Читать книгу Vasyl Stus: Life in Creativity - Dmytro Stus - Страница 7

Stus, Vasyl. Tvory, Vol. 5 and 6 (2 books) (Lviv: Prosvita, 1994–1999).

Belikov, Yurii. “Vo imia ottsa i syna,” Za cheloveka, No. 10 (44) (December 2001).

Bilocerkowycz, Jaroslaw. Soviet Ukrainian Dissent: A Study of Political Alienation (Boulder and London, 1988).

Kasyanov, Heorhii. Nezhodni: Ukrains’ka intelihentsiia v rusi oporu 1960–80-kh rokiv (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995).

Moroz, M. O. Litopys zhyttia ta tvorchosti Lesi Ukrainky (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1992).

Ne vidliubyv svoiu tryvohu ranniu: Vasyl Stus—poet i liudyna: Spohady, statti, lysty, poezii (Kyiv: Ukrainskyi pysmennyk, 1993).

Ovsienko, Vasyl. Svitlo liudei: Spohady-narysy pro Vasylia Stusa, Yuriia Lytvyna, Oksanu Meshko (Kyiv, 1996).

Permskie politlageria (Perm, 1995).

Shovkoshytny, Volodymyr. “‘Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu…’,” Ukraina, No. 4 (1990).

Verstiuk, V. F., O. M. Dziuba, and V. F. Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia: Khronolohichnyi dovidnyk (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1995).

Zhulynsky, Mykola. Iz zabuttia—v bezsmertia (Storinky pryzabutoi spadshchyny) (Kyiv: Dnipro, 1990).

1 For more details about Lesia Ukrainka’s burial, attended by thousands of people, see M. O. Moroz, Litopys zhyttia ta tvorchosti Lesi Ukrainky (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1992), 514–515.

2 All documents indicate the night of September 4 to 5, or simply September 4. However, after collecting a large number of testimonies and recollections, I think we can say that Vasyl Stus died on the night of September 3/4. And the next night, as Vasyl Ovsiienko writes in his memoirs, the body of Vasyl Stus was taken out of the dungeon in a “villainous” way.

3 Valentyna Popelyukh (born 1938) was Vasyl Stus’ wife.

4 Paradoxically, in this very Chusovoy, whose river runs along lands made tragic by the fate of thousands and thousands of Ukrainians, from time to time frightening the eye with a glimpse of white (earth? bones?). The director of the Ogonyok Olympic mountain skiing center, Leonard Postnikov, opened a museum of the Chusovaya river. His first exhibits were the Ermak Chapel saved by Postnikov and a large memorial stone, the first monument to the victims of repression in the USSR. It was in 1981 that Vasyl Stus was still alive and had just arrived at VS-389/36, located at a distance of 40 km from Postnikov’s future museum.

5 Mart Niklus, who managed to visit the site with Estonian TV, which was making a film about him, repeatedly mentioned this in his letters to me and Vasyl Ovsienko.

6 Volodymyr Shovkoshytny, “‘Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu…’,” Ukraina, No. 4 (1990): 7. The telegram is stored by the family in Vasyl Stus’ archive.

7 Shovkoshytny’s statement in the above-mentioned article that the documents concerning Oleksa Tykhy were prepared is not correct. Their collection started in the last weeks before departure but not all the permits were obtained from the authorities. Had the reburial had taken place at that time, Oleksa Tykhy’s ashes would most likely not have been transported.

8 V. F. Verstiuk, O. M. Dziuba, and V. F. Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia: Khronolohichnyi dovidnyk (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1995), 634–635.

9 Ibid., 636–637.

10 Ibid., 628.

11 Ibid., 626.

12 Despite all the protests and appeals, on December 4, 1987, the USSR Council of Ministers passed a resolution “On restricting the registration of Crimean Tatars in a number of settlements of the Crimean Oblast and the Krasnodar Krai.” See ibid., 627.

13 In particular, it is worth mentioning Oles Honchar’s resonant letter to the Secretary General of the CPSU Central Committee, Mikhail Gorbachev, in which he expressed his concern about the narrowing of the sphere of use of Ukrainian and made proposals aimed at surmounting the shortcomings of the national and cultural policy of the USSR. It is also impossible to ignore Ivan Dziuba’s series of articles, Because It’s Not Just Language, Sounds…, which earned him the Taras Shevchenko State Prize in 1990.

14 Verstiuk, Dziuba, and Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia, 627.

15 Many of the debates at this conference were devoted to discussing such a seemingly insignificant terminological problem as what word should be used to describe the ideology of the repressions of the 1930s: stalinizm or stalinshchyna. Behind all this was the unwillingness of society to admit that the conveyor belt of death was not due so much the arbitrariness of one person (stalinizm) but fundamental to the basis of the existence and development of the state (stalinshchyna). In this context, they did not want to mention Lenin’s name, which still remained beyond criticism, at least in public conversations and debates, or to focus on those repressed in the 1960s and 1970s. Although the persons repressed in those years were active participants in the founding congress, they were forced to accept the rules of the game proposed by the Central Committee and the KGB if they had any hope of public attention and mass media coverage. Information about the creation of the Memorial Society appeared in the official press, although it was significantly edited by censors.

16 See Pravda Ukrainy, April 16, 1989.

17 In his study Soviet Ukrainian Dissent, Jaroslaw Bilocerkowycz provides interesting statistics of the social structure of the Ukrainian resistance movement in the second half of the 20th century: 58.9% of the dissidents, according to the researcher’s incomplete and selective data, were from the peasantry; 30.4%, from the intelligentsia; 10.7%, were workers. For more details, see Jaroslaw Bilocerkowycz, Soviet Ukrainian Dissent: A Study of Political Alienation (Boulder and London: Westview, 1988), 67–68; see also Heorhii Kasyanov, Nezhodni: Ukrains’ka intelihentsiia v rusi oporu 1960–80-kh rokiv (Kyiv: Lybid’, 1995), 190. Yet allow me to disagree with these eloquent figures (to my knowledge objective data is not available). Based on my personal communication with different people from these segments, at least 2/3 of those called “intellectuals” by Bilocerkowycz and Kasianov were of peasant origin, because the absolute majority of them belonged to the first (and not even the second) generation of the intelligentsia and, therefore, had no support from influential parents, friends, etc. Indirectly, the lack of such support and advice “helped” them find themselves behind bars in the KGB pre-trial detention facilities without any hope of escaping by great or small compromises with the authorities. Without an influential public “rearguard,” those “peasants,” who through great efforts made their way to the capital, had either to repent atrociously and sling the maximum amount of mud at their fellows or endure the maximum term of imprisonment. A smaller part of the “intelligentsia” consisted mainly of Russified dissidents of Jewish descent, who, although united with the Ukrainians by their struggle against the regime, defended not so much national as universal democratic values. These groups differed culturally and mentally to a large extent but were on mostly friendly terms.

18 Verstiuk, Dziuba, and Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia, 640.

19 Verstiuk, Dziuba, and Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia, 642 At that time, the first recordings of Taras Petrynenko’s song appeared. It contained the line: “even the birth of a child requires movement” (rukh).

20 Despite the persecution and strict ban on the return of Crimean Tatars by police in Crimea, there was no concealing the obvious fact: contrary to official policy, Crimean Tatars were returning home. On July 7, 1989, the first issue of the Crimean Tatar Dostluk (Friendship) weekly supplement to the official newspaper Krymskaia pravda (Crimean Truth) was published in Simferopol, which was a first small victory.

21 Verstiuk, Dziuba, and Repryntsev, Ukraina vid naidavnishykh chasiv do siohodennia, 643.

22 I suspect the real reason for Volodymyr Shcherbytsky’s personal (according to “informed” sources) hatred of Stus will not be known for a very long time. In any event, no official documents revealing his “direct” interference in the fate of Vasyl Stus have been found. However, at the level of “unofficial” conversations, there is much indirect evidence that, in 1972, Stus was convicted on the instructions of Shcherbytsky or of someone acting on his behalf.

23 Shovkoshytny, “‘Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu…’,” 7

24 Stanislav Chernilevsky was a director of the three-part documentary film Black Candle of the Enlightened Road. Together with Volodynyr Shovkoshytny he did the bulk of the organizational work on reburial.

25 The first materials appeared in the newspaper Literaturna Ukraina accompanied by a long and irresolute article of Mykola Zhulinsky, director of the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Ukrainian SSR (see his Iz zabuttia—v bezsmertia (Storinky pryzabutoi spadshchyny) [Kyiv: Dnipro, 1990], 416–439). If a certain abstractness and uncertainty in the article did not remove the ban on the poet’s name in the Soviet Ukrainian press, at least it served as permission for others to publish his poems. (It must be noted that the tone of the article could not have been different. The series of materials that made up the book Iz zabuttia—v bezsmertia [From Oblivion to Immortality] was based on diaspora materials and was designed to legalize the previously forbidden names of Ukrainian writers.) However, publication was done in several ways. Particularly disgusting was the article in the newspaper Molod’ Ukrainy, published on the instructions of the Central Committee and, in an additional slight, in an issue signed not by the editor-in-chief but by his deputy. When I proposed publishing a response to the lampoon, the frightened deputy made excuses for himself, saying, “we want to publish Stus’ words and that is now possible only in this form.” The magazine Ukraina (No. 23 [1989]: 6–7) called its material about the poet “We Missed Life.” The materials in the magazines Prapor (No. 2), Zhovten’ (No. 7) and Kyiv (No. 10) were completely different. The publication in the newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya (November 17, 1989) was important, although the quality of the Russian translation left much to be desired.

26 Henrikh Dvorko (1931–2012) was Doctor of Chemical Sciences, who in the late 1960s signed well-known protest letters against the arrests and military intervention in Czechoslovakia. As a result, he was fired from leading chemical institutes and had to work under the direction of a person who did not even hold a Candidate degree. After the arrest of Ivan Svitlychny, Dvorko helped his family financially. He was an organizer of the “Pripyat Republic,” where the sixtiers gathered for summer vacations (after their arrests, their children gathered there). He was also the only person who did not destroy Vasyl Stus’ self-published collection Merry Cemetery in 1972. At the time of the events described, he was Dmytro Stus’ father-in-law.

27 Ihor Bondar was a stoker who was engaged in the distribution of self-published Ukrainian materials. In the 1960s, he served three years in a criminal camp.

28 Iryna Kalynets (Stasiv, 1940–2012) was a Ukrainian writer and activist in the Ukrainian resistance. She was arrested in 1972 and served her sentence in Mordovia separated by a few rows of barbed wire from Vasyl Stus. In 1975, when Stus was wounded in the camp by an awl, his life was saved only thanks to a hunger strike Kalynets organized together with Nadiia Svitlychna and Nijolė Sadūnaitė in the women’s zone, demanding medical assistance for the victim.

29 Oleh Pokalchuk (born 1955) is a Ukrainian poet, translator, and bard. He has engaged in business and politics, and promoted the establishment of Plast (the National Scout Organization) in Ukraine.

30 Vasyl Hurdzan (1926–2001) was an activist in the Ukrainian resistance and a political prisoner.

31 On July 14, 1995, the Ukrainian patriotic forces, without securing the approval of the authorities, decided to bury Patriarch Volodymyr on the grounds of St. Sophia’s Cathedral, which was surrounded by special police units ready for such an attempt. When people, instigated by the organizers, started digging a grave at the gates of St. Sophia’s bell tower, force was used against them. The bloody events of that July were not only a deathless disgrace to the authorities, who were so bold as to carry out such a blasphemy, but also showed the irresponsibility and indifference to the people of those who organized the funeral. Neither the people nor the ashes of the lost person should become small counters in political games. And I intentionally refrain from mentioning here the name of the man who ordered the troops to beat people, because, having the experience of organizing such an event, I am convinced that those who planned all this are no less responsible for everything that happened.

32 Dvorko’s apartment was the headquarters for the reburial of Vasyl Stus, Yuriy Lytvyn, and Oleksa Tykhy.

33 In the USSR and for the first 10 years of independent Ukraine, November 7–8 was a public holiday and ritually celebrated. Parades, rallies and other festive events were designed to give the October coup in tsarist Russia a landmark significance. The celebrations were magnificent, with the obligatory noisy excessive drinking. A reburial on these days meant failure because none of the Soviet officials would help in its implementation under any circumstances, and would have thrown up every possible obstruction due to his official duties.

34 V. Shovkoshytnyi. “Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu ...” (“My people, I will come back to you ...”),7. An abridged variant of the article was published in the book: Ne vidliubyv svoiu tryvohu ranniu. Vasyl Stus—poet i liudyna. Spohady, statti, lysty, poezii. [I did not fall off my early anxiety. Vasyl Stus—poet and person. Memoirs, articles, letters, poems].—K.: Ukrainskyi pysmennyk (Ukrainian writer), 1993, 365-371.

35 Vasyl Ovsienko in his book Svitlo liudei (Light of the People) indicates that the correct spelling of the surname is Dyvdin, not Dyldin, as erroneously stated in the publication of V. Shovkoshytny. 66.

36 Volodymyr Ivanovych Chentsov was the Head of the Chusovsky KGB regional department. From the end of 1981 to the end of 1984, he worked as a criminal investigator for the KGB in VS-389/36 camp and, according to V. Ovsienko (See: Svitlo liudei [Light of People], 66), “was one of the people responsible for the deaths of political prisoners.”

37 The town of Chusovoy was built around a metallurgical giant founded by French industrialists in the late 19th century. The Ogonyok tourist center is located on the outskirts, the largest and most modern ski center in the USSR.

38 Shovkoshytny, “‘Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu…’,” 8–9.

39 The idea to bury the bodies of Vasyl Stus, Yury Lytvyn and Oleksa Tykhy in the Baykove Cemetery in Kyiv first occurred to Volodymyr Holoborodko, because no one but him believed in the possibility of obtaining such a permit. And he ... made an unfortunate slip. He went to the Union, the Central Committee and … he got the permission. Ironically, when they went to the cemetery to choose a location for the burial, Vasyl Stus’ wife, Valentina Popelyukh, was without a seat in the car. Iryna Kalinets had to look for a seat for my mother. Holoborodko, who really wanted to personally choose a location, was left “without a place.”

40 One episode well characterizes the tense situation of that. Oksana Dvorko, who was a kind of liaison between Perm and Kyiv, and therefore in intently anticipating news from the distant Urals, picked up the phone and heard something completely unexpected:

- You have a call from the Pope’s residence ...

- From where? She did not understand. How, when under constant stress, could you digest information not directly related to the reburial?

- From the Pope.

- Excuse me, we have no “papa” (father in Russian), we only have “tato” (father in Ukrainian), she answered.

- From the Patriarch of Rome, she heard from the receiver and a pleasant voice began to ask about the problems and complications arising from reburial …

41 A suburban village that almost merged with the Ukrainian capital. Very close to Sviatoshyn, where Vasyl Stus’ family lived.

42 Volodymyr Shovkoshytnyi. “Narode mii, do tebe ya shche vernu ...,” 9.

43 At that moment and in Perm in general, we were as if isolated from the rest of the world. Deciding that we should rely only on ourselves, we did not trust to any external assistance. Without the psychological guidance of all the members of the Perm expedition, we would not have been able to achieve the special unity that characterized the film crew in November 1989. However, it is now clear that without the help of all concerned people in the world, who put pressure on the Gorbachev’s administration, the new composition of the Central Committee of Ukraine and the Ukrainian government to allow reburial, we would never have broken through the wall of “playing it safe” and the bans. Writing these lines a decade and a half after the event and trying to recreate the feelings and emotions of that time, against all odds, I express my gratitude to those who made considerable efforts to organize the Kyiv part of the reburial, and to those who put pressure on the governments of the USSR and the Ukrainian SSR. Without them, the reburial of Vasyl Stus, Yurii Lytvyn and Oleksa Tykhy in 1989 would have been impossible.

44 Ovsienko, Svitlo liudei, 66.

45 Ibidem.

46 Ibid., p. 67.

47 It was this damage that provided additional evidence in favor of the version of Vasyl Stus’ violent death. This was commented also by Yurii Belikov, who went to the local clairvoyant with photos of my father. The picture we saw that November evening gives Yurii Belikov grounds to say that “the circumstances of Stus’ death have not been made clear yet”: Yury Belikov, “Vo imia ottsa i syna,” Za cheloveka, No. 10 (44) (December 2001): 6.

48 Ibid.

49 In a sixteen-story building at 13A Chornobylska St., Apt. 94, Vasyl Stus lived in Kyiv between his two prison terms, from August 1979 to May 1980.

50 This statement is not in the least an exaggeration. Even the film’s director, Stanislav Chernilevsky, knew almost nothing about Vasyl Stus before his reburial. When I met him, his knowledge of the future hero of the film was limited to a few poems heard on Radio Liberty, recited by Nadezhda Svitlichna. They did not know even that much about Lytvyn and Tykhy. Vasyl Ovsienko and Vasyl Hurdzan did their best to expand the participants’ knowledge about these people. About the same, if not even less, was the knowledge of the people gathered on Sofiivska Square in Kyiv. However, another factor contributed to this mass reburial: people overcoming seventy years of fear for the first time filled the streets for something other than the celebrations of the first of May or the seventh of November. And as much as the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the KGB set out to “control” the reburial, much remained out of their control. Tykhy, Lytvyn, and Stus were the first to break free of “distant Siberia,” to which millions of Ukrainians had been deported and from where only a few returned, with almost every Ukrainian family having their “internees.” Therefore, consciously or not, when seeing off the last three Ukrainians who died in the camps, each of them accompanied by his relatives, peers, and childhood friends. It is likely that this psychological phenomenon made Vasyl Stus’ name quite popular and well-known in Ukraine in what turned out to be a short time. I must admit that credit for that goes to Levko Lukyanenko, Vasyl Ovsieko, Yevhen Pronyuk, Dmytro Korchynsky, Mykola Horbal and many other people. They took a diametrically opposite position on the priority and necessity of certain actions. I considered the Perm reburial part to be the main affair and they stressed the Kyiv part. Because, in addition to the Christian content, it was important to help people overcome the long-standing fear of the authorities. Looking back on those days from a distance of 15 years, I must thank luck for assigning the governance of these two interconnected parts to Irina Stasiv-Kalynets who found the necessary compromise between family and national and political interests. This chapter provides a private view of the history of the reburial seen by relatives’ eyes. Moreover, to preserve emotional truth, almost no time adjustments were made to “smooth” things over.

51 Ihor Bondar, together with his guys and some Greek Catholic priests, were filling in the graves. In the darkness that suddenly filled the sky, the people, frightened by the hopeless attempt to fill in the graves using their hands and the responsibility for leaving the graves open, started quickly to break up or, as described by Ihor, to turn tail and run away. Igor Bondar and his boys filled in the graves, and the Greek Catholic priests brought by him “sealed” them.

52 According to various sources, the number of people who accompanied Stus, Lytvyn and Tykhy on their last journey ranged from 75,000 to 105,000. Kyiv had not seen such a large number of people since 1917. That year, on April 1 (March 18 in the old style), a 100,000-strong demonstration of Ukrainian social and political forces took place in Kyiv, which ended with a rally on Sofiivska Square.

53 Vasyl Stus. Tvory [Works]. V. 6 (additional). Book 1, 355.