The directory «Plots»

Stus (Стус) Vasyl Semenovych

Vasyl Stus was a Ukrainian poet and publicist, one of the most active members of Ukrainian dissident movement. For his political convictions, his works were banned by the Soviet regime and he spent 23 years (about a half of his life) in detention. On November 26, 2005 he was posthumously given the title Hero of Ukraine by order of the state.

Vasyl Stus was born on January 8, 1938 into a peasant family in the village of Rakhnivka, Vinnytsia Oblast (province), Ukraine. Next year, his parents Semen Demyanovych and Iryna Yakivna moved to the city of Stalino (presently Donetsk). Their children joined them one year later. Vasyl first encountered the Ukrainian language and poetry from his mother who sang him Ukrainian folk songs.

After the secondary school, Vasyl Stus entered the Department of history and literature of the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino (nowadays Donetsk University). In 1959 he graduated from the institute with honors. Following graduation, Stus briefly worked as a high school teacher of Ukrainian language and literature in Tauzhnia village of Kirovohrad Oblast, and then was conscripted to the Soviet Army for two years. During the study and military service in the Ural mountains he started to write poetry and translated into Ukrainian more than a hundred verses by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. The original copies of his translations were later confiscated by KGB and they were lost.

After the military service, Vasyl Stus worked as an editor in the newspaper Sotsialistychnyi Donbas (Socialist Donbas) in 1960-1963. In 1963, he entered a Doctoral (PhD) program at the Shevchenko Institute of Literature of Ukrainian Academy of Sciences in Kiev. At the same time he published his selected poetry.

In 1965 Stus has got married; his son, Dmytro was born in 1966.

On September 4, 1965 during the premiere of the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors movie in Kiev's Ukrayina cinema, Vasyl Stus took part in a protest against arrests of Ukrainian intelligentsia. For the protest participation, on September 20 he was expelled from the Institute and later lost his job at the State Historical Archive. He then worked in a few places as a building constructor, a fireman, and an engineer, continuing his intensive work on poetry. In 1965 he submitted his first book Circulation for publishing, but it was rejected due to discrepancy with Soviet ideology and artistic >Belgium.

On September 7, 1972, Stus was arrested for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda". He served a 5 year sentence in a labor camp, and two more in exile in the Magadan Oblast.

In August 1979, having finished his sentence, he returned to Kiev and worked in a foundry. He spoke out in defense of members of the Ukrainian Helsinki group (UHG). Stus himself joined the UHG in October 1979.

In 1980, prior to the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, he was arrested and received a 10 year sentence for "anti-Soviet activity". Vasyl Stus died of beating on September 4, 1985 in a Soviet forced labor camp for political prisoners Perm-36 near the village of Kuchino, Perm Oblast, Russian SFSR, where he had been transferred in November 1980. In 1985, an international committee of scholars, writers, and poets nominated him as a candidate for the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, but he died before the nomination materialized. He was nominated by a German writer Heinrich Boll, who publicly stated that he expected Stus to win the prestigious prize. It must be noted that in the Kuchino camp, out of 56 inmates kept there between 1980 and 1987, 8 died, including 4 members of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

Ukraine, 2008, Vasyl Stus