties. Stus had been active as a poet since the mid-Fifties and was keen to pursue a career as both a creative writer and literary scholar. While his first attempt to have a selection of his juvenilia published failed in spite of positive internal reviews, Stus benefitted from the stimulating atmosphere among his fellow shistdesiatnyky.
In 1965, Stus took part in a protest against a wave of arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals, which resulted in his expulsion from the Institute of Literature and the end of his budding literary career. Between 1965 and 1972, Stus took manual jobs to provide for his family but he continued writing both poetry and criticism. Around 1970, he produced two major collections of poetry,  Zymovi dereva (Winter Trees) and Veselyi tsvyntar (The Merry Cemetery).  Zymovi dereva was smuggled to the West and published in tamizdat. Veselyi tsvyntar was published in samizdat and distributed among a handful of Stus’s friends and colleagues. The differences between the two collections are striking. While Zymovi dereva, being conceived as an anthology of Stus’s poetry from the Sixties, is a kaleidoscope of strikingly different styles and thematic clusters, Veselyi tsvyntar is a monological poetic construction devoted to dismantling the absurdity of everyday Soviet life and language.
In early 1972, together with several other Ukrainian intellectuals, Stus was arrested. He spent most of the year in a KGB building in central Kyjiv awaiting sentencing. During those months, Stus’s poetry came to full maturity.
In 1972, his original works were complemented by a wide selection of translations of Goethe’s poetry, which came to constitute the second part of his collection Chas tvorchosti / Dichtenszeit (Poetry time / Dichtenszeit). The book, hermetic in style and thematically subject-centred, clearly shows Stus’s intertextual dialogue with the European modernist tradition of the first half of the century. Between 1973 and 1979, Stus served his sentence, first in Mordovia and then near Magadan. During those years, he never abandoned his literary endeavours and composed works that would be published in his major book of poetry,  Palimpsesty (Palimpsests), and worked on an equally impressive collection of translations, mostly from German poetry; the most recurrent theme in his letters to his family is Rilke’s poetry and the challenges that he faced translating it. In 1979, Stus was permitted to go back to Kyjiv. However, his engagement with the dissident movement led to his second arrest in 1980. In the notorious Perm’-36 labour camp in Kuchino, near Perm’, Stus’s already precarious health conditions deteriorated considerably. He died in September 1985. In 1989, Stus’s remains were transferred to Kyjiv. The event, attended by an impressive crowd of people, has been described as an important episode in the months that preceded the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s declaration of independence.
Stus soon became a hero of an independent Ukraine and his poetry came to be seem as an embodiment of the author’s contemporary political engagement. This has often resulted in unsatisfactory readings of Stus’s literary legacy as his poetry is a reactivation of the rich modernist impulse in Ukrainian literary culture that had been tragically interrupted in the Thirties with the physical annihilation of a large cohort of writers and intellectuals. Stus’s intense intertextual dialogue with poets such as Rilke, Pasternak and Tsvetaeva testifies to the depth of his engagement with modernist literature, while his letters explicitly show his conscious desire to act as a leading innovator of Ukrainian literary culture. 

Alessandro Achilli
[30th June 2021]

Editions

• Stus V., Tvory: u chotyr’okh tomakh, shesty knyhakh, Prosvita, L’viv 1994-1998.
• Stus V.,  Zibrannia tvoriv: u dvanadtsiaty tomakh, Fakt, Kyjiv 2007-2009. 

Bibliography

• Achilli A., La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus: Modernismo e intertestualità poetica nell’Ucraina del secondo Novecento, FUP, Firenze 2018.
• Stus D., Vasyl’ Stus: Zhyttia iak tvorchist’, Fakt, Kyjiv 2005.
• Zinkevych O., Frantsuzhenko M. (eds.), Vasyl’ Stus: V zhytti, tvorchosti, spohadakh ta otsinkakh suchasnykiv, Smoloskyp, Toronto 1987.