Vasyl Stus wrote poems in the labour camps of the Soviet system and died there in 1985. He had refused to recant, refused to be silent, refused every arrangement that would have shortened his sentence at the cost of his conscience. In the decades since, he has become something larger than a biography: a symbol of the indomitable Ukrainian spirit, and a direct heir to the line of spiritual resistance that Taras Shevchenko opened in Ukrainian literature more than a century before him.
Alexander Korotko's narrative poem does not retell that life as chronicle. It reconstructs it from the inside.
Working in poetic vision rather than narrative sequence, Korotko traces the internal weather of a man under sustained pressure: the doubt, the exhaustion, the moments where will nearly gives way, and the stubborn refusal that holds anyway. What emerges is a portrait of stoic struggle rendered with unusual intimacy, giving readers access not to what Stus did but to what it may have cost him.
This edition presents Korotko's poem in English language, transled by Michael Pursglove.
Alexander Korotko is one of Ukraine's most widely translated contemporary poets. His War Poems appeared from Glagoslav in 2022, followed by the short story collection Bera and Cucumber in 2023. He lives in Kyiv.
