Vasyl Stus was an extraordinary Ukrainian poet and dissident who died in a labour camp in Russia three years before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Bohdan Tokarskyi notes in his introduction to the poetry translations, Stus was ‘uncompromising in his pursuit of justice and the truth’ in his life and art.
On the Inevitability of Justice
Introduction by Bohdan Tokarskyi
In 1979, whilst in exile in Kolyma, Vasyl Stus received a parcel with books by Rainer Maria Rilke from the German Amnesty International activist Christa Bremer. Stus thanked Bremer for her thoughtful gifts but also noted a major difference between Rilke’s work and his: ‘… my world is different to that in which Rilke lived. My soul not only searches for beauty but also longs for the higher spheres, justice, and the truth’. Just a few years earlier, in 1975, as the radio announced the signing of the Helsinki Accords and hailed the Soviet government’s commitment to fundamental freedoms, Stus lay unconscious in a Russian labour camp, bleeding from an untreated stomach ulcer. His world was indeed very different to Rilke’s: a world in the heart of Soviet totalitarianism, which mercilessly violated human rights and denied Ukraine the very right to exist as an independent culture and political nation.
In his civic struggle and poetry alike, Stus was uncompromising in his pursuit of justice and the truth. For him, the two went hand in hand. Uncovering the truth — about the plight of Stus’s own generation, the ubiquitous Russification, the mass executions of Ukrainian intellectuals in Stalin’s Great Purge in the 1930s, the Holodomor — was a conditio sine qua non for the eventual administration of justice.
While himself subject to the brutal injustice of the Soviet ‘legal’ system, Stus indefatigably asserted the imperative of human rights and national rights, protesting against any debasement of his or his fellow inmates’ dignity, writing an endless stream of letters to the Soviet authorities in defence of political prisoners, refusing to be silent about crimes, calling for the decolonisation of the USSR and Ukraine’s independence. In 1979, having just served his first sentence and returned to Kyiv, Stus became a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group (UHG), the principal human rights watchdog in Soviet Ukraine. Joining the UHG in the situation where Ukrainian dissidents received some of the harshest sentences in the Soviet Union and where, as the historian Timothy Snyder has put it, ‘human rights activism was treated as the most dangerous form of political crime’ was an extraordinary act of courage. This courage was punished. In 1980, Stus was arrested for the second time and sentenced to ten years in labour camps and five years of exile. He died in 1985, in a forced labour camp in Perm, like three more members of the UHG: Yurii Lytvyn, Valerii Marchenko, and Oleksa Tykhyi. It was dissidents like Stus who laid the foundation for the discourse and practice of human rights protection in the Soviet Union.
Stus’s lyric work is never too far from his civic engagement. Even in his less overtly political poems — and the more introspective, philosophical texts constitute the majority of his corpus — he seamlessly weaves the values that are fundamental to human rights into his poetic tissue: individual and collective freedom, the ethical imperative, the power of the lyrical — and legal — subject, the search for the truth.
The two poems we have selected for this publication foreground these themes. These two texts are separated by nearly a decade. Stus wrote the first draft of ‘I cannot survive this sleety winter’ on 4 September 1965, the date that marked the beginning of a new era in Soviet dissent. On that day Stus took part in the public protest — in the Ukraina cinema in the centre of Kyiv — against the first post-Stalin wave of arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals. Among the arrested was Ivan Svitlychnyi (1929–1992), a prominent literary critic, translator, and one of the leaders of the Ukrainian sixtiers. Stus first met Svitlychnyi when he moved from Donetsk to Kyiv in 1963 to do his PhD at the Institute of Literature. Svitlychnyi, who himself hailed from Luhansk, became Stus’s closest friend. Just a few days after the protest, Stus was expelled from the Institute. For several years he had to do odd jobs, including working as a stoker.
Stus himself was arrested in 1972, during Leonid Brezhnev’s most brutal crackdown on dissidents. His poem ‘They beat our snow-covered heads’ belongs to the Gulag period, after Stus, with his ‘heavy dossier’, had already irreversibly ‘crossed the threshold of the cell’. This Gulag text brings to the fore another theme that was of paramount importance for Stus: solidarity. Bearing in mind his Armenian, Georgian, Jewish, Lithuanian, Estonian, and other fellow dissidents, Stus evokes the collective ‘we’ of communities oppressed by the Soviet imperial order. While the original refers to uiarmleni narody (‘peoples under the yoke’), we went a step further and translated this part as ‘defiant peoples’. For Stus, after all, any oppression necessitated resistance: ‘The shards of our pain | keep calling us to battle’. Both poems brim with a sense of tireless, searing fury as a response to crimes that must ensure the inevitability of justice — fury underpinned by Stus’s adamant belief that ‘criminals will be punished, and those who do good [dobrodii] will triumph, if only posthumously’.
**
I can’t survive this sleety winter
without my Ivan’s dear smile.
And neither can I close my eyes,
not for a single instant,
when Kyiv sleeps and in the dead of night
they blacken, left and right,
my friend’s good name.
His light shines steady, like a star’s
through mist, but not a word
is to be heard from him, just silence.
Excruciating silence. Not a whisper
comes from his lips. Oh, my moustachioed sun!
The only gift the three kings bear for you
is their haphazard and threadbare rage.
My soft-eyed Ivan! Can you hear me?
I swear I don’t know what I have done
that until now I haven’t felt or crossed that
high and pure threshold of your cell.
Forgive me my weekend Khreshchatyk,
forgive me that I sit around and stoke
the boilers, deaf to the world. That I
endure it when I no longer can be silent
or endure, that reading your translations
I fall in love with Dante, Nezval, Orhan
and barrel to the ninth circle of hell.
And keep on waiting until, finally, one day
they’ll also come across my heavy dossier —
they who have robbed me of the world.
Who stole my land, my only chance at peace,
and left instead this salty, bloody fury,
and just one right: to toil under their yoke.
Now all the brave men hide in their holes,
professed truth-lovers — may you rot in hell!
Is human goodness only good until,
without courage, strength or any rights,
you’re called upon to help someone,
to throw a lifeline, to defend them,
to give a harbour in the storm,
and dare fight so you may live,
and dare die — so you may go on living?
And as they punish you, my one and only,
where can I flee the outrage, the shame?
Farewell, goodbye now, my accursed country,
the motherland of cowards and hangmen.
6 December 1965
Не можу я без посмішки Івана
оцю сльотаву зиму пережить.
В проваллях ночі, коли Київ спить,
а друга десь оббріхують старанно,
склепить очей не можу ні на мить,
він, як зоря, проміниться з туману,
але мовчить, мовчить, мовчить, мовчить.
Ні словом не озветься. Ані пари
із уст. Вусате сонечко моє!
Несуть тобі три царіє со дари
скапарене озлоблення своє.
Іваночку! Ти чуєш, доброокий?
Їй-бо не знаю, що я зле зробив.
Чого ж бо й досі твій поріг високий
ані відчув, ані переступив.
Прости мені, недільний мій Хрещатик,
що, сівши сидьма, ці котли топлю
в оглухлій кочегарці. Що терплю,
коли вже ні терпіти, ні мовчати
не можу, що, читаючи, люблю
твоїх Орхана, Незвала і Данте,
в дев’яте коло прагнучи стремлю.
Моє ж досьє, велике, як майбутнє,
напевне, пропустив котрийсь із трутнів.
Із тих, що білий світ мені окрали,
окравши край, окрали спокій мій,
лишивши гнів ропавий і кривавий
і право — надриватися в ярмі.
Сидять по шпарах всі мужі хоробрі,
всі правдолюби, чорт би вас побрав.
Чи людська добрість — тільки добрість,
поки без сил, без мужності, без прав
запомогти, зарадити, вступитись,
стражденного в нещасті прихистить
і зважитись боротися, щоб жити,
і зважитись померти, аби жить?
Коли тебе, коханий, покарають —
куди втечу від сорому й ганьби?
Тоді прости, прощай, проклятий краю,
вітчизно боягузів і убивць.
**
They beat our snow-covered heads against
eternity, relentlessly, without mercy.
And we still fail to settle a score with
our era and to find the path of truth.
Our grief’s ice-shards grind, bash and
and batter us. The shards of our pain
keep calling us to battle. But all we do is
swim behind ourselves like our own cadavers.
Our fury’s taking our breath away.
You, captive of eternity, go throw yourself
against the wall to win your freedom.
The world’s in agony, but defiant peoples
still shake the lampshade of the sky.
The stinging thorns of their screams
grow to the stars, into the cosmic blackness.
Немилосердно нас об вічність б’ють
припалою снігами головою.
А все не поквитаємось з добою,
ніяк не вийдем на правдиву путь.
Тороси горя нас і труть і мнуть,
тороси болю кличуть нас до бою,
а ми пливем, як туші, за собою,
і тільки дух нам забиває лють.
О в’язню вічності, гати себе об мур,
гати об мур, аби зажить свободи.
Конає світ. Уярмлені народи
гойдають небо, ніби абажур,
і в чорноті космічній, над зірками,
росте їх крик — жалкими шпичаками.
Dr Bohdan Tokarskyi is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, specialising in Ukrainian literature and culture. His translations have appeared in Apofenie, AGNI, Asymptote, Modern Poetry in Translation, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Two Lines. Bohdan Tokarskyi and Nina Murray have been working on a volume of Vasyl Stus’s poetry in English translation, a project that won a 2023 Peterson Literary Fund Translation-in-Progress Grant.
Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collection Glapthorn Circular (LiveCanon Poetry, 2023), Gannota: A Tale of Three Thimbles (The Braag, 2024), and several chapbooks. Her award-winning translations include Oksana Zabuzhko’s Museum of Abandoned Secrets, and Oksana Lutsyshyna’s Ivan and Phoebe, and Lesia Ukrainka’s Cassandra.
Visual: Anna Zvyagintseva, Kyiv, 2024
