COURAGE

povezovanje zbirk

This photograph is from the ‘Red University’ series that shows scenes of the clashes between militia and students in 1968. On June 3, 1968, students from Belgrade University set off from New Belgrade towards the building of the rector’s office located in the old part of the city with the intention of demonstrating and stating their demands. They were soon stopped by a militia cordon. Veljko Vlahović and Miloč Minić, top officials in the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, spoke to the students and tried to convince them not to rally. However, militia and students clashed, resulting in injuries to at least four people. The following day, the students occupied the building of the rector’s office and proclaimed their programme. One of their demands called for changing the university’s name to the ‘Karl Marx Red University’. The occupation lasted seven days, while the protests spread to Yugoslavia’s larger university centres. It was ended by a television address by Josip Broz Tito in which he allegedly supported the students, acknowledging that irregularities did exist and should be removed. At that time a photo reporter with the Belgrade weekly ‘NIN’, Tomislav Peternek recorded the shocking scenes of the riots at the overpass in New Belgrade.

The Vasyl Stus Collection is an incredibly rich resource for literary scholars as well as the broader public. The two volumes of his letters, published in 1997, are considered masterpieces by those intimately familiar with his life and works.. At the end of the second volume is a remarkable essay written by Stus’s mentor, friend and colleague Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, titled “The Epistolary Literature of Vasyl Stus,” which provides important insights into Stus’s character, his literary influences, his understanding of what was happening to himself and his friends, and how he understood their role in history. The original letters to friends and acquaintances are held at the archives of the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), while the letters to his wife and son remain in the family’s private archive.

The Vasyl Stus collection is an incredibly rich resource for literary scholars as well as the broader public. The two volumes of his letters, published in 1997, are considered masterpieces by those intimately familiar with his life and works.. At the end of the second volume is a remarkable essay written by Stus’s mentor, friend and colleague Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, titled “The Epistolary Literature of Vasyl Stus,” which provides important insights into Stus’s character, his literary influences, his understanding of what was happening to himself and his friends, and how he understood their role in history. The original letters to friends and acquaintances are held at the archives of the T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (NANU), while the letters to his wife and son remain in the family’s private archive.

Як добре те, що смерті не боюсь я
і не питаю, чи тяжкий мій хрест.
Що перед вами, судді, не клонюся
в передчутті недовідомих верств.
Що жив, любив і не набрався скверни,
ненависті, прокльону, каяття.
Народе мій, до тебе я ще верну,
і в смерті обернуся до життя
своїм стражденним і незлим обличчям. 
Як син, тобі доземно уклонюсь
і чесно гляну в чесні твої вічі,
і в смерть із рідним краєм поріднюсь.

— Василь Стус

How Good It Is

How good it is that I’ve no fear of dying
Nor ask myself how ponderous my toil
Nor bow to cunning magistrates, decrying
Presentiments of unfamiliar soil,
That I have lived and loved, yet never burdening
My soul with hatred, curses or regret.
My people! It is to you I am returning.
In death I somehow find my fate.
I turn my pained but goodly face to living
And in filial prostration I begin.
I meet your eyes in fair thanksgiving
And join my kindred earth as closest kin.

— Vasyl Stus

(Trans. by Marco Carynnyk)

While in exile Stus wrote many texts that were almost impossible to send out to family and friends. Some texts made it out in letters, but that was only partly successful as not all of them passed through the censors. There was a scheme devised in the camps whereby texts were passed on using small containers, which held rolling papers for cigarettes with text written tiny script on both sides, which were then rolled up and placed into tubes that were either swallowed, or transferred in some other way. In Stus’s collection is one such container, which held a number of these rolling papers onto which he had written in the smallest legible text some poems he had drafted while in the camps. These poems not only made it out of the camps and also the Soviet Union, as fellow activist and Soviet political prisoner Nadia Svitlychna managed to publish these poems abroad, even though publishing Stus’ poetry was forbidden at that time in the USSR. The original papers somehow made it back to the family, which they donated to the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature along with the rest of his archive. It is the view of Galyna Burlaka, a senior research fellow at the institute and head of the Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies that items such as this are fantastic and unique on their own. However, given Stus’ prominence and history, they are also national treasures. This is why the Institute of Literature’s archive has the status a national repository, as it holds items of immense value for Ukraine as a whole.