Ukrainian dissidents. Beyond the limits...

The project is called “Beyond the Limits... The Poet, His Brethren, and Their Age.” Head of de­part­ment of the National Museum of Li­te­ra­ture of Ukraine (NMLU) Oksana Derkach explained: “We have snatched the name of the exhibition out of Stus’s creative legacy’s context. It is beyond the limits of possible, per­mis­sib­le, plausible. The exhibition is centered on Stus, his path of suffering, his brethren and associates who made up the close circle of Ukrainian dis­sidents.” The project was conceived by actress Halyna Stefanova and literary critic Roman Veretelnyk who have implemented this idea in cooperation with the museum, the Kyiv Mohyla Academy, and the Les Kurbas Center.

Exhibits on display include many unique books and paintings from the NMLU’s collections, and visitors are touched as they see memorabilia from the 1960s and 1970s, like record players, vinyl records, cameras, watches, or big sunglasses in a cardboard box. Other items include Stus’s clothes: a tie, a hat, and a scarf knitted by his wife Valentyna for the poet when he served his term at a labor camp in Mordovia.

The organizers have shown Stus the translator as well. A typewriter has a sheet inserted with translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem “Death of a Poet,” as Rilke was the favorite poet of the Ukrainian dissident. Derkach commented: “Stus did not see any of his translations published in his lifetime, even though the poet was a top-notch translator. More generally, the Sixtiers who could not publish their own works found self-fulfillment in translation. These authors could express their beliefs through texts of foreign authors.”

The exhibition “Beyond the Li­mits...” has a large green-painted box of apples displayed prominently. Such boxes were used to send parcels to prisoners of labor camps, including Stus. The box is filled with apples for a reason: “Once a year, people were allowed to send apples to prisoners. His wife Valentyna Stus did exactly that. The jailers waited until the fruits went bad, and only then handed them to the poet. ‘My wife held these apples in her hands...’ Stus wrote in a poem then,” Derkach told us.

The taffeta cloth which covered Stus’s coffin during his reburial is the centerpiece of the exhibition. This piece is preserved in the NMLU’s collection. On the heavy red curtain with gold fringe, the organizers placed the diploma of laureate of the Shevchenko Prize, awarded to Stus posthumously for poetry collection The Path of Suffering. Next to it, one sees engraving by Andrii Humeniuk, made for the poet’s solemn reburial which took place on November 19, 1989. The ar­tist gave away copies of the engraving to those attending the reburial, and one of them went to Stefanova.

“The Sixtiers’ movement is a subject of constant interest for our museum. This phenomenon was too strong and significant for us to act otherwise. The exhibition ‘Beyond the Limits...’ offers to the public our attempt to present this topic so that people will fully imagine and feel how artists of that era lived. It seems that the time itself has stopped among these exhibits,” Derkach admitted. The topic of Stus and his companions is getting further attention at another exhibition, also held at the NMLU, which is called “History as Orchestrated for Human Voices” and shows the documentaries shot by the Sixtiers.

Young people want to learn more about Ukrainian artists of the past century. The NMLU’s director general Halyna Soroka is happy with it: “The opening of the ‘Beyond the Limits...’ exhibition saw wonderful children coming from the Kyiv Mohyla Academy who had taken a course on the Sixtiers. These youths are very inspired, they talked to the Sixtiers, who also attended the event, and read poems by Stus, although they make for a hard reading.”

The exhibition “Beyond the Li­mits... The Poet, His Brethren, and Their Age” will last at the NMLU until December 1.