COURAGE

Свързване на колекции

The Vasyl Stus Collection is an incredibly rich resource for literary scholars as well as the broader public. The two volumes of his letters, published in 1997, are considered masterpieces by those intimately familiar with his life and works.. At the end of the second volume is a remarkable essay written by Stus’s mentor, friend and colleague Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, titled “The Epistolary Literature of Vasyl Stus,” which provides important insights into Stus’s character, his literary influences, his understanding of what was happening to himself and his friends, and how he understood their role in history. The original letters to friends and acquaintances are held at the archives of the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), while the letters to his wife and son remain in the family’s private archive.

The Vasyl Stus collection is an incredibly rich resource for literary scholars as well as the broader public. The two volumes of his letters, published in 1997, are considered masterpieces by those intimately familiar with his life and works.. At the end of the second volume is a remarkable essay written by Stus’s mentor, friend and colleague Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, titled “The Epistolary Literature of Vasyl Stus,” which provides important insights into Stus’s character, his literary influences, his understanding of what was happening to himself and his friends, and how he understood their role in history. The original letters to friends and acquaintances are held at the archives of the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), while the letters to his wife and son remain in the family’s private archive.

Як добре те, що смерті не боюсь я
і не питаю, чи тяжкий мій хрест.
Що перед вами, судді, не клонюся
в передчутті недовідомих верств.
Що жив, любив і не набрався скверни,
ненависті, прокльону, каяття.
Народе мій, до тебе я ще верну,
і в смерті обернуся до життя
своїм стражденним і незлим обличчям. 
Як син, тобі доземно уклонюсь
і чесно гляну в чесні твої вічі,
і в смерть із рідним краєм поріднюсь.

— Василь Стус

How Good It Is

How good it is that I’ve no fear of dying
Nor ask myself how ponderous my toil
Nor bow to cunning magistrates, decrying
Presentiments of unfamiliar soil,
That I have lived and loved, yet never burdening
My soul with hatred, curses or regret.
My people! It is to you I am returning.
In death I somehow find my fate.
I turn my pained but goodly face to living
And in filial prostration I begin.
I meet your eyes in fair thanksgiving
And join my kindred earth as closest kin.

— Vasyl Stus

(Trans. by Marco Carynnyk)

While in exile Stus wrote many texts that were almost impossible to send out to family and friends. Some texts made it out in letters, but that was only partly successful as not all of them passed through the censors. There was a scheme devised in the camps whereby texts were passed on using small containers, which held rolling papers for cigarettes with text written tiny script on both sides, which were then rolled up and placed into tubes that were either swallowed, or transferred in some other way. In Stus’s collection is one such container, which held a number of these rolling papers onto which he had written in the smallest legible text some poems he had drafted while in the camps. These poems not only made it out of the camps and also the Soviet Union, as fellow activist and Soviet political prisoner Nadia Svitlychna managed to publish these poems abroad, even though publishing Stus’ poetry was forbidden at that time in the USSR. The original papers somehow made it back to the family, which they donated to the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature along with the rest of his archive. It is the view of Galyna Burlaka, a senior research fellow at the institute and head of the Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies that items such as this are fantastic and unique on their own. However, given Stus’ prominence and history, they are also national treasures. This is why the Institute of Literature’s archive has the status a national repository, as it holds items of immense value for Ukraine as a whole. 

All roads in the Ukrainian archives seem to lead to Vasyl Stus, one of the most prominent poets of the sixtiers generation. He was a central figure in samizdat circles, though his works were largely unknown to the larger public until the late 1980s. This item has a particularly unusual trajectory, as it was smuggled out of Soviet Ukraine by Raisa Moroz. Liuba Vozniak-Lemyk copied by hand five of Stus’ poems on two pieces of cloth and then Moroz sewed them into the wide skirt she would wear as she left the Soviet Union. Vozniak-Lemyk was a member of the Ukrainian underground, sentenced in 1948 to 25 years of hard labor in Siberia, but was amnestied in 1956. Moroz was a human rights activist married to one of the most prominent Ukrainian political prisoners of the Brezhnev era—Valentyn Moroz. On April 27, 1979, he was released unexpectedly from a Mordovian prison, as part of a spectacular exchange of five political prisoners for two Soviet spies that took place at JFK Airport in New York. None of the prisoners knew about the planned exchange nor been asked for their consent. They thought they were having their citizenship revoked and being deported. Raisa was also allowed to leave the Soviet Union as part of this exchange. These poems were published in the Munich-based émigré journal Suchasnist in Ukrainian in December 1979.