Stus’s poetry is an embodiment of the Ukrainian worldview, Ukrainian cultural consciousness of the twentieth century. The lines of Vasyl Stus do not reflect life—but for the first time they create a new spiritual reality, one that did not exist before the poems.
Contents
1. “All Kyiv is dreamed of me in wonderful dreams…”
2. “Like in the starry sky, the music of a ringing phone!”
3. “A star shone on me this morning…”
4. “So delicately-delicately dreams led me…”
5. “On Lysa Hora, the extinguished campfire cools…”
6. “Crows flew past in the neighboring window…”
7. “Wheels rattle” (In memory of M.K. Zerov)
8. “She and I: Someone has separated us…”
9. “One mountain is winter, the other—summer…”
10. “My homeland itself became alien to me…”
11. “Balzac, envy—here it is, the cassock…”
12. “In that clear field, blue, like flax…”
13. “Dry leaves fall from the branches…”
14. “In the Kolyma frost, viburnum…”
15. “June snow on a boundless hill…”
16. “There is silence. In silence, dry and black…”
17. “Here, in my black-black surroundings, wandered…”
18. “Burn, soul! Burn—don’t complain!” (In memory of Alla Horskа)
19. “Pipes sparkle, dazzled by blended brilliance…”
20. “Sad without a forest, sad without a meadow…”
21. “Dad prays to God…”
22. “Though the play began long ago…” [The Theater of the Absurd]
23–24. Vasyl Stus reads his poems (Amateur recording from the late 1960s—early 1970s)
Translations of poems from Ukrainian into Russian:
Dmytro Baka (8,11,17,19)
Yuriy Belykov (12,14,16,18)
Oleksandr Kupreychenko (1–7,9,10,13,15,20–22)
The poems are performed by:
Olha Boitsova (2,7,10,11,13,15,17,20)
Anna Litkens (4,6,8,16,18,19)
Olha Tenyakova (3,5,9,12,14,21)
Tymofiy Trybuntsev (1,21,22)