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Vasyl Semenovych Stus was born on January 8, 1938, in Rakhnivka, Haisyn Raion, Vinnytsia Oblast, and died on September 4, 1985, in a Soviet concentration camp no. 389/36-1, Perm Oblast, RSFSR. He was a dissident poet, translator, and literary critic regarded as one of the foremost authors of Ukraine, particularly renowned for his opposition to the Soviet government.
Stus is known for his tragic philosophical poems, complex imagery, and frequent use of rare words and neologisms. Although only a few of his literary works had political issues as their subject, he was repressed by the Soviet government for his support of the Ukrainian dissident movement and for his condemnation of the Soviet Union’s colonial Russianization policies, which had as their ambition to be the elimination of Ukrainian national identity. Stus spent many years of his life in imprisonment.
Vasyl Stus was born into a peasant family. Soon after his birth, his family fled from state repressions of the kulaks (more affluent peasants) and moved to Stalino (presently Donetsk), where his father became a worker. His first encounter with poetry was in the form of Ukrainian folk songs, which his mother had sung to him. He began school in 1944, and in 1954 he entered the History, Language and Literature Faculty of the Stalino Teachers’ Training Institute, from which he graduated in 1959.
In 1959, Stus taught Ukrainian Language and Literature in the Tauzhnye school in the Kirovohrad region, after which he signed for two-year military service in the Urals. After his service, Stus worked as literary editor for the Sotsialystychesky Donbas (Socialist Donbas) newspaper. In 1963, he began Ph.D. studies at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, specializing in Theory of Literature. He was expelled from the institute in 1965 for protesting against the increasingly prevalent secret arrests and closed trials taking place.
Stus in exile in Magadan in the late 1970s
In 1972, Stus was arrested and sentenced to five years of strict-regime labor camp followed by three years of exile. He served his sentence in Russia: in Mordovian forced labor camps and in a village in the Magadan oblast. In 1979, Stus returned to Kyiv, but in 1980, he was arrested again for joining the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.
While in exile in Magadan, Stus worked in the mines, extracting ore. He subsequently described the inhumane working conditions in his Gulag diary:
[There is] really bad dust in the mine, because there is no ventilation: tight vertical tunnels are being bored through. The hammer weighs about 50kg, the rock bolt up to 85kg. While the ‘windows’ are being drilled, one has to shovel. The respirator (a gauze bandage) becomes unusable within half an hour: it gets soaked with sweat and choked with dust. Then you have to take it off and work without any protection.
In his trial, Stus was appointed a defense attorney by the name of Viktor Medvedchuk against his will, who refused to defend him. Reportedly, Medvedchuk stated before the court, “All of Stus’s crimes deserve punishment.” Later, Medvedchuk became an influential pro-Russian figure in Ukrainian politics and one of the country’s richest oligarchs. Stus received ten years of imprisonment and five years of exile for “anti-Soviet activity” and was transported to a forced labor camp in the Perm oblast, Russia, where he declared hunger strikes several times.
Stus was repeatedly placed in solitary confinement for his uncompromising moral stance and defiant behavior. In 1983, after his diary had been smuggled out of the camp and published outside the USSR, he was placed in solitary confinement for a year. Heinrich Böll and other Western writers urged the Soviet regime to free the poet, but all of their letters remained unanswered.
Stus's continuous criticism of the regime subjected him to repeated persecution, which eventually led to his death. In September 1985, after a week in a cold, unheated cell, Vasyl Stus died in unclear circumstances. He was buried in the territory of his prison camp. After several refusals, Stus's family received permission to transfer his body to Ukraine. On November 19, 1989, a procession of over 30,000 mourners attended the interment of Stus and two other dissidents, Oleksa Tykhy and Yurii Lytvyn, at the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. The event became emblematic of national solidarity and censure of the repressive regime in power.
Stus wrote his first poems as a student and had some of them published in the journals Dnipro and Zmina in 1963–5. His activities in the dissident movement prevented the printing of his first collection of poems. Although he continued to write throughout his imprisonment, the KGB consistently confiscated and destroyed his work. Up to 600 poems and translations from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rudyard Kipling, and Charles Baudelaire were lost in 1976. These works were mostly non-political.
Some of the surviving poems were smuggled out to the West, where they appeared in several collections. The first collection, Zymovi dereva (Winter Trees, 1970), was followed by Svicha v svichadi (A Candle in a Mirror, 1977) after which came the posthumous Palimpsesty: Virshi 1971–1979 rokiv (Palimpsests: Poems of 1971–9, 1986). The first collection to materialize in Ukraine was an underground samvydav (self-published) collection, Povernennia (The Return), which was published in Ivano-Frankivsk in 1990.
Cover page of Stus's 1972 manuscript of "Time of Creativity"
Stus was most prolific during his years of captivity, managing to write his 500-page poetic magnum opus in that period, Palimpsests. In the poetry collection, Stus seems to put his circumstances to the margins, instead charting, through metaphor and idiom, a radical spiritual journey. The work bears some likeness to T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, which Stus had read, as well as Gerard Manley Hopkins' works, which in all likelihood were unknown to him. Likely commenting on his creative experience, Stus wrote, “the debris of torment / might give birth to flowers.”
Following his arrest for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in 1972, Stus spent nine months in custody awaiting his trial. During this period, he composed a major collection of poetry, Time of Creativity (later to become part of Palimpsests). In near-complete solitude, apart from time spent with interrogators, Stus wrote more than 300 original poems and translated more than 100 poems by Goethe. The dates marking Stus’s poems suggest he may have sought to write at least one poem a day, composing as many as five on some days.
Traditional in form, Stus's poetry began as "lyricism of actuality," a manner in which the poets of the 1970s responded to the realities of that time. Content had more significance than form, and the satire prevalent in the poetry of the 1960s was frequently replaced by scorn, indignation, and revilement of the ruling party. Stus's poetry written in prison, however, has more serenity, expressing a longing, philosophical contemplation of life, nature, man as the prisoner and conversely the jailer, and reveals Stus's striving to reconcile the contradictions of the human experience. In total, Stus authored six poetry collections, five of which have survived.
In 1990 Stus's works gained wider acceptance with the publication of the first official edition of his poetry, Doroha boliu (The Road of Pain). In 1992, two collections were published in Ukraine: Vikna v pozaprostir (Windows into Beyond-Space), containing Stus's poetry, articles, letters, and diary excerpts, and Zolotokosa krasunia (The Golden-Braided Beauty), containing Stus's poetry found in the KGB archives. A four-volume (in 9 books) edition of Stus’s works was published in Lviv in 1994. A project of publishing a twelve-volume edition of Stus’s collected works was initiated in 2007 by his son Dmytro Stus.
At the end of the 1980s, when the perestroika policy was put into action in the Soviet Union and relative freedom of speech was established, the Ukrainian independence movement gained prominence. In the aftermath of the USSR's collapse and the restoration of Ukraine’s independence in 1991, numerous books of Stus’s poetry were published in his country, including a four-volume scholarly edition. The Donetsk National University and dozens of streets all over Ukraine are named in Stus’s honor. Since then, Stus's poems have been required reading in all Ukrainian schools and widely studied at universities.
“A Stranger Lives My Life and Wears My Body” is one of Stus’s most famous poems; its opening lines read as follows:
Stus married in 1965 and fathered a son in 1966. His son, Dmytro Stus, is a literary scholar specializing in his father's poetry. In 1981, Stus wrote in a letter to his fourteen-year-old son:
The human being creates herself, she gives birth to herself. Who are You at this stage, in fact? A piece of raw, malleable clay. So take this piece of clay into your hands and knead it until something hard and well defined emerges from it. Imagine that You yourself are the God that creates human beings. You are God. Hence, as the God of yourself, knead your clay until you feel flint under your hard skin. This is the best time for you to do that — Create yourself!
