Василь Стус. Палімпсести

Василь Стус

Work proposed for translation:

Палімпсести 
Poetry (1986)
Length: 352 pp.
Copyright: Heirs: dvstus@gmail.com

Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) is a prominent Ukrainian poet, dissident, political prisoner, symbol of the struggle for human dignity and freedom. A philologist by education, Stus worked as a teacher, translator and literary editor, studied at the graduate school of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1965, during the premiere of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Sergei Parajanov, he spoke out against the arrests of creative youth, for which he was expelled from graduate school. The murder of the artist Alla Horska was the impetus for the creation of the poetry collection The Merry Cemetery, in which Stus ironically criticizes the Soviet totalitarian reality, where death and tragedy have become everyday realities. This was the reason for his arrest. After the first imprisonment (1972–1979), Stus returned to Kyiv, but in 1980 he was arrested for the second time. In 1985, the poet died in a camp. The posthumous collection Palimpsests (1986) became the highest point of his work, exploring the strength of the spirit and freedom under totalitarian pressure. Stus’ work has been translated into many languages. He is not only a Ukrainian poet, but also a world symbol of the struggle for human rights and dignity.

Palimpsests is the pinnacle of Vasyl Stus’ poetic work. It includes most of the poems that the poet wrote during his exile in Kolyma in the harsh conditions of imprisonment and camp existence. The title of the collection reveals its essence: it is a multitude of layers of text, and metaphors and symbols here are like keys to finding the next layer of meanings. The poems of Palimpsests are an escape from oblivion, an attempt to comprehend human pain in conditions of totalitarian horror against the background of the broad experience of European culture. These are complex intellectual texts that combine biblical, Ukrainian folklore and ancient motifs. At the same time, there are allusions to the texts of Shevchenko and Rilke. For Stus, the preservation of human dignity is not a debatable issue. With his poetry, he affirms it and writes so strongly that this dignity emanates from every line, but at the same time the reader will not find any declarativeness or unnecessary pathos here. In addition, Stus has an amazing sense of aesthetics and musicality of words — his poetry naturally resonates with the ear thanks to a successful combination of various artistic means.