How to explain the mystery of fame? Many once well-known people who spent much of their lives
at the core of historic events have fallen into oblivion since. The brilliant East Ukrainian
poet and Soviet-era dissident Vasyl Stus (1938-85) became renowned only after his reburial in
late Soviet Ukraine in 1989. What are the reasons for the widespread admiration for him in
post-Soviet Ukrainian society? The exceptional beauty of his poetry? His stunning courage and
selflessness as a Soviet dissident? The irreconcilability of his position as a human being? Or
and Vasyl Stus' ability to feel the pain of others as his own?Trying to answer these and other
questions the poet's son and literary scholar Dmytro Stus masterfully combines a cultural and
biographical study with private recollections and observations of his father. The book offers a
sometimes-paradoxical merger of genres mixing academic analysis with novelistic narration. It
shows Vasyl Stus through the eyes of his son and researcher against the background of
twentieth-century Ukrainian belated emergence as a nation-state. In 2007 the Ukrainian edition
of this book won Ukraine's prestigious Shevchenko National Prize.
