Dmytro Stus - Vasyl Stus

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Dedicated to all who keep the faith
against objective circumstances
The Author

Either the world will accept me as I am, as birthed by my mother, or it will kill me, destroy me. But I will not give up! And from every one of my moments, from every feeling and thought I will draw my portrait, that is, a portrait of the whole world
Vasyl Stus

Contents

Vasyl Stus.

Poet.

Human rights activist.

Man.

Friend. Husband. Father. Prisoner. Philosopher. Acquaintance. Beloved. Known and unknown. Politician and anti-politician at the same time. Alive and long deadfrom the viewpoint of human life, but not in historical perspective.

Who are You? Why, for several decades after Your death, has Your figure been attracting attention, provoking resistance from some and true admiration from others? Why are You clambering up and falling down at the same time?

Why, despite such a significant interest in You, do the following words by Mykola Ryabchuk seem both so close to the truth and at the same time unrelated to Your texts: Vasyl Stus, demythologized by young critics, has much less of a chance of becoming a Ukrainian popular cultural hero than his mythologized populist hypostasis may suggest?

And what made almost 100,000 people pour into the frosty streets of Kyiv on November 19, 1989, to pay their last respects to You, who had remained unknown even to many writers. (People have often confessed to me that they learned about Vasyl Stus on that day. But no famous person, as far as I know, dared to write about it).

For some reason, the fate of Vasyl Stus has strengthened with time and still serves as a litmus test of authenticity, proving once again that a person, against all odds, is still able to overcome fear and become worthy of his calling. I am sure that if the officials of the Ukrainian Communist Party Central Committee and KGB, who decided in 1972 to charge the poet, had realized that they were creating a national myth of the indomitable Ukrainian spirit, they would never have brought the case, which was completely made up and tied to the confrontation between Petro Shelest and Leonid Brezhnev, to court.

But thats exactly what happened

At that time, the same Fatecombining the instinct of self-preservation and the desire for self-immolation, providence, and faith, everyday life and holidayled Stus parents to move from starving and despairing Rakhnivka to working Stalino. And the same Fate drove Vasyl from there to Kyiv, a city that repeatedly rejected him as a foreign body before honoring him as a hero after his death. Fate tested the poet in new ways and by new trials, but he, divining its commands, found in himself the strength and will to proudly accept the challenge. This is how the mystery of Vasyl Stus life was created, according to whose internal logic, against all odds, he had to self-actualize to the very maximum, to expend himself. A constant readiness to maximally fill the moment of life, whatever the circumstances, makes it possible to speak today of the phenomenon of Vasyl Stusa man, a poet, a husband, a father, a son, known and unknown, good and

Yet this book is not only about Vasyl Stus. After all, whoever he was, whatever he created of himself, his dependence on the socio-cultural and political conditions under which he happened to live was so great that to understand the true motives of the poets actions, it would be necessary to encompass his social history. Then what could we say about Vasyl Stus, whose personality would thus be subordinated to the common, to social life, in all its concrete historical connections and indirectness?

In some of his manifestations, this esthete, aristocrat, Westerner, this admirer of the esoteric Rilke and anyone hostile to what is ours, this foreign spirit

In these circumstances, the trends and tendencies of literary fashion, which occupy an important place in the formal aspect of the poets work, are always assigned a secondary, subordinate function. The main thing is not to betray the truth of life, Vasyl Stus used to say.

Given this choice (today is the pathetic clich is that of serving the interests of the people), it is not surprising that Vasyl Stus entered the history of Ukrainian literature and culture not thanks to his poems, but, as it were, only with their substantial support. And when, in the mid-1970s, his poems, as insightfully recited by Nadiia Svitlychna, started to be heard quite often on Radio Liberty, behind them there was the image of a fighter against the system, a man who for many listeners was an example of inviolability.

In this way, complementing and opposing each other, the works and biography of Vasyl Stus continue to exist today. The writer, whose works organically combine elements of populism, and of the modern and postmodern,

To follow this path with dignity, it was necessary not only to learn to endure moral and physical torture and humiliation, to multiply the copies of his works, which were destroyed by civil servants at the first opportunity; it was necessary not just to harden and accept separation from family and friends; but also to create an inner world that would allow him to feel confidence and not despair under any circumstances. Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska describes this as self-exploration. a quote (or is it a term?) borrowed from Vasyl Stus himself.

The ability to balance the demands of his inner world and his actionswith/without dignityat a sky-high height, in the historical conditions of the second half of the twentieth century, allowed the poet to withstand all the trials that befell him.

How was his inner world formed, out of which not only poems and works, butperhaps even more significantlyStus style of life grew, a style described by the poets contemporaries as an inability to pass by someone else in pain and despair?

It would seem that it is this openness to pain and suffering that makes the poets figure either all-admirable or all-repulsive: no one is indifferentthere is either full recognition and esteem or else utter rejection and denial of this way of life. Given such polarization, it seems possible to see Vasyl Stus personality at the intersection of those lines of force that transform a man of the crowd (an ordinary man) into a man with a biography. In this regard, Yuri Lotman says that not everyone who lives in this society has the right to a biography. After all, each type of culture forms its own models of people with biographies and people without biographies ... each culture creates in its ideal model a type of person whose behavior is entirely determined by the system of cultural codes and a person who has a certain freedom of choice for hisownbehavior model.

A striking biography is always a breaking out of the ordinary, a violation of given canons, the creation of ones own honor code, and atypical behavioral conduct, recognized to be socially significant to the extent that the latter serves as an example for other people to define their life strategies. The creation and formation of a person with a proud and independent profile is a much more complicated affair than any literary work. After all, literature is, in the first place, an attempt to comprehend the world by artistic means. Instead, life creation is the creation of oneself, ones destiny, and thus the world around oneself. And this struggle of the individual to have the right to -actualize, in some cases, actually affects the existing state of society, causing a greater or lesser reaction (transformation, modification) of the latter. And here, in this preface, we use lofty words, but only by using such high registers of contradiction can we speak about Vasyl Stus.