Unearthly, faithful to himself, kind and...

On January, 8, 1938 the Ukrainian poet and defender of rights Vasyl Stus was born

Today Vasyl Stus is named an unshakable fighter for independence of Ukraine, a straight-out defender of rights and the greatest poet, whose creative work was nominated for the receiving of the Nobel Prize. At soviet times he was pursued as a dissident and a nationalist. This question was already covered in the periodical of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine “Viche” (2006, №№1-2).

Some earlier unknown touches to the portrait of a prominent Ukrainian are revealed by his son Dmytro - a literary critic, an editor-in-chief of the magazine “Kyiv Rus”, an author of the  research “Vasyl Stus: life like creative work”, awarded with the National Prize of Ukraine named after Taras Shevchenko, and by Mykola Zhulynskyi, an academician and a known public man.

Dmytro STUS:

– For some reasons the fate of Vasyl Stus has been lengthened in time and until now it serves as the litmus paper of authenticity, once again proving that a man – regardless all circumstances – is after all able to overcome his own fear and become worth of his mission. I’m sure: if the workers of the CC of CPU and KGB of Ukraine, who accepted in 1972 a decision to condemn a poet, realized that they themselves created the national myth of firmness of the Ukrainian spirit, they would never take the case fabricated and “born” on the opposition of P.Shelest – L.Brezhnyev into the court. But it happened just like that and that is one more evidence of omnipotent fate. In due time that fate, which combined instinct of self-preservation and aspiration of self-immolation, providence and faith, average day and holiday forced Stus’s parents to move from starving and hopeless Rakhnivka (Vinnytsa district) to worker’s Stalino and made Vasyl leave for Kyiv – a city that not once pushed him out like a foreign body in order to commemorate him as a hero already after his death.

Mykola ZHULYNSKYI:

– Not everything from the creative inheritance of Vasyl Stus has been saved. No less than six hundred poems were confiscated and destroyed in the frightful years of camp sufferings. However, it is possible to judge about the scale of artistic thought of a great master of word from those works that reached a reader or remained in relatives and family. Amplitude of his moods is enormous, it achieves catastrophic overstrain. Vasyl Stus experienced a separation with his wife and a little son especially heavily. Their images come up in dreams, appear in darkness of insomnia, and become visible on cold walls, appeal and call to themself… It is not easy to imagine the emotional state of the poet in the period of investigation, during the first and then the second imprisonment for ten years of deprivation of liberty and five years in deportation. This sentence was declared not in the terrible thirtieth, but already in the eightieth (more precisely, on October, 2, 1980). At forced works in the Ural camp at night between September, 3 and 4, 1985 the poet passed away, but his large integral reserve has remained, where such words can be read: “Go – become mature and enrich yourself…”