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.
"This is the first detailed biography of a genial poet whose word expressed the pains, tragedies, and lost hopes of the Soviet Ukrainian so-called 'Sixtiers' in the 20th century. To those who do not know or know only little of Vasyl Stus' oeuvre, the book will reveal a great European poet who, together with Rilke, Whitman, Celan and Pasternak, represents mankind's finest twentieth-century poetry. To those who already know his legacy, the book will reveal the context of Stus' poems and help to better understand his texts."Leonid Finberg, Editor-in-Chief, Dukh i Litera Press, Kyiv-Mohyla Academy