The idea of creating life in Vasyl’ Stus’s perception: texts and contexts.

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the idea of creating life in Vasyl’ Stus’s perception. The research is based on the material of Stus’s poetry, letters and literary critics. The idea of creating life is in the focus of both philosophy, psychology and literary science. The author is basing her research on literary studies, dedicated to the idea of creating life, and also analyzes the previous researches on this idea in Vasyl’ Stus studies. The notion of creating life in literary studies should be understood as a method of constituting oneself as a cultural phenomenon and verifying one’s aesthetic experience. In this case creating life becomes an intentional artistic strategy. To comprehend the problem of creating life one needs to use such issues as textualization of empirical experience, semiotization of everyday behavior, forms of writer’s self-presentation and symbolic autobiography.

Vasyl’ Stus’s intellectual contexts, which formed his identity as a poet, were also the basis for his approach to life. The idea of creating life, which first appeared in romanticism, came to Stus, likely, through the figure of his favorite poet — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Modernistic idea of merging life and art is accepted by Stus through the main poets of his personal canon — Boris Pasternak, Rainer Maria Rilke and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The key concepts of Stus’s creating life are truth, sincerity, kindness, life as suffering. Kindness, as Stus understands it, is a characteristic and a necessary feature of a poet, who, in his turn, “has to be a human”. In his literary critics (and later — in poetry) staring from the early 1960s, Stus emphasizes the necessity of being sincere for every poet. Life as suffering becomes a major motif of poet’s texts soon after he was first arrested in 1972. In the same period Vasyl’ Stus begins to comprehend the idea of life as an imitation of life of Christ.

In the context of creating life the phenomenon of Vasyl’ Stus’s opposition to the soviet power could be interpreted as a practice of realization of freedom. The idea of creating life in Stus’s interpretation is a combination of two biographies: poet’s, whose creativity was the greatest value for him; and a biography of man, who, being in a difficult existential situation, chooses freedom and dignity.