Last week it was fifteen years since Vasyl Stus, the talented Ukrainian poet, long-term prisoner of conscience, and member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group perished tragically in one of the infamous death camps in the Urals.
It all happened twenty years after Stus’ and his like-minded friends’ protested in the Ukrayina Cinema House during a showing of the film Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors by Serhiy Paradzhanov. A wave of arrests hit Ukraine then. Stus’ friends and allies — young scientists, and literati — had been put behind bars portending the end of the Khrushchev’s thaw. Stus had to pay for it by being dismissed from graduate school and looking for a job while blacklisted until he was arrested in 1972 for first time. Being a poet by God’s grace he spent twelve of his 47 and a half years in imprisonment. His name and works (at least a part of them) came back to his compatriots in the late 1980s with the poet’s reburial on November 19, 1989 in Kyiv together with Oleksa Tykhy’s and Yuri Lytvyn’s, his sworn camp brothers. What was he like, what did he dream of and worry about while on his martyr’s path? Who can better answer these questions but a person who knew him well, like, for instance, the poet’s son, Dmytro STUS. Now we are proposing a conversation with him to our readers.
A great deal has been written and said about Vasyl Stus. This original poet is compared with Shevchenko. It would be interesting to hear what was your father like in the everyday life, what do you remember about him?
Every time, every epoch brings forth various things the people need. Whether we wish it or not, Shevchenko’s creativity was molded in St. Petersburg — Shevchenko’s verses were listened to in the same salons where Poltava dumplings were eaten. Later the campaign to popularize his works began because Shevchenko’s verses touched to the quick, stimulating the extremely numerous Ukrainian community of St. Petersburg to return to their people. Stus was in the same situation because the segment of the intelligentsia making their careers were again switching to the Russian language starting to serve the imperial culture. However, if we take into consideration expression means of, say, as if colorful populism (narodnichestvo), this niche was occupied already. Ivan Drach and M. Kholodny worked there, and Vasyl Symonenko had left it earlier. But the nature of the Stus’s talent was far from traditional populism. Intellectualism was his way. All that also had its effect on his life. It was painful for my mother. It’s hard to answer what he was like in life because a person conducts himself differently in different situations. I remember him better during our difficult period ,but he was a person who could give a lot, to me personally, and did give a lot.
After Chornovil’s death they called him the last romanticist. Can we say the same about your father?
I can’t really agree with calling anybody the last romanticist. It is a good name, and there have always been romanticists. In my opinion, being a romantic has never been connected with politics, it is associated with love, with how one sees life, with the desire to always go against the current. Well, I don’t know whether my father could be called a romanticist. Obviously, it’s possible in the sense that he had the great luck to believe in spite of all circumstances that somebody needed what he was doing.
The world public came forward to defend the poet. Were there similar voices in Ukraine, however, for instance on the part of those influencing the regime, if only, say, Oles Honchar? The fact is that in Russia itself Academician Sakharov was actively defending political prisoners.
First, Ukrainian voices were much more difficult to hear. There were no well-known powerful public figures at that time who stood up to defend Stus. This characterizes, however, not those figures so much, as the general atmosphere in Ukraine at the time. Moreover, in 1972 Stus was not so well known; they knew his poetry and writings very little. It was only after his Palimpsests, after 1974-1975 that his name became well-known and significant. But then, in 1972, many people more popular than he were arrested — Ivan Svitlychny, Yevhen Sverstiuk, and Chornovil. If famous public figures do not defend Valentyn Moroz, Sverstiuk, Svitlychny — and Svitlychny was, after all, former editor-in-chief of Radianske Literaturoznavstvo (Soviet Literary Criticism) — what could they say about Stus?
And what did Stus think of his sworn brothers of sixties who caved in during the political trials of the early seventies?
His attitude toward such people differed since one can crack differently. A person assumes responsibility and decides how to act in situation one or another in view of the circumstances. Among circumstances of the kind there might be one’s wife, children, parents, health state, one’s own physical condition. Stus liked Dziuba and despite the fact that he had written the first sharp letter, he spoke of Dziuba later with great warmth and was upset when the latter was failing to create works at the level of his Internationalism or Russification? As to Kholodny, his attitude was different. But that was conditioned by the nature of the recantation letters. It is one thing to cave in but another to sling mud at everybody else.
Finally, about Stus’s maximalism, I think that only he had a right to it and nobody else because his requirements regarding himself were at the same maximalistic level. But when today all this is cited by people who are not so exacting towards themselves and are following, to my mind, a much dirtier way than Kholodny, it irritates me a lot.
You certainly remember that hasty burial of Vasyl Stus in 1985. What do you think the camp chiefs were so afraid of?
That’s true, something linked with Stus happened in the zone. Several days after his death the camp warden committed suicide. The point was that Vasyl Stus had been nominated for the Nobel Prize which clearly was not granted him since it would have been necessary from the political point of view to give it to Gorbachev. That is why it was necessary either to moderate camp practices or to release Stus. Stus’s personal relations with supervisors and camp administration were so strained that a direct order from above did not bind the jailers to anything. As the result of a conflict Stus was put into solitary: there were light frosts, his nerve system was exhausted, his heart was chronically ill (by the way, in 1980 they could not have jailed him having such bad health; it was already a de facto death sentence). It is not known whether there was a direct strike or he failed to hold a bunk that was too heavy. And what were they afraid of? I think they were really not afraid of anything because those people were confident of their rightness and impunity. It was like one more humiliation of mine, my mom, or his relatives who had come there. We could not do anything with them at the time. Later on, when the exhumation was done some marks on the left side of the chest were discovered, there are photos to prove that. But nobody knows what had really happened. Another thing is that prisoners could have supported him somehow, could have gone on a hunger strike. The atmosphere was, however, so oppressive that everyone realized that one still had to stand it. Human instincts were at work here. Later on Vasyl Ovsiyenko and many other ex- prisoners recalled that after Stus’s death the climate became less tense at once — a lot changed. There was no longer such terrible pressure and no declarations that you were worse than the homeless.
To what extent is it true that Stus was killed just for his nomination for the Nobel Prize?
The people who write that have no idea of Stus’s psychological condition. That confrontation had simply ground his nerves down completely since he had participated in every hunger-strike and been involved into every protest action. You can’t do that without negative consequences for the body. It was like a suicide a la Don Quixote with clear understanding of everything that might result. In 1985 he seemed completely exhausted.
About a political prisoner’s family. What was the attitude of associates and neighbors, your mother’s colleagues, your teachers, and classmates in the 1970s?
After the series of arrests those people whom the arrests had not affected took care of the families of those arrested. Rita Kostiantynivna and Borys Stepanovych Dovhan helped us, supporting morally and often financially. Her father rendered support to us, too, for over fifty years a Communist Party member, by the way. But people’s attitude varied. Some treated us as enemies, other people’s attitude did not change a lot. The teachers were educating everybody, they were telling us that we should love Lenin — the propaganda machine was still working. But I studied in a bad school, which did not offer any real life prospects — it was simply nearby. Nevertheless, they had created such conditions there too that I was forced to leave after the eighth grade. I think that all those external factors, which certainly do exist, can’t be decisive. Everything depends upon our comprehension. People ask me often why I have never visited my father’s native village of Rokhnivtsi, Vinnytsa oblast. It’s quite simple. All those relatives — it doesn’t matter why — didn’t have anything to do with my mother in those years; they just didn’t exist and that’s all. And this is something very hard to get over.
Thank you for the interview.
