Wassyl Stus

Wassyl Stus 1980, KGB photography

Vasyl Semenowytsch Stus ( Ukrainian Василь Семенович Стус ., Scientific transliteration Vasyl 'Semenovyč Stus * 8. January 1938 in Rachniwka , Oblast Vinnytsia , † 4. September 1985 in Kutschino , Oblast Perm ) was a Ukrainian poet and writer and a Soviet dissident . He was one of the most committed representatives of Ukrainian cultural autonomy in the 1960s and was sentenced to a total of 23 years in prison camps and in exile.

Life

Stus was born in 1938 as a farmer's son in a village in Podolia , in the same year his parents moved with him to the city of Stalino (today Donetsk ) in order to avoid deculacization and forced collectivization . The sometimes wistful songs that his mother sang for him had a great influence on his childlike disposition. After graduating from secondary school, Stus studied at the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino at the Faculty of History and Literature. In 1958, between completing his studies and beginning his two-year military service, he worked for three months as a teacher in Haiworona in the Kirovohrad Oblast . During his studies and military service he began to write and discovered poets like Goethe and Rilke for himself; he is said to have translated several hundred poems by the two German poets into Ukrainian, they have been lost due to confiscation. In 1959 he published his first poems in Soviet magazines.

After Stus was discharged from the army in 1960, he wrote for three years as an editor for the magazine Sozialistitscheski Donbass ( Socialist Donbass ) before taking up an aspirant position at the Literature Institute at the Academy of Sciences in Kiev in 1963 . In 1963 a selection of poems appeared in a literary magazine. When the poet took part in a protest against the imprisonment of Ukrainian intellectuals in 1965, this cost him his studies and work at the institute. He took on construction work, as a stoker and in a design office and had a very productive poetic phase at the same time. He had married in 1965 and in 1966 their son Dmytro was born.

When Stus tried in 1965 to publish his first volume of poems Kruhowert ( Круговерть ), the publisher refused to do so; Even a second collection of poetry Symowi derewa ( Зимові дерева - winter trees ) was rejected in spite of benevolent reviews from colleagues - it was however spread through the samizdat and reached Belgium in this way. In 1970 the book was published in Brussels. Thereupon Stus was accused of "anti-Soviet activities".

In the period that followed, Stus wrote critically against the ruling system and its restorative tendencies, which had regained strength after the thaw period : his open letters were addressed to the Writers' Union, the CP Central Committee and the Verkhovna Rada and protested against the imprisonment of colleagues the reawakening personality cult and human rights violations. After participating in newly emerging human rights groups in the early 1970s, he was arrested in January 1972 for "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda" and sentenced to five years of forced labor and three years in exile in the fall of that year. He spent his imprisonment in various penal camps in Mordovia , including the DubrawLag special camp , interrupted only by hospital stays because of a serious stomach ailment. His poems were regularly confiscated and destroyed, some he was able to pass on in letters to his wife, and a text in which he attacked the KGB was smuggled into the USA and published in New York.

In 1977 he was sent to his exile Matrosowa in Magadan Oblast in the far east of Russia, where he worked in a gold mine until 1979.

When Stus returned to Kiev in the autumn of 1979, he contacted the Helsinki human rights group there, whose members were subjected to repression. Although his health was in poor health, he earned his living as an industrial worker. In May 1980 he was arrested again and this time - as a "particularly dangerous repeat offender" - sentenced to 10 years in a forced labor camp and 5 years in exile. In court, Stus had refused the defense by the lawyer Viktor Medvedchuk (later head of the presidential office of Leonid Kuchma ) and tried to defend himself; He was then expelled from the courtroom and sentenced in absentia.

During the five remaining years he was held in camp Perm 36 near Kuchino, Stus was not allowed to visit his family. In 1983, however, notes from prison camp reached the West, and in 1985 an international group of writers and artists proposed Stus for the Nobel Prize for Literature .

On August 28, 1985, Stus was sentenced to detention in the camp for "violating the dress code" and protested by going on a hunger strike. Wassyl Stus died in the night of September 3rd to 4th, presumably of hypothermia. He was buried in the camp cemetery; his family was denied a home burial on the grounds that his term had not expired.

In 1989, Stus' remains, along with those of two other prisoners, were transferred to Kiev and buried there in the Baikowe Cemetery . His work appeared in several editions in the following years.

Awards and honors

• In 1993, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Stus was awarded the State Taras Shevchenko Prize of Ukraine posthumously for his complete works .
• In 2008 he was named Hero of Ukraine by the President of Ukraine .
• In 2008 a Ukrainian postage stamp worth 70 kopecks was issued in his honor, showing several buildings of a camp behind a barbed wire fence.
• In 2008 the Ukrainian National Bank minted a commemorative coin worth 2 hryvnia, which shows a portrait of the poet on the reverse based on a mosaic by the Ukrainian artist Alla Horska .

Works

Poetry collections

• Kruhowert ( Круговерть - vortex ), 1965
• Symowi derewa ( Зимові дерева - winter trees ), 1965
• Wesselyj zwyntar ( Веселий цвинтар - Merry Cemetery ), 1971
• Tschas twortschosti ( Час творчості - creative period ), 1972
• Palimpsests ( Палімпсести ), 1986
• Поезії Стихи ( Poetry ), 2009

in German

• Fear - I got rid of you. Ukrainian poems from exile . Ivan Switlychnyj; Yevhen Swerstyuk; Wassyl Stus. From d. Ukrain. trans. by Anna-Halja Horbatsch. Gerold and Appel, Hamburg 1983, ISBN 3-7604-0061-2 .
• A poet in resistance. From the diary of Wassyl Stus . From d. Ukrain. by Anna-Halja u. Marina Horbatsch. Gerold and Appel, Hamburg 1984, ISBN 3-7604-0065-5 .
• You only dreamed your life , selection from the collection of poems Palimpsests . From d. Ukrain. trans. by Anna-Halja Horbatsch. Gerold and Appel, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-7604-0070-1 .

literature

• Michael Hejfetz: Wassyl Stus - a poet behind barbed wire . Thun 1983.
• Kuratorium Geistige Freiheit (eds.): Jurij Badzio, Valerij Martschenko, Wassyl Stus. Three Ukrainian prisoners of conscience . Thun 1985.
• Wachtang Kipiani, The Wassyl Stus Files. Collection of documents from the archives of the former KGB [Справа Василя Стуса. Збірка документів з архіву колишнього КДБ УРСР]. Vivat, Charkiw 2019. 688 pp. ISBN 978-966-942-927-8

Footnotes

1. ↑ Ann-Dorit Boy: The enemies of the state rightly languished. The famous GULag Museum “Perm 36”, the only memorial camp for political prisoners in Russia, is to be destroyed. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 19, 2014, p. 13.
2. ↑ biography Wassyl Stus on Olexa-org; accessed on March 12, 2016

Web links

Commons : Wassyl Stus  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Vasylʹ S. Stus in the catalog of the German National Library