A major Ukrainian poet, critic, commentator and samizdat author; member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group after 1979. Stus was twice confined as a political prisoner; the second time he died in the camps.

“The Dissident Movement in Ukraine” (KHPG website)

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Born on 8 January 1938, in the village of Rakhnivka (Haisyn district, Vinnytsa Region, Ukraine), Vasyl Stus died on 4 September 1985, in Kuchino village (Chusovoi district, Perm Region, RSFSR), part of the Perm Camp complex.

Vasyl Stus (1938-1985)

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VASYL STUS WAS BORN into a peasant family.

Soon after he was born, his family fled from the continued repression of the so-called ‘kulaks’ (affluent peasants) and moved into the city of Stalino, today Donetsk. There his father became a manual worker.

Vasyl received his first lessons in poetry from his mother who sang him Ukrainian folk songs. In 1944 he started school; in 1954 Stus entered the “History, Language & Literature Faculty” of the Stalino (Donetsk) Teachers’ Training Institute. He graduated in 1959.

That year Stus taught Ukrainian Language and Literature in the Tauzhnye school (Kirovohrad Region); then he did military service for two years in the Urals. After serving in the Soviet army, Stus worked as literary editor of the “Socialist Donbas” newspaper.

In 1963 he began PhD studies at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature (UkSSR Academy of Sciences). He specialized in the “Theory of Literature”. From 1964 onwards Stus worked in the State History Archive of Ukraine. Later (1969) he wrote for his readers

“The period after military service was a time of poetry for me. It was the age of Pasternak and unquestioningly intense love for him …

“These days I prefer Goethe, [Volodymyr] Svidzinsky and Rilke. The Italians are wonderful (those that I know), particularly Ungaretti and Quasimodo. I also like ‘thick prose’: Tolstoy, Hemingway, Stefanik, Proust, Camus, Faulkner …

“I don’t consider myself to be a poet. I see myself as a person who writes poems. Some of them – I think – have something to them.”

Stus married Valentina Popelyukh in 1965; their son, Dmytro, was born in 1966.

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ACTIVIST

ON 4 SEPTEMBER 1965 at the preview showing in Kyiv’s Ukraina cinema of Sergei Paradzhanov’s “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” [Tini zabutykh predkiv], Ivan Dziuba took to the floor to protest about the ongoing arrests of members of the intelligentsia. Stus was one of the first to support him.

Retribution was swift. On 20 September Stus was expelled from his PhD studies; then he was dismissed from the State History Archive. He began working on a building site, as a stoker and an engineer of technical information in a design bureau.

These were years of intensive creativity for Stus: with poetry, translations, criticism and early attempts at writing prose. In 1965 Stus tried to publish his first work Maelstrom [Kruhovert]. The “Molod” (Youth) publishing house, however, found the author’s ideological and artistic criteria, as well as his civic position, unacceptable.

Despite positive editorial reviews from the poet Ivan Drach and the literary critic Yevhen Adelheim, Stus’s next collection of poems Winter Trees [Zymovi dereva] also “got stranded” somewhere in the publishing house. In 1970 the book was published in Belgium; thereafter Stus was treated as an outcast by the system.

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STUS ACTIVELY PROTESTED against the restoration of Stalin’s “Cult of Personality”; the policy of undermining national differences and identity; and restrictions on freedom of speech. He was one of the 139 members of the Ukrainian intelligentsia who in April 1968 signed a letter to Leonid Brezhnev protesting at the political trials in Ukraine and Moscow (CCE 1.2, letter 2.7).

He is also known to have sent several Open Letters then:

[1] to the Presidium of the Ukraine Writers’ Union in defence of Viacheslav Chornovil after a defamatory article by O. Poltaratsky (“Who is looking after certain humanists” [Kym opikuyutsa deyaki humanisty]) was published late in 1968 in the Literaturna Ukraina [Literary Ukraine] perodical;

[2] to L. Dmyterko, editor of the journal Vitchyzna [Homeland], sharply criticising his attacks on Ivan Dziuba (1969);

[3] and in 1970 to the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the KGB, and to Ukraine’s Supreme Soviet [Verkhovna Rada], arguing passionately that restricting freedom of speech and allowing flagrant violations of human rights would have fatal consequences.

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FIRST ARREST (1972)

IN 1971 UKRAINIAN DISSIDENTS decided to set up a legal human rights organization analogous to the Action Group for the Defence of Human Rights in the USSR (founded in Moscow in 1969, see CCE 8.10). Their decision was prompted by the arrest in Odessa of Nina Strokata-Karavanska.  Stus joined the organization, which became known as “Public Committee in Defence of Nina Strokata”.

On 12 January 1972 Stus was himself arrested and charged with “Anti-Soviet Agitation & Propaganda” (Article 62, UkrSSR Criminal Code). The charges focused specifically on 14 poems and ten human rights and literary articles. Among these was an article on the work of P. Tychyna entitled “A phenomenon of our time” in which Stus discussed the influence of Party literature on the poet’s creative output.

He was also accused of having put together a samizdat collection of his own verse in 1970 entitled The Merry Graveyard [Vesyoly tsvyntar]. In it Stus wrote about the living conditions of Soviet people, about socialist democracy and, supposedly, he “made defamatory remarks about the events organized by the Soviet Communist Party (CPSU) to celebrate the centenary of Lenin’s birth, the founder of the Soviet State”.

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The main aim of the prosecution during the second wave of arrests in 1972 (CCE 24.3) was to prove that the opposition-minded intelligentsia had regular and intensive contacts with Ukrainian nationalist organizations abroad. As the “Dobosch case” showed (CCE 26.9), this goal was not attained.

On 7 September 1972 Stus was sentenced by the Kyiv Regional Court under Article 62 pt. 1 (UkSSR Criminal Code) to five years in harsh-regime labour camps and three years’ exile.

In his letter “J’accuse!” (CCE 37.14 item 4) Stus wrote

“The trials of 1972 and 1973 in Ukraine put human thought and the very process of thinking in the dock. Humanism and manifestations of filial love for one’s own People were on trial.”

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IN THE CAMPS AND IN EXILE

FROM FEBRUARY 1973 ONWARDS Stus was held in the Mordovian or Dubrovlag political labour camps (ZhKh-385), in Camp 3 at the Barashevo settlement (Tengushevsk district, Mordovian ASSR). 

In autumn 1975 he almost died as the result of a burst stomach ulcer. Before being hospitalized Stus was taken to Kyiv for a ”prophylactic session”; on 10 December 1975 he was operated on in the Gaaz Prison Clinic in Leningrad.  

On 6 February 1976 Stus was taken under armed guard to Camp 17 of Dubrovlag (Ozernoe village, Mordovia). His cellmate there, Leningrader Mikhail Heifetz (CCE 32.6), wrote

“From the very first moment I was struck by Vasyl’s emaciated appearance. His features were sharply-outlined, as though carved with a knife from wood, his cheeks looked as though filed down, with his closely-shaven head accentuating his features.”

Heifetz continued:

“… he bore himself with pride and dignity, like a Chinese emperor …

“He spoke with the authorities and wardens in the tone of a victor and prosecutor in a future Nuremburg Trial. He regarded those with red (Soviet) epaulettes as criminals about whose activities he was collecting information: at a later date, he would pass the judge such truthful, albeit subjectively tinged, observations.” 

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Stus took part in all the political prisoners’ protests. 

In a letter to the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet dated 1 August 1976, Stus repudiated his Soviet citizenship, since his human rights were being “flagrantly violated” in the USSR (CCE 37.14, “J’accuse!”)[¹]

From time to time, Stus’s poems were confiscated during spot searches.

And there was always a threat that they would be destroyed, which for the poet was one of the hardest trials to bear. He tried to send as many of his poems as he could in his letters to his wife. In the Mordovian camps, he was still able to do that; later it became impossible.

In a letter to the International PEN Club of 11 September 1976, Stus asked that it take measures and use all its authority to save his work: lyrical verse and translations (about two hundred poems by Wolfgang Goethe and one hundred by Rainer-Maria Rilke). The camp administration objected to Stus’s creative output: “the very fact of his incarceration can give his lyrical texts a political overtone”. Stus was often punished by periods in the punishment cells; in all the time he spent in the camps he was allowed only one visit.

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In August 1976 Stus was transferred , this time to Camp No. 19 (Lesnoye, Mordovia).

From Camp 19 Stus set out with others under armed guard on 11 January 1977 for Matrosovo settlement (Tenkynsk district, Magadan Region), his place of exile in the Soviet Far East. There he worked in a goldmine. Stus was not allowed to rent a room but forced to live in a workers’ hostel with former criminals.  As the result of an accident on 20 August 1977 he was kept in hospital for two months, during which time many of his books and manuscripts disappeared from his room at the hostel.  

Stus was subjected to intolerable conditions and treatment. There were attempts at provocation, he was “grilled” at meetings of the “work collective”. A thoroughly defamatory article “Friends and enemies of Vasyl Stus” appeared in the local newspaper on 8 July 1978: it was followed on 3 August by the publication of reactions to the article.

Only by going on hunger strike in 1978 did Stus secure permission to make a 10-day trip back to Donetsk in east Ukraine. He arrived there just in time to see his father before the latter died.

That same year Stus was made a member of the International PEN Club.  

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RETURN TO KYIV (1979); DEATH IN PERM 36 (1985)

IN AUGUST 1979, having completed his sentence of imprisonment and exile (CCE 55.5), Stus returned to Kyiv where he worked as a mould operator in a foundry and on a conveyor belt for the ‘Sport’ shoe company.

He spoke out in defence of Ukrainian Helsinki Group members facing repression. Stus himself joined the Group in October 1979. 

“In Kyiv I learned that people close to the Helsinki Group were being repressed in the most flagrant manner. This at least had been the case in the trials of Ovsiyenko, Horbal and Lytvyn; soon they would deal similarly with Chornovil and Rozumny. I didn’t want that kind of Kyiv. Seeing that the Group had been left rudderless, I joined it because I couldn’t do otherwise …

“When life is taken away, I have no need of pitiful crumbs. Psychologically, I understood that the prison gates had already opened for me and that any day now they would close behind me – and close for a long time.

“But what was I supposed to do?

“Ukrainians were not able to leave the country and, anyway I didn’t particularly want to go beyond those borders since who then, here, in Great Ukraine, would become the voice of indignation and protest? 

“This was my fate, and you don’t choose your fate. You accept it, whatever that fate may be. And when you don’t accept it, it takes you by force … I had no intention of submitting, however, whatever happened.  Behind me stood Ukraine, my oppressed People, whose honour I had to defend or perish.”

Vasyl Stus, “From a camp notebook” [Z tabornoho zoshyta], 1983

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On 14 May 1980 Stus was arrested again.

The charges this time were based on his letters to Sakharov, Lukyanenko, Petro Grigorenko and to friends in Kyiv, on his appeal to the USSR Prosecutor’s Office in defence of Mykola Horbal, on verbal statements and his own poems. On 2 October 1980 the Kyiv Regional Court prosecuted Stus under Article 62 Pt. 2 (UkrSSR Criminal Code). Declaring him a particularly dangerous repeat offender, it sentenced him to 10 years in special-regime labour camps and five years exile (CCE 58.14).  Andrei Sakharov addressed a letter of protest in defence of Stus to the participants in the Madrid Helsinki Accords Review Conference.

Stus was taken to Camp 1 of the Perm political labour camps (VS-389/36) in Kuchino village (Chusovoi district, Perm Region).

The conditions were extremely harsh. The camp administration used all manner of oppression: Stus was not allowed any visits and was ill a great deal. At the beginning of 1983 he went on hunger strike for 18 days, and spent a year in the punishment cells. Nevertheless, he managed to write and to work on translations. Approximately 250 poems written in free verse and 250 translations were to have formed a book he planned to call Bird of the Soul [Ptakh dushi]. But all he wrote was swiftly confiscated. The fate of those texts remains unknown.  An official reply to a formal request from his relatives, stated they were destroyed when the camp closed down in 1989.

In 1983 Stus managed to pass “From a camp notebook” [Z taborovoho zoshyta] to the outside world. After its publication in the West, especially after Heinrich Böll nominated Stus in 1985 for the Nobel Literature Prize, the pressure on Stus intensified.

On 28 August 1985 Stus was once again thrown into the punishment cells. There he declared a hunger strike “to the end”. 

Vasyl Stus died on the night of 3-4 September 1985 (USSR News Update, 1985, 17-1). His relatives were told that his death was due to a “heart disorder”. He was buried in the camp cemetery in Borisovo village, Chusovoi district.

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LEGACY

In Lviv in January 1989 the first non-governmental Vasyl Stus Prizes were awarded for “talent and courage”. 

This Prize was set up by the Ukrainian Association of the Independent Creative Intelligentsia, and is awarded every year in Lviv on the poet’s birthday (past winners include Ivan Svitlychny, Nadiya Svitlychna, Mykhailyna Kotsyubynska and others).

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On 19 November 1989 the remains of Vasyl Stus, Oleksa Tykhy and Yury Lytvyn were reburied in the Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.  Several thousand people attended the ceremony.

Between 1994 and 1998 the collected works of Vasyl Stus were published in seven volumes, prepared by the poet’s son Dmytro and by Mykhailyna Kotsyubynska.

In 1993 Stus was posthumously awarded the Taras Shevchenko State Prize for Literature.

Author, S. Karasik, 20 April 2005
Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group

(updated JC, 28 June 2024)

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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1. AUTHOR

Stus, V.S., Zymovi dereva [Winter trees], Brussels: Literatura i mistetstvo, 1970 (206 pp.)

Stus, V.S., Svicha v svichadi [A Candle in a Mirror], 1977

Stus, V.S., Palimsesty [Palimpsests]: Poems of 1971-1979, Suchasnist publishers, 1986 (469 pp.)

Stus, V.S., Poetry, Kyiv: Radyansky pysmennyk, 1990 (224 pp.). Compiler and author of afterword, Mykhailyna Kotsyubynska.

Stus, V.S., Pid tyaharem khresta [Under the burden of the cross], Lviv: Kamenyar 1991 (160 pp.)

Stus, V.S., Zolotokosa krasunya [The Golden-Braided Beauty], Kharkiv: Oko, 1995 (128 pp.)

Stus, V.S., Works in 6 volumes, 9 books, Lviv: Prosvita, 1994-1999

Stus, V.S., Vechir. Zlamana vit. Vybrane [Evening; Broken branch; Selected poems], Kyiv: Dukh i literara, Zadruha, 1999 (284 pp.). Compilers, Oksana Dvorko and Dmytro Stus; preface, Kostyantyn Moskalets.

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2. OTHERS

All publications in Ukrainian, except last (1987 Smoloskyp)

Heifetz, Mikhail, “Ukrainian silhouettes” [Ukrainski sylyety], Suchasnist periodical, 1983 (pp. 7-100)

Heifetz, Mikhail, A field of despair and hope [Pole vidchayu i nadiyi] Almanac, Kyiv: 1994 (pp. 137-225)

Vasyl Stus, Man and Poet: He did not turn from his Early Unease … [Ne vidlyubyv svoyu tryvohu rannyu … Vasyl Stus – Poet i lyudyna]. Memories, articles, letters and poetry, Kyiv: Ukrainsky pysmennyk, 1993 (400 pp.). Compiler O. Orach.

Ovsiyenko, Vasyl, “The Light they Gave [Svitlo lyudei]: Memories and Portraits of Vasyl Stus, Yury Lytvyn and Oksana Meshko”, Biblioteka zhurnalu URP “Republic”, Political Portraits series, № 4. Kyiv, 1996 (108 pp.)

Sverstyuk, Yevhen, The Prodigal Sons of Ukraine [Bludni syny Ukrainy], Kyiv: 1993 (pp. 140-161 & 210-220)

Vasyl Stus: his life and work, in the memories and estimation of his contemporaries, Smoloskyp publishers: Baltimore-Toronto, 1987 (463 pp.) In English.

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3. CONTEMPORARY SAMIZDAT REPORTS

“KHRONIKA” (Eng.) and “VESTI” (Russ.), 1968-1985

both online since 2016

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3.1 : “A Chronicle of Current Events” (CCE, 1968-1982)

Accessible online in Russian and English; printed in book form, in both languages:

«Хроника текущих событий» website; launched 2008 by Memorial (Moscow);
A Chronicle of Current Events, website launched 2015 in London.

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[a] CCE online (Eng.) & The Herzen Foundation 1979 (Russ.)

1972

24.3, “Arrests in Ukraine” (No. 24, 5 March 1972, Eng.);
Herzen Foundation 1979: No. 24, p. 352 (print Russ.)

CCE 25.10, item 7, “News in Brief” (No. 25, 20 May 1972, Eng.) Stus in Pavlovsk Psychiatric Hospital.
Herzen Foundation 1979: No. 25, p. 417 (print Russ.)

CCE 26.4, “Pre-trial investigations” (No. 26, 5 July 1972, Eng.);
Herzen Foundation 1979: No. 26, p. 437 (print Russ.)

CCE 27.1-1, “Repressive measures in Ukraine: Trials, June-September 1972” (No. 27, 15 October 1972, Eng.); Herzen Foundation 1979: No. 27, pp. 471-472 (print Russ.)

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[b] CCE Online (Eng.) & Khronika publishers,

Nos. 28-58, 60-62: 1973-1982 (Russ.)

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1975

Additional items: CCE 37 (September 1975)

CCE 37.5 “In the Camps and Prisons” (No. 37, 30 September 1975, Eng.). Stus beaten up and injured.

CCE 37.14 (item 4) “J’accuse!” item 4 (No. 37, 30 September 1975, Eng.)

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1976

CCE 42.4-1, “In the Camps and Prisons” (No. 42, 8 October 1976, Eng.);
Khronika Press (1976) No. 42, p. 38 (print Russ.)

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1977

CCE 45.13 “In Exile” (No. 45, 25 May 1977, Eng.);
Khronika Press (1977), No. 45, pp. 35, 38 & 60 (print Russ.)

ADDITIONAL

1977, CCE 46.12, “In Exile” (No. 46, 15 August 1977, Eng.)
CCE 46.23-2, “Political Prisoners in the USSR” (No. 46, 15 August 1977, Eng.)
Relief Fund for Political Prisoners and their Families

CCE 47.11, “In Exile” (No. 47, 30 November 1977, Eng.). S. exiled to Soviet Far East.
Khronika Press (1977), No. 47, p. 133 (print Russ.)

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1978

CCE 48.11 “In Exile” & // (No. 48, 14 March 1978, Eng.);
Khronika Press (1978) No. 48, pp.  21, 23, 72 & 83 (print Russ.)

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1979

CCE 54.14 “In Exile” (No. 54, 1979, Eng.);
Khronika Press (1979) No. 54, pp. 40 & 79 (print Russ.)

CCE 55.5 “After Release” (No. 55, 31 December 1979, Eng.);
Khronika Press (1979) No. 55, pp. 8 & 35 (print Russ.)

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1980

Khronika Press (1980) No. 57, pp. 57-59, 89 & 90 (print Russ.)
CCE 57.13 “Events in Ukraine” (No. 57, 3 August 1980)

Khronika Press (1980) No. 58, pp. 74-78 (print Russ.)
CCE 58.14 “The Trial of Vasyl Stus” (No. 58 November 1980, Eng.)

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1981

Khronika Press (1981) No. 62, pp.  131, 170 (print Russ.);
CCE 62.16 “Prisons and Camps” & CCE 62.23 “Samizdat Update” (No. 62, 14 July 1981, Eng.)

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3.2 : “Vesti iz SSSR” (USSR News Update) 1978-1991

Vesti online & Prava cheloveka publishers (München)

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1979

USSR News Update (print), 1979, 8-9 (Russ.)
USSR News Update (online), 8-9 “Положение ссыльных” (30 April 1979) – The state of exiles

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1980

USSR News Update, 1980 (print), 10-1 “The arrest of Vasyl Stus” (Russ.)
USSR News Update, 10-1 (online), “The arrest of Vasyl Stus ” (31 May 1980; Russ.)

USSR News Update, 1980 (print), 19-4 “Stus on Trial” (Russ.)
USSR News Update, 1980 19-4 (online), “Stus on Trial” (15 October 1980; Russ.)

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1984

USSR News Update (print), 1984, “Stus’s health”, 24-24 (Russ.)
USSR News Update (online), 24-24 “Stus’s Health” (31 December 1984; Russ.)

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1985

USSR News Update (print), 1985, 17-1 (Russ.)
USSR News Update (online) 17-1, “The Death of Vasyl Stus”, 15 September 1985, Eng.)

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“Ukraina” periodical (Ukr.)

Kotsyubynska, Mykhailyna, “In Memory’s reflection”, 1991, № 1, pp. 13-16 [U svichadi pamyati].

Shovkoshytny, Volodymyr, “My People, I shall return to you”, 1990, № 4, pp. 7-9 [Narode miy, do tebe ya shche vernu …].

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NOTES

1. The widely-read Stus took the title of Emile Zola’s celebrated 1898 front-page challenge to the French government during the Dreyfus Affair. Once Zola was prosecuted for libel, his defence lawyers would be entitled to access the documentation justifying the conviction four years earlier of former army captain Alfred Dreyfus.
   
   (In Ukrainian the title was “Ya obvynuvachuyu”.)
   ↩︎

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