Vasyl Stus

Vasyl Stus (Rakhnivka, 1938 – Perm-36, 1985) was a Ukrainian poet, translator, literary critic and journalist, and an active member of the dissident movement under Soviet rule. He wrote in Ukrainian at a time when the Soviet system restricted both the language and the ideas he defended. Today he is widely regarded as one of Ukraine's foremost poets, and his case illustrates the repression of Ukrainian intellectuals in the 1970s and 1980s.

He was born into a peasant family, and as a child he joined his parents in Stalino, now Donetsk. He learned Ukrainian largely from his mother, who sang him folk songs, and he graduated from the local pedagogical institute in 1959. During his military service he began writing poetry and translated more than a hundred lines of Goethe and Rilke, though those manuscripts were later seized by the KGB and lost. After working as a newspaper editor, he began a doctoral programme in Kyiv. In 1965 he joined a protest at the premiere of Sergei Paradzhanov's film against the arrests of intellectuals, and as a result he was expelled from the institute and lost his job at the state archive. Soviet publishers rejected his books, and his next collection of poems appeared in Belgium in 1970. He was arrested in 1972 and again in 1980, and he died at the Perm-36 labour camp in September 1985 after a hunger strike.

His poetry, written in a language the authorities tried to marginalise, returns repeatedly to national memory and personal dignity. As a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group he defended human rights without hiding his convictions. After his death his remains were moved to Kyiv in 1989, and his name became a symbol of intellectual resistance. In 2005 he was posthumously named Hero of Ukraine, and in 2016 the Donetsk National University, then based in Vinnytsia, took his name.