Vasyl Stus
Vasyl Stus Semenowytsch ( Ukrainian Василь Семенович Стус, scientific transliteration Vasyl ' Stus Semenovyč; born January 8, 1938 in Rachniwka, Vinnytsia Oblast, † September 4, 1985 in Kutschino, Perm Oblast ) was a Ukrainian poet and publicist. He was one of the most dedicated member of a Ukrainian cultural autonomy in the 60s and was sentenced to a total of 23 years in prison camps and exile.
Life
Stu was born in 1938 as son of a farmer in a village in Podolia, in the same year his parents moved with him to the city Stalino (now Donetsk ), in order to escape the dekulakization and forced collectivization. Great influence on his childish mind had partially wistful songs that his mother sang to him. After finishing secondary school Stus studied at the Pedagogical Institute in Stalino at the Faculty of history and literary studies. Between graduation and the beginning of the two-year military service, he worked for three months in 1958 as a teacher in Haiworona in Kirovohrad Oblast. During his studies and military service he began to write and discovered poets like Goethe or Rilke in itself; it should have transferred several hundred poems of the two German poets into Ukrainian, they are lost through confiscation. In 1959 he published his first poems in Soviet magazines.
After Stu had been discharged from the army in 1960, he wrote three years as an editor for the magazine Sozialistitscheski Donbass ( Socialist Donbass ) before an aspirant got a job at the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences in Kiev in 1963. In 1963 a selection of poems in a literary magazine. When the poet in 1965 took part in a protest against the detention of Ukrainian intellectuals, this cost him to study and work at the institute. He participated in work on the building as a fireman, and in a design office and had a very productive parallel poetic phase. In 1965 he had married, and in 1966 the son of Dmytro was born.
As late as 1965 Stu tried his first volume of poetry Kruhowert ( Круговерть ) to publish, he was denied by the publisher so; also a second collection of poetry Symowi derewa ( Зимові дерева - Winter trees) were repudiated despite benevolent colleagues from reviews - but she found through the samizdat dissemination and came in this way to Belgium. In 1970 the book was published in Brussels, which Stu finally came out of the Soviet system.
In the aftermath Stu wrote critically against the ruling system and its after the Khrushchev thaw recently been gaining strength restorative tendencies: his open letter addressed to the Writers' Union, the Communist Party Central Committee and to the Verkhovna Rada and protested against the detention of colleagues against the resurgent cult of personality and human rights violations. After he had participated in the early 70s in emerging human rights groups, he was arrested in January 1972 for " anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda " and sentenced in the autumn of the year to five years of forced labor and three years of exile. He spent time in prison in various prison camps in Mordovia, interrupted only by hospitalization for a severe stomach ailment. His poems were regularly seized and destroyed, some he was able to pass in letters to his wife, and a text in which he attacked the KGB, was smuggled into the United States and published in New York.
In 1977 he was sent to his exile Matrosowa in the Oblast Magadan in the far east of Russia, where he worked in a gold mine until 1979.
As Stu in the fall of 1979 returned to Kiev, he made contact with the local Helsinki human rights groups, whose members were subject to repression. His livelihood he deserved, although in poor health, as industrial workers. In May 1980, he was arrested again and this time - as "particularly dangerous repeat offenders " - sentenced to 10 years in a forced labor camp and 5 years exile. In court, Stu had (later President's head of Leonid Kuchma ) rejected the defense by the attorney Victor Medwetschuk and tried to defend himself; then he was asked to leave the courtroom and sentenced in absentia.
In the five years remaining to him in a prison camp in Kutschino Stus was allowed no visit his family. 1983 still came notes from the prison camp in the West, and in 1985 proposed an international group of writers and artists to Stu's Nobel Prize for Literature before.
On August 28, 1985 Stu was punished in the camp because of " violation of the dress code " with Karzerhaft and protested by hunger strike. On the night of 3 to 4 September he died, probably of hypothermia. He was buried in the camp cemetery; his family was denied a funeral in the home on the grounds that his term had not yet expired.
1989 led to his remains, together with those of two other prisoners to Kiev and buried him there.
In 1993, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, awarded posthumously to Stu for his overall state Shevchenko premium Ukraine. His work has appeared in the following years in several editions.
Works
- Kruhowert ( Круговерть - Eddy ), 1965
- Symowi derewa ( Зимові дерева - Winter Trees ), 1965
- Wesselyj zwyntar ( Веселий цвинтар - Merry Graveyard ), 1971
- Tschas twortschosti ( Час творчості - creative period ), 1972
- Palimpsests ( Палімпсести ), 1986
- Поезії Стихи ( poetry ), 2009
- You have your life just a dream, selection from the collection of poems palimpsests, Hamburg 1987, ISBN 3-7604-0070-1
- A poet in the resistance. From the Diary of the Vasyl Stus, 1982, ISBN 3-7604-0065-5
- Fear - I got rid of you. Ukrainian poems from exile, 1983, ISBN 3-7604-0061-2