How to explain the mystery of fame? Many once well-known people who spent much of their lives at the core of historic events have fallen into oblivion since. The brilliant East Ukrainian poet and Soviet-era dissident Vasyl Stus (1938-85) became renowned only after his reburial in late Soviet Ukraine in 1989. What are the reasons for the widespread admiration for him in post-Soviet Ukrainian society? The exceptional beauty of his poetry? His stunning courage and selflessness as a Soviet dissident? The irreconcilability of his position as a human being? Or/and Vasyl Stus’ ability to feel the pain of others as his own?
Trying to answer these and other questions, the poet’s son and literary scholar Dmytro Stus masterfully combines a cultural and biographical study with private recollections and observations of his father. The book offers a sometimes-paradoxical merger of genres mixing academic analysis with novelistic narration. It shows Vasyl Stus through the eyes of his son and researcher against the background of twentieth-century Ukrainian “belated” emergence as a nation-state. In 2007, the Ukrainian edition of this book won Ukraine’s prestigious Shevchenko National Prize.
Circa l’autore
The author:
Dr. Dmytro Stus studied Philology at Kyiv State University. Since 2012, he has been Director of the Taras Shevchenko National Museum in Kyiv. Previously, he was a Research Fellow at the Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. Dmytro Stus is the chair of the Congress of Litterateurs of Ukraine, a former editor of the journals Kyivs’ka Rus’, Suchasnist’, and Knyzhnyk-Review, and CEO of the Ukraine Incognita Foundation. He has compiled several collections of works by his father as well as, together with Leonid Finberg and Oleksii Sinchenko, the anthology Ukrainian Dissidents (ibidem-Verlag 2021).
The translator:
Ludmila Bachurina is Senior Lecturer in English at the V.I. Vernadsky Taurida National University at Kyiv.
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