Questo mese leggiamo Vasyl Stus, una voce messa a tacere dalla colonia penale sovietica Perm-36, ma che rimarrà con voi

**Our next book club meeting will be dedicated to an absolutely extraordinary person: Vasyl Stus. We meet on June 14th at 19:00 Kyiv time.**

Born in 1938 in a small Ukrainian village, Stus grew up to become one of Ukraine’s most influential voices. He rose through academia, wrote beautiful and searching poetry, and translated Goethe and Rilke into Ukrainian. But his refusal to stay silent in the face of Soviet repression changed the course of his life forever. In 1965, he stood up in a Kyiv cinema and publicly protested the arrest of Ukrainian artists and intellectuals, and from that moment, the authorities never left him alone. He was arrested, sent to labour camps, released, and arrested again. He spent years in some of the harshest conditions the Soviet system could devise, separated from his wife and son, his manuscripts regularly seized and destroyed by the KGB. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1985, and died that same year in Perm-36, a Soviet penal colony in the Ural Mountains, at just 47 years old. The exact circumstances of his death were never fully clarified.

His life was full of pain and very little joy. But his integrity never wavered, and his words — sharp, honest, and human — have outlasted the empire that tried to silence them.

Some of his works are here:

[https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/posts/shards-of-our-pain-poems-by-stus](https://www.londonukrainianreview.org/posts/shards-of-our-pain-poems-by-stus)

[https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/poem-ukraine-vasyl-stus](https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/poetry/poem-ukraine-vasyl-stus)

And a bonus — a Ukrainian soldier recites a Stus poem: [https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/w0tvfi/a_ukrainian_soldier_reads_a_poem_by_ukrainian/](https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/w0tvfi/a_ukrainian_soldier_reads_a_poem_by_ukrainian/)

Not part of our book club? join us at: [https://uabook.club/](https://uabook.club/)

And for people who think this is already “old” his so-called lawyer was no other than medvechuk who was still a deputy in the parliament Verkhovna Rada in 2023 and who had been the chief* of presidential administration until 2005.

https://museum.khpg.org/en/1628665242