Vasyl Stus (1938-1985), also known under the pen name of Vasyl Petryk, was born in Vinnytsya. At the age of two, he moved to Donetsk with three siblings and parents, who received jobs at a chemical plant. He stayed in the region until 1963, was educated there and received his first job there as a Ukrainian language and literature school teacher. He moved to Kyiv when he was 25 to start a Ph.D. in literature and published his first collection of poems a year later. He was kicked out of the Ph.D. program in 1965, after speaking out against arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia. The manuscript of his book was destroyed. He published his second book in Brussels in 1970. The third one came out the same year through samvydav, illegal underground publishing. He was arrested two years later. He was sentenced to five years in prison and spent another three years in exile. After release, he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki group of human rights activists and continued to write. He was arrested again in 1980, and received 10 years in prison and five years in exile. He only lived until 1985, the same year that one of his books was nominated for a Nobel Prize. In Ukraine, his first compilation of poems, The Road of Pain, was published in 1990, a year before the country’s independence.
Vasyl Stus, a short biography
He lived a short and tough life.
