Literature & Literary Studies
October 2018
Vasyl Stus was not only a poet of rare talent, publicist, translator and literary critic, but he is also a personification of "the voice of conscience in the world of shaky and blurred concepts of honour, truth, decency." He spent nearly half of his life in Soviet detention centres, solitary confinement cells, Mordovian and Kolyma camps and toiling at mines. The Soviet penal system deprived him of family visits, seized his poems, letters and manuscripts, physically abused him and tried to destroy him morally but it never managed to break his spirit.The poems in this collection are the best examples of Vasyl Stus's lyrics. In these lines, civic motives and the artist's pain for the fate of Ukraine are intertwined with a delicate lace of love lyrics and philosophical reflections on life and the purpose of man. Poems are full of hope and unyielding resolve.
