Still figuring out our stand

Vasyl Stus was born in January 1938 and 20 years later he wrote:

Rejoice in the days and nights of spring,
In the tender smiling light of dawn!
Helmsman, full ahead! Let our youth burn out,
For we’re true to life and will be crowned with glory.

He was indeed crowned with glory, although as befits an uncompromising personality, he never lived to see this. He died on the night of Sept. 4, 1985, in an isolation cell of Prison Camp VS-189/36 in the village of Kuchino, Chusov raion, Perm oblast (Russia). In November 1989 the remains of Vasyl Stus, Yurii Lytvyn, and Oleksa Tykhy were transferred to Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv. This is a very special cemetery, where the grave of Stus is “united” with those of various nomenklatura functionaries who persecuted him during his lifetime. The same is true of Viacheslav Chornovil, whose grave is not far from that of Volodymyr Shcherbytsky and other great “leaders” of the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR.

In 1972 the arrestee Stus wrote to one of them: “I am not a nationalist. On the contrary, I thought it necessary to act in such a way as to help a certain proportion of Ukrainians clear their heads of the fog of self-admiration, anti-Semitism, and backwater provincialism. Likewise, I considered it necessary to act so as to clear the heads of some Russians, Jews, and others of the fog of disrespect for the Ukrainian language, culture, and history...” Who could have realized what Stus was striving for in the Brezhnevian year of 1972?

Vasyl Stus was born in Vinnytsia oblast. In 1940 the family moved to Stalino (today: Donetsk), where his father got a job at a local factory. In 1954-59 he majored in Ukrainian language and literature at the local pedagogical institute (currently a university, where I saw a memorial plaque to Stus on one of its walls). Later he worked as a schoolteacher in Kirovohrad oblast, served in the army, and worked at School No. 23 in Horlivka, Donetsk oblast. In 1963, having worked as a coal miner and editor of the newspaper Sotsialisticheskii Donbass, Stus enrolled for graduate courses at the Institute of Literature at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. He started publishing his works in 1959, and his first poems appeared in the journal Dnipro. He managed to publish several reviews and poems. He could have written a dissertation because he admitted that he knew “all the popular quotes from the patented classics,” but events took a different course.

Above all, Stus valued freedom. According to a modern Ukrainian writer, a pofigist (one who doesn’t give a damn about anything — Ed.), freedom is an idea or action that leads one off course. Stus took such an action on Sept. 4, 1965, during a students’ protest rally against the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. The rally took place at the Ukraine Cinema, on the initiative of the literary critic Ivan Dziuba. Stus supported him, shouting to the audience: “Those who are against tyranny, stand up!” Stus made his choice. Since then he would never forgive the System anything, and the System reciprocated. On Aug. 20 of that year Stus was expelled from the university for reasons that were jesuitically formulated as “repeated breaches of the rules of graduate students’ conduct.” He became unemployed but never became a conformist. He did not remain silent in the face of injustice and made no secret of his views. He worked on a construction team as a stoker, then found a job at the Central Historical Archives of the Ukrainian SSR, but was forced to resign, of course.

After that Stus found an engineer’s job, but he did not make a career in this field. He was first arrested in January 1972 and was sentenced to five years in the camps and three years of exile. He returned to Kyiv in August 1979 as a well-known writer and member of the PEN Club and later, the Ukrainian Helsinki Group.

Stus was a 2nd class molder at the foundry of the Paris Commune Factory, and later a conveyor edge spreader at the Sport Shoe Factory. But the System forgot nothing about this spreader. He was rearrested in 1980 and sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment and five years of exile.

Back in 1968, Stus wrote:

That’s how I live: like a monkey among monkeys
With a sinful forehead branded by worry
I keep crashing against the stone walls,
I am their slave, like a slave, like a base slave...

This is an exaggeration. He was never a slave, no matter what the System did to him. Ivan Dziuba described him this way: “He was one of those people who are easy to deal with. He didn’t talk much, but he was intense both in his words and his silence; he was not suited either to senseless amusements or patriotic rhetoric...Into every matter he injected gravity and what I would describe as unexpressed moral rigorism. Even his appearance gave the impression, especially to those who were meeting him for the first time, of extraordinariness and the status of a chosen one.”

This is a serious observation, considering that Stus is too often covered in bronze paint these days; to put it mildly, he is being idealized to a certain extent. This should not be done, for he himself once admitted, “I feel better in winter, without the short-lasting illusions of summer — warmth and greenery.” One should have no illusions with regard to such “winter” people as Stus; they should not be presented as “white and fluffy.” They were never like that. Stus was perhaps (too) honest with himself and thus had the right to demand honesty from others.

This alone makes me regard Stus not only as a poet and translator but also as a historical personage — or a “prisoner of history,” to use his own words. We lack such people today. We are now hearing that Ukraine needs people like Jerzy Giedroyc. Perhaps we do. I wholeheartedly respect and appreciate Giedroyc. However, he was “creating” an independent Poland outside that country. Stus never had his Maisons-Laffitte (the French town where Giedroyc died — Ed.). He was in Ukraine and wanted to stay here forever. That is why I think we need people like him, who are capable of telling the lords, and especially the underlords, who they really are. After they expelled Stus from graduate school and he read the order signed by the director of the Academy’s Institute of Literature, he wrote: “May this remain on your party conscience.” I wonder what he would have to say about the government in Ukraine after August 1991.

After sustaining clinical death at a prison hospital in Leningrad oblast in 1975, Stus wrote:

How good it is that I do not fear death,
I do not ask whether my cross is heavy.
I do not bow down, judges, to what is before you
With a presentiment of unknown roads...

There is a painful shortage of individuals who, like Stus, are capable of admitting that:

The rotten mainland of Ukraine
Is growing like a mushroom; even a tiny infant
Promises to become our executioner
And chop apart the age-old threshold,
With their forefathers’ patriotism...
With every passing day this earthly firmness rots,
While we’re still figuring out our stand.
We are approaching the essence.
Forgotten by the Lord, we are begging
For a homeland.

Stus did not beg for anything. This is what makes him such an interesting personality. But at the same time he did not demand anything superfluous. He stood with his feet on the ground. “Demanding anything from the times is unwise and perhaps unworthy. But neither should you drift with the current.” These lines are from a letter to his son Dmytro in 1983. It is a testament for all those who still remember that they are living in Ukraine, who still have not lost those feelings that were known in the Stus hierarchy as self-respect and human and national dignity.