‘A FRAGMENT OF WHOLENESS’: THE MAKING OF THE POETIC SUBJECT IN VASYL STUS’S PALIMPSESTS
Bohdan Tokarskyi
St John’s College
University of Cambridge
The dissertation is submitted for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
June 2019
PREFACE
This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration.
It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution.
It does not exceed the prescribed word limit of 80,000 words.
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ABSTRACT
Bohdan Tokarskyi
‘A Fragment of Wholeness’: The Making of the Poetic Subject in Vasyl Stus’s Palimpsests
My PhD thesis investigates the exploration of the self and the innovative poetical language in the works of the Ukrainian dissident poet and Gulag prisoner Vasyl Stus (1938-1985). Focusing on Stus’s magnum opus collection Palimpsests (1971-1979), where the poet casts the inhuman conditions of his incarceration to the periphery and instead engages in radical introspection, I show how Stus’s poetry foregrounds the very making of the subject as the constant pursuit of the authentic self. Through my examination of unpublished archival materials, analysis of Stus’s underexplored poems, and the contextualisation of the poet’s works within the tradition of the philosophy of becoming, I propose a new reading of Palimpsests, one that redirects scholarly attention from the historical and political to the psychological and philosophical. This new perspective allows me to explore the writer’s complex concept of authenticity, which oscillates between ‘recollection’ and ‘repetition’, the desire for sameness and the temporal non-coincidence of the self. It affords the opportunity to analyse Stus’s unique poetical language, which captures the very coming-to-be of the subject before it reaches any stable identity. Palimpsests enacts repetition-as-difference on the level of words, poems, and the collection as a whole. I scrutinise the permeating self-doubling in Stus’s poetry and show that the central poetic persona in Palimpsests is, unusually, not ‘I’ but ‘you’ – the specular double of the speaker. This self-address positions ‘oneself as another’ and leads me to assert that Stus’s Palimpsests opens up new avenues for the study of lyric address as such. I contend that the process of the making of the self surpasses the poet’s text and his own historical circumstances and involves the reader in the process of self-writing. My thesis reshapes our understanding of Stus’s verse and contributes to the study of subjectivity and authenticity in Soviet dissident literature and in the Ukrainian tradition of metaphysical poetry.
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NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
In this thesis, I use the modified Library of Congress system without diacritics and ligatures for the transliteration of Ukrainian and Russian. For the sake of readability, I omit the soft sign (‘ь’) and do not transliterate it with an apostrophe. The Ukrainian letters ‘і’, ‘ї’, ‘й’ are all transliterated as ‘i’ in English. For the transliteration of ‘зг’ I use the combination ‘zgh’ to distinguish it from ‘ж’ (‘zh’).
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ABBREVIATIONS
Works by Vasyl Stus
S* Tvory: u chotyrokh tomakh (shesty knyhakh). Z dodatkovymy 5 i 6 (u dvokh knyhakh) tomamy (Lviv: Prosvita, 1994-1999) P Zibrannia tvoriv: u dvanadtsiaty tomakh. Tom 5. Palimpsesty (Naipovnishyi nezavershenyi korpus) (Kyiv: Fakt, 2009) Pa Palimpsesty: Virshi 1971-1979 rokiv, ed. by Nadia Svitlychna (New York: Suchasnist, 1986) DZ Zibrannia tvoriv: u dvanadtsiaty tomakh. Tom 3. Chas tvorchosti / Dichtenszeit (Kyiv: Fakt, 2008) ZD Zymovi dereva (Brussels: Literatura i mystetstvo, 1970)
* I refer to this edition as ‘S volume, book: page’. E.g. ‘S VI, 1: 480’ stands for p. 480 in book 1 of volume VI.
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Завжди любити, щоб завжди помилятися. Але – завжди любити. І відтак існувати, а існувати – це помилятися.
Василь Стус
Always to love to always err. But – to always love. And therefore to exist, because to exist is to err.
Vasyl Stus
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Working on this thesis has been a long journey and at the end of it (which is but another stop) I feel that I only start to approach the magnetic and mesmerising works of Vasyl Stus. This journey has not always been easy and straightforward, but I have been blessed with love and support from so many outstanding people, who are all part of this thesis in one way or another. I am deeply grateful to my supervisor Dr Rory Finnin. It all started with you giving a chance to an international law student, and I have been incredibly fortunate to have your support every step of the way. Thank you for your patience with that voluminous folder filled with the many drafts of my work and for our countless many-hour conversations at Adams Road and beyond. With whom else would I speak about Stus alongside quantum physics and celestial bodies? For your generosity, rigour, and kindness I will always be deeply grateful. It has been a privilege to learn from you both as a scholar and as a person. I am proud to have been a Gates scholar and a member of St John’s College, and I am immensely grateful to the Gates Trust and to my College for funding my research and for recognising its importance. Without this, and without the generous moral and practical support of the amazing people working both with Gates and at St John’s, this thesis would not have been possible. A great thank you is also due to the Cambridge Ukrainian Studies programme, which has given me important opportunities and has been a home for me over this time. I am also very grateful to Bohdan Hawrylyshyn and Ihor Bardyn for your support in funding my Master’s, which was the crucial stepping stone for my PhD project. My gratitude goes to all of my colleagues at the Department (now Section) of Slavonic Studies at the University of Cambridge. It has been a great pleasure to work with you. I would like to say thank you to my adviser Dr Olenka Pevny for your solid academic support, your enthusiasm, and your kind-hearted attitude, which I have really appreciated during these years. I am grateful to Dr Stanley Bill for your valuable suggestions and encouragement at different stages of my work, and for being an inspiration for me. I am thankful to Olga Płócienniczak – for your door always being open and for our special conversations. This is also a great chance to say thank you to our Ukrainian Studies cohort at Cambridge, Drs and future Drs: Ivan Kozachenko, Daria Mattingly, Jon Roozenbeek, Iryna Shuvalova, and Maria Terentieva. Thank you for our stimulating discussions and for all the cups of tea that we have shared. An additional thank you to Jon for your skillful programming that has helped me to look at Stus’s texts in a different way. I would like to say thank you to Dr Martin Crowley for taking interest in my work and for helping me to consider Stus’s works within a broader context. I am grateful to Dr Vitaly Chernetsky for making it all the way to Cambridge for my viva, and for your insightful comments that have certainly made this thesis a better piece of work. Stus Studies have been expanding in a big-bang fashion, and I am grateful to other Stus scholars Dr Alessandro Achilli, Dr Halyna Kolodkevych, Dr Tetiana Mykhailova, and Professor Liudmyla Tarnashynska for the opportunity to share our fascination with Stus and to learn from your work. I am indebted to Dr Dmytro Stus – thank you for your openness, for the insights about Vasyl Stus’s life and art that you have shared with me, and, of course, for your dedicated efforts, which have made it possible to relish Vasyl Stus’s works. Meeting Valentyna Popeliukh was
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unforgettable – thank you for your warm welcome and for sharing your sacred memories with me. I am also grateful to Vasyl Ovsiienko – you have been a powerful voice of your generation, whose significance we are yet to comprehend. Thank you for preserving this memory and for teaching me that Stus put the stress on Зимові деревá. I am thankful to my esteemed colleagues in Germany and France, Professors Iryna Dmytryshyn, Susanne Frank, and Andrii Portnov for being so welcoming and for broadening my horizons. I would like to express my gratitude to my dear friends in Ukraine and beyond. To Kateryna Busol – for being a special presence in my life and an example for me in important ways. To Vasyl Liutyi – for our strong friendship that has withstood time and, of course, for our table tennis rallies. I am thankful to Geoffrey Engel for the consolation of philosophy and for the unique gift of our intellectual kinship. And to Giovanni Miglianti – thank you for being my inspiring sparring partner during our Master’s and for our continued friendship ever since. I am grateful to my ever-present mentor Dr Mykola Gnatovskyy, for your unfailing guidance and care, and for always finding the time. I would like to say thank you to my housemates and friends at Brooks Road, Drs and future Drs: Rosie Finlinson, Oliver Mayeux, Martin Michel, and Syamala Roberts. Our house was my happiest abode in Cambridge. My big thank you goes to my good friend Danielle Craig – your thoughtful edits and comments and your kind help always came just at the right time. I would like to say a very special thank you to Maria Montague. With the number of drafts of this work you have read, you have firmly become a Stus scholar yourself. Thank you for sharing it all with me and for reminding me that в руках зосереджена сила найбільших у світі щедрот. Thank you to my dear grandfather. I know that you are celebrating with me wherever you are. Above all, I am filled with gratitude and admiration for my mother. You have been showing that, indeed, Лиш мати – вміє жити, аби світитися, немов зоря. Overcoming all the hardship and destitution, you have convinced me from a young age, even in the most difficult of times, that everything is within reach if you believe and work hard. You have been the fundamental and constant source of faith, confidence and love for me. Дякую, Мамо.
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CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...... 1 CHAPTER 1. TIME FOR STUS: SUBJECT VS HISTORY ...... 24 1.1. Reviews: Temporality and Subjectivity ...... 27 1.2. Stus’s Essays: Towards Authenticity ...... 31 1.3. Undoing Time: Empty Duration, Existential Present, and Cyclicity ...... 38 1.4. Subjectivity as Non-Coincidence of Self ...... 46 CHAPTER 2. RECOLLECTION AND REPETITION: THE MODALITIES OF AUTHENTICITY IN PALIMPSESTS ...... 54 2.1. Recollection and Repetition...... 56 2.2. Recollection: Primordial Unity and Memory ...... 59 2.3. Repetition: Becoming, Desire, Neologisms ...... 74 CHAPTER 3. ONESELF AS ANOTHER: SELF-DOUBLING IN STUS’S WRITING . 104 3.1. Stus’s Prose as a Laboratory of Self-Doubling ...... 113 3.2. Self-Doubling in Palimpsests ...... 124 CHAPTER 4. THE MAKING OF THE READER ...... 142 4.1. Stus’s Readers and Decontextualisation ...... 144 4.2. Deixis: ‘You Are Here’ ...... 151 CONCLUSION ...... 173 BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 176
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INTRODUCTION
The image of Vasyl Stus (1938-1985) took a prominent place at the Maidan Square during the 2013-2014 Euromaidan revolution. Unlike the spray-painted revolutionary mottos from Lesia Ukrainka, Ivan Franko, and Taras Shevchenko, the poster with Stus simply said: ‘Ia z vamy’ (‘I am with you’).1 The fact that Stus’s image shared the public space of the revolution with the Ukrainian classic nineteenth-century triad shows how firmly Stus is associated with Ukraine’s nation-building process. Yet at the same time the personal deictics on the poster also emphasise the power of Stus’s ‘colossal I’2 and the significance of the dialogue between the poet and ‘you’, his addressees. Stus is one of Ukraine’s most sophisticated and complex twentieth-century poets. Since his death in the Perm forced labour camp in 1985, the study of his works has become an increasingly dynamic and expansive field. Most recent research has shed light on important aspects of Stus’s poetics, such as the extensive intertextuality and ‘variability’ of his texts, along with his modernist sensibility. Yet literary scholarship on his work still does not fully reflect the significance and scale of his philosophical rigour, literary innovation, and psychological depth. What remains underexplored, in particular, is one of the most original aspects of Stus’s poetry: the profound philosophical and psychological investigation of the self. In this thesis, I seek to fill this gap by redirecting focus from Stus’s political role to the complex dynamics of ‘I’ and ‘you’ in his poetry. I investigate Stus’s distinctive concept of the self as non-coincidence, both in existential and phenomenological terms, and show how his poetry stages the very making of the self.
‘Several Poets Writing Under the Pseudonym “Vasyl Stus”’: Academic Approaches to Stus’s Work
In contemporary scholarship, one can discern at least three central areas of discussion and principal readings of Stus’s poetry, to which I will refer here as discourses: anti/postcolonial, revolving around the questions of trauma and national identity in the shadow of imperialism; (post)modernist, revolving around questions of literary style; and philosophical, revolving around the dynamics of the self. While these discourses are porous, they are nonetheless instrumental for an understanding of the general landscape of ‘Stus Studies’. In this introduction, I start by analysing some seminal pioneering works written during Stus’s
1 Translation in this thesis is my own unless stated otherwise. 2 Bohdan Rubchak, ‘Peremoha nad prirvoiu: Pro poeziiu Vasylia Stusa’, Suchasnist, 10 (1983), 52-83, p. 57.
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lifetime or shortly after his death in 1985 and show how subsequent scholarship has fed off the initial reception and developed these discourses. Surveying the state of the art will help me to identify and explore the gap that remains in the study of Stus’s poetry, which this thesis seeks to address. None of Stus’s collections of poetry came out in Ukraine before his death. Ukrainian émigré critics were at the forefront of publishing his work and offering critical responses to his poetry. The first of Stus’s published poetry collections was Zymovi dereva (Winter Trees), which was printed in Brussels in 1970, before the poet’s arrest in 1972. In a short introduction to the collection, which represents the first critical work on Stus, Ariiadna Shum frames the poet as a specifically Ukrainian writer and describes him as ‘oryhinalnyi poet imazhynist z pevnoiu zakraskoiu siurrealistychnoi kompozytsii’ (‘an original imagist poet with a certain tint of surrealist composition’).3 Shum is especially attentive to the versatility of Stus’s versification, style, and poetical language replete with archaisms and neologisms; notably, the volume includes a mini-dictionary to help the reader.4 She points out the poet’s ingenious use of metaphor and his associative ‘korystuvannia kilkoma tropamy i fihuramy odnochasno’ (‘use of several tropes and figures simultaneously’) (p. 7). While more of a general outline, this early piece nonetheless defines such salient features of Stus’s verse as its varied poetics, sophisticated poetical idiom, and multilayered associative ensembles. It took a few years before Stus’s next volume, Svicha v svichadi (A Candle in a Mirror), was published in New York in 1977. This was the first major publication to contain a sizeable selection of Stus’s poetry from his period of imprisonment, along with some poetry from his two early collections, the aforementioned Winter Trees, and Veselyi tsvyntar (Joyful Cemetery), and a bibliography of Stus’s publications. In the introduction, Marco Carynnyk focuses on giving a detailed account of Stus’s gruelling imprisonment. Yet he also appraises the poet’s writing, emphasising that Stus ‘zasluhovuie nashoi uvahy iak poet ne menshe, nizh krytyk chy politviazen’ (‘merits our attention as a poet no less than a critic or a political prisoner’).5 While Carynnyk suggests that Stus’s poetry does not contain a great deal of formal innovation, he praises it as ‘tuha, napruzhena, bahata na imperatyvy’ (‘tight, intense, abundant in imperatives’), with ‘sophisticated metaphor’ (p. 16). Stus, notes Carynnyk, seeks to ‘peredaty imanentnist nepovtornoi khvylyny’ (‘convey the uniqueness of the unrepeatable
3 Ariiadna Shum, ‘Poeziia Vasylia Stusa’ (ZD: 1). 4 See the appendix dictionary ‘Poiasnennia malovidomykh sliv’ (‘The Explanation of Little-Known Words’, pp. 195-201), which illustrates Stus’s innovative poetical language. 5 Marco Carynnyk, ‘Povernennia Orfeia’, in Svicha v svichadi: Poezii, ed. by Marco Carynnyk and Wolfram Burghardt (New York: Suchasnist, 1977), p. 16.
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moment’) (p. 17). Having at his disposal some of Stus’s translations of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, the critic is also the first to highlight Stus’s artistic kinship with the Austrian poet, referring to their ‘prystrasnyi smutok za vtrachenoiu iednistiu liudyny zi svitom, za zahublenoiu tsilisnistiu i orhanichnistiu buttia’ (‘passionate yearning for the lost unity of humanity with the world, for the wholeness and organicity of being’) (p. 17). Two important articles by émigré critics Ostap Tarnavskyi and Bohdan Rubchak appeared in 1983. Each scholar breaks ground in drawing specific textual parallels between Stus and Rilke and detects other intertextual references in Stus’s works. Tarnavskyi focuses particularly on connections with the Ukrainian modernist poet Pavlo Tychyna. He argues that whereas Rilke’s poetry dwells in the metaphysical realm, Stus, like Tychyna, is rooted concretely in a national context. Like Shum, Tarnavskyi considers Stus’s poetry primarily within Ukrainian parameters, both cultural and political. Furthermore, the critic ties the poet’s works firmly to his captivity and, in effect, conflates his poetry with his life circumstances.6 Rubchak’s article provides an illuminating counterpoint to Tarnavskyi’s piece. A poet himself, Rubchak offers a more extensive list of Stus’s literary intertexts and treats such affinities with nuance. Foregrounding Stus’s cultivated intertextuality, he aptly suggests that ‘v chytacha mozhe sklastysia vrazhennia, shcho pid psevdonimom “Vasyl Stus” pyshe kilka poetiv’ (‘the reader might get the impression that several poets write under the pseudonym “Vasyl Stus”’).7 Rubchak approaches Stus specifically as a poet and, through close textual analysis, focuses on the oscillation between ‘samorozshcheplennia’ (‘self-dispersal’) and unity in Stus’s works, examining such underlying themes as self-doubling, memory, and temporality. He is the first scholar to note the centrality of the image of palimpsest for the poet. Rubchak foregrounds Stus’s affinities with existentialism and shows how the ‘political, psychological, and metaphysical’ merge in his writing.8 The critic, therefore, lays a foundation for further rigorous discussion of Stus’s poetry, attending in particular to questions of fragmentation and self-doubling, which I will go on to examine closely in this thesis. In 1986 the first extensive publication of Stus’s Palimpsests appeared in New York, prefaced by George Shevelov’s seminal essay ‘Trunok i trutyzna’. Unlike Rubchak’s more focused piece, Shevelov’s introduction provides instead a general survey of Palimpsests, in
6 Ostap Tarnavskyi, ‘Znaiomlennia z poetom Vasylem Stusom’, Almanakh UNS, 1983, 134-47. 7 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha nad prirvoiu’, p. 56. 8 In speaking of the Other as a factor of self-dispersal, Rubchak posits, for instance, that ‘tut sprava kudy hlybsha, nizh shchodenni politychni obstavyny. Adzhe v nespodivanomu povoroti navit kokhana inodi staie zahrozlyvym Inshym’ (‘it goes much deeper than the everyday political circumstances. For even the beloved can sometimes become the dangerous Other in an unexpected turn of events’) (p. 62).
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which the critic sets out to ‘inventaryzuvaty poezii za ikhnimy temamy i stylem’ (‘take stock of [Stus’s] poems by theme and style’).9 Yet Shevelov discerns, if in a sketchy fashion, a number of Stus’s focal themes and thereby issues an important vade mecum for future scholars. He emphasises the introspective (‘intensive’) nature of Stus’s poetry, where the limited number of themes is compensated by their sophisticated investigation. The critic notes that the self-exploration in Stus’s poetry at the same time translates into an exploration of the human existential condition more universally. Shevelov defines the core of Stus’s poetry as ‘zoseredzhennia na stavanni, a ne na stani, rukh v seredynu sebe samoho’ (‘the focus on becoming and not being, the movement inwards’) (p. 33), thus advancing the theme of becoming, which similarly furnishes a central area of investigation in my thesis. Shevelov begins his essay by famously posing the question that all scholars of Stus’s poetry face in one way or another: ‘Iak vidirvatysia vid heroichnoi biohrafii tvortsia i hovoryty pro virshi iak fakt literatury?’ (‘How is one to tear oneself away from the writer’s heroic biography and speak about [Stus’s] poems as a fact of literature?’) (p. 18). While in practice Shevelov himself is occasionally inconsistent in distinguishing between the poet and his poetic alter ego, the critic nonetheless emphasises the difference between the two and highlights clearly what is central in Stus’s poetry: ‘Naibilshe dosiahnennia tsiiei poezii v okhoplenni narodzhuvanykh emotsii, dushevnykh rukhiv u protsesi ikhnoho oformlennia’ (‘The greatest achievement of this poetry is the capturing of nascent emotions and movements of the soul as they come into being’) (p. 31).
Anti/postcolonial Discourse
The death of Stus and the landslide changes in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s only aggravated the question posed by Shevelov. Iurii Bedryk’s study ‘Vasyl Stus: problema spryimannia’ (‘Vasyl Stus: The Problem of Perception’, 1992) was the first to approach metacritically the very perception and reception of Stus’s writing as a problem of its own, problematising the public image of Stus. Scholars and readers at large, Bedryk argued, ignored the poet’s own separation of aesthetic questions from political and civic questions.10 In 1995, Oksana Zabuzhko similarly pointed out a discrepancy between the poet’s ‘social
9 George Y. Shevelov, ‘Trunok i trutyzna: Pro “Palimpsesty” Vasylia Stusa’, in Palimpsesty: Virshi 1971-1979 rokiv, ed. by Nadia Svitlychna (New York: Suchasnist, 1986), pp. 17-58 (p. 19). 10 Iurii Bedryk, Vasyl Stus: Problema spryimannia (Kyiv: Fotovideoservis, 1993), p. 3.
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position (that of a martyr), and the mere poetic text’.11 Even when we fast-forward fifteen years, Marko Pavlyshyn comes to a similar conclusion in his meticulous overview study ‘Martyrology and Literary Scholarship: The case of Vasyl Stus’ (2010): ‘The bifurcation of the Ukrainian cultural field persists – and with it the parallel existence of Stus the poet and Stus the martyr. For the moment, the martyr prevails.’12 Pavlyshyn’s formulation makes it clear that ‘Stus the poet’ has also secured a firm place in scholarship, yet it is overshadowed by the martyr reading.13 The notion of martyrdom, a constant over the course of the history of Ukrainian literature,14 is inevitably bound up with colonialism, the paradigm within which scholars commonly place Stus. Drawing upon Pavlyshyn’s analysis of colonial, anticolonial, and postcolonial discourses in the Ukrainian context, Myroslav Shkandrij suggests that ‘Stus accepts that there is no short-circuiting the national on the way to spiritual salvation. In several ways, therefore, he can be seen as an anticolonial writer on the cusp of the postcolonial.’15 Pavlyshyn defines anticolonialism as a ‘reactive response’ to colonialism, and postcolonialism as playing with the colonial myth and ‘turn[ing] the tables on the colonisers, rather than engaging them in the combat’.16 While Shkandrij explicitly frames Stus’s writing
11 Oksana Zabuzhko, ‘Reinventing the Poet in Modern Ukrainian Culture’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 2 (1995), 270-5 (p. 274). 12 Marko Pavlyshyn, ‘Martyrology and Literary Scholarship: The Case of Vasyl Stus’, The Slavic and East European Journal, 4 (2010), 585-606 (p. 602). 13 Cf. Kostiantyn Moskalets’s proposition: ‘zdatnist prynesty sebe v zhertvu [...] obertaietsia vybukhom nebachenoi mohutnosti’ (‘the ability to sacrifice oneself [...] turns into an explosion of extraordinary power’). See Kostiantyn Moskalets, ‘Vasyl Stus: nezavershenyi proekt’, in S I, 1: 15. Similarly, Tamara Hundorova notes with respect to the poet: ‘Buty zhertvoiu – tse staie chy ne iedynym statusom buttia’ (‘Being a victim becomes practically the only status of being’). See Tamara Hundorova, ‘Fenomen Stusovoho “zhertvoslova”’, in Stus iak tekst, ed. by Marko Pavlyshyn (Melbourne: Viddil slavistyky universytetu imeni Monasha, 1992), pp. 1-31 (p. 9). Volodymyr Morenets speaks of ‘vidsvit mesianstva, iakym popry voliu i bazhannia avtora znachena ioho poeziia’ (‘a reflection of messianism, which marks Stus’s poetry in spite of his will and wish’). See Volodymyr Morenets, ‘Do pytannia modernosti liryky Vasylia Stusa (Khudozhno-filosofski aspekty indyvidualnoho styliu)’, Naukovi zapysky Natsionalnoho Universytetu ‘Kyievo-Mohylianska Akademiia’, 4 (1998), 97-105. More examples and their critical analysis can be found in: Alessandro Achilli, ‘Soviet Dissident Writers in the Literary Canon of Contemporary Ukraine’, in Ukraine twenty years after independence: Assessments, perspectives, challenges, ed. by Giovanna E. Brogi, and others (Rome: Aracne, 2015), pp. 273-86. 14 See Uilleam Blacker, ‘Martyrdom, Spectacle, and Public Space: Ukraine’s National Martyrology from Shevchenko to the Maidan’, Journal of Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society, 2 (2015), 257-92. 15 Myroslav Shkandrij, Russia and Ukraine: Literature and the Discourse of Empire from Napoleonic to Postcolonial Times (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), p. 258. In his introduction to the 1992 volume characteristically entitled ‘Stus iak tekst’ (‘Stus as Text’) Pavlyshyn admits that the contributors to the volume are ‘vpevneni v neobkhidnosti prochytannia Stusovykh poezii, iake b vykhodylo poza ramky “Heroichnoi biohrafii” (Shevelov) ta politychnykh otsinok [...] vse zh zmusheni (v tsomu nevblahannist kolonialnoho kontekstu) povertatysia do biohrafii і, cherez nei, do polityky’ (‘convinced of the necessity to read Stus’s poetry in a way that would go beyond the “Heroic biography” (Shevelov) and political judgments [...] yet they are bound (and here the colonial context leaves no choice) to come back to his biography, and, via that, to politics’) (pp. 165-6). 16 Marko Pavlyshyn, ‘Post-colonial Features in Contemporary Ukrainian Culture’, Australian Slavonic and East European Studies, 6.2 (1992), 41-55 (p. 45). For a comprehensive study of the dynamics of postcolonialism in
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as anti-cum-postcolonial, this perception is implicit in a significant current in Stus Studies, which regards him primarily in the context of nationhood and the tradition of ‘poetry-as- opposition’,17 a discourse only reinforced in response to Ukraine’s ongoing political and geopolitical challenges. Many scholars oppose the focus on the national in analysing Stus’s writing. An emblematic example is Natalia Burianyk’s 1997 doctoral work ‘Incarceration and Death: The Poetry of Vasyl’ Stus’, the first PhD dissertation about Stus to be written outside of Ukraine. It remains the only other English-language doctoral work (apart from this thesis) fully focused on Stus. Burianyk offers a thoughtful reading of Stus’s works and consciously refrains ‘from considering poems that reveal Stus as a citizen and concentrate[s] [instead] mainly on those themes and motifs that transcend national and ethnic boundaries, such as death, fate, love, time and space’.18 Burianyk’s study is indeed illuminating in its analysis of the co-existence of existentialism and determinism, and the operation of ‘subjective time’ in Stus’s poetry, as well as the latter’s alignment with Buddhism. However, for all her indisputable contributions, and despite her rejection of the national(ist) reading, Burianyk nonetheless gravitates toward the realm of the anti- and postcolonial by choosing death and incarceration as the central theme for her study and, in effect, confining Stus to a context of (interpretational) captivity. The image of Stus as a ‘poet of dissent’ (Shkandrij) is related to the reading of his poetry in the context of the shistdesiatnyky (‘sixtiers’), a group of Ukrainian ‘dissident intellectuals of the 1960s’,19 ‘united by a determined refusal to comply with the Soviet cultural and national politics of the Brezhnev era’.20 While some scholars radically affirm that ‘[s]pravzhnii Stus pochynaietsia tam, de zakinchuietsia Stus-shistdesiatnyk’ (‘the real Stus begins where Stus the sixtier ends’),21 for others he represents a (or even the) ‘key figure’ of
the Ukrainian context (in particular, in Ukrainian literature) see Vitaly Chernetsky, Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007). See also Vitaly Chernetsky, ‘Postcolonialism, Russia and Ukraine’, Ulbandus Review, 7 (2003), 32-62. 17 Zabuzhko, ‘Reinventing the Poet’, p. 275. 18 Natalia Burianyk, ‘Incarceration and Death: The Poetry of Vasyl’ Stus’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Alberta, 1997), pp. 39-40. 19 Oxana Pachlovska, ‘The Poetry of the Sixtiers and Europe: Between Culture and Politics’, in Ukraine and Europe: Cultural Encounters and Negotiations, ed. by Giovanna Brogi Bercoff, Marko Pavlyshyn, and Serhii Plokhy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), pp. 390-413 (p. 391). 20 Achilli, ‘Soviet Dissident Writers’, p. 277. 21 Vasyl Ivashko, ‘Mif pro Vasylia Stusa iak dzerkalo shistdesiatnykiv’, Svitovyd, 3 (1994), 104-20 (p. 107).
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the group.22 These categorisations clash, as scholars propose different ways to define the very phenomenon of the shistdesiatnyky and to assess their legacy.23 Having emerged in the shifting political landscape of the 1960s and early 1970s, with both the liberalisation of the Thaw and the subsequent tightening of the Soviet regime under Brezhnev, the literature of the shistdesiatnyky oscillates between the political and aesthetic, subjective and collective, national and European, traditional and modernist. A diachronic perspective facilitates understanding of the relationship between Stus and the shistdesiatnyky. While Stus was influenced by the sixtiers such as Lina Kostenko and Mykola Vinhranovskyi in his early poetry, he neither considered himself to be a shistdesiatnyk nor was considered as such by others. One of the key sixtiers and Stus’s fellow prisoner Ievhen Sverstiuk notes that the name of Stus simply ‘ne isnuvalo v hroni poezii shistdesiatnykiv’ (‘did not exist in the group of the shistdesiatnyky poets’).24 In a 1971 talk, Stus does not include himself in this group either: the shistdesiatnyky, he suggests, ‘ishly na nevtorovanu dorohu [...] I cherez tse perevahoiu і, mozhe, trahediieiu shistdesiatnykiv bula ikhnia vymushena, а, mozhe, i bazhana bahatolykist (stylova)’ (‘were off the beaten track [...] And for this reason, their advantage and, perhaps, their tragedy was their forced or, perhaps, desired (stylistic) diversity’).25 Thus, the poet comments on the group as an outsider. As Stus develops his own highly introspective style, which especially crystallises in Palimpsests, his engagement with the poetry of the shistdesiatnyky diminishes.26 Recognising the complex relationship between Stus’s ‘heroic biography’ and his verse ‘as a fact of literature’, as Shevelov frames the dilemma, some scholars consider the possibility of a hybrid approach to the figure of Stus and to his cultural legacy. Oxana Pachlovska remarks that
[Stus’s] uncompromising stance against the regime and death while imprisoned enabled many Ukrainian scholars to inscribe him into a ‘martyrological’ canon, while their Western counterparts
22 See this comprehensive study by leading shistdesiatnyky scholar Liudmyla Tarnashynska: Siuzhet doby: Dyskurs shistdesiatnytstva v ukrainskii literaturi XX stolittia (Kyiv: Akademperiodyka, 2013). 23 Achilli justly notes that ‘[t]he question of the legacy of the Shistdesiatnyky in contemporary Ukrainian culture is one of the most controversial and problematic’. See Achilli, ‘Soviet Dissident Writers’, p. 276. 24 Ievhen Sverstiuk, ‘Vidnaidena improvizatsiia Vasylia Stusa’, Suchasnist, 9 (1991), 38-41 (p. 39). 25 Stus gave this talk in January 1971 at a literary discussion in Kyiv. The talk was recorded and preserved against all odds. Ievhen Sverstiuk subsequently transcribed and published it in Suchasnist, as per the footnote above. In the previous footnote, I refer to Sverstiuk’s introductory note regarding the recording. Whenever I speak of Stus’s actual talk, I refer to it as follows: Vasyl Stus, ‘Vystup Vasylia Stusa’, Suchasnist, 9 (1991), 41- 3. 26 For an overview of Stus’s critical commentaries on a number of the sixtier authors in his letters, see Liudmyla Romashchenko, ‘Shistdesiatnyky i shistdesiatnytstvo v epistoliarii Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovi zapysky Natsionalnoho universytety ‘Ostrozka akademiia’, 21 (2011), 317-24.
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sought to disaggregate the political and aesthetic dimensions of his oeuvre. Both approaches are legitimate, but the marginalization of either would impoverish an understanding of the poet’s work. To this day, no synthetic vision has been proposed.27
‘Vasyl Stus: Zhyttia iak tvorchist’ (‘Vasyl Stus: Life as Art’, 2004), Stus’s most comprehensive literary biography to date, written by Dmytro Stus, the poet’s son and a scholar of his works, represents a major attempt at such a synthetic vision. The scholar advocates a more comprehensive and balanced reading: ‘Odni ioho spryimaiut lyshe iak esteta i liryka, inshi – iak bortsia za “nezalezhnist Ukrainy” [...], tym chasom iak use tse v duzhe skladnyi, khymernyi i ne zavzhdy poslidovnyi sposib tsilkom pryrodno spivisnuvalo v nomu’ (‘Some only perceive him as an artist and a poet, and others as someone who fought for an “independent Ukraine” [...], while all of this co-existed in him organically in a complex, strange, and not always consistent way’).28 Yet such synthesis has proven to be problematic, conventionally prioritising the study of Stus’s life over his works. Pavlyshyn notes in this regard: ‘Intentions to synthesize the biographical and the textual notwithstanding, in practice it was the former that triumphed’.29 Dmytro Stus’s book largely conforms to this proposition. Its very title foregrounds the primacy of ‘life’ above ‘art’.30 In his preface to the third edition of the book (2015), Dmytro Stus defines its purpose as ‘rozkryttia obrazu Stusa-poeta, shcho formuietsia v rezultati zhyttievoi samorealizatsii v konkretnykh suspilno-istorychnykh obstavynakh’ (‘the uncovering of the image of Stus the poet, which was formed as a result of his self-realisation in specific social and historical circumstances’) (p. 5). He opposes ‘prymityvnyi obraz Stusa-bortsia bez strakhu і dokoru’ (‘a primitive image of Stus the fearless and irreproachable fighter’), and yet emphasises the poet’s struggle for ‘pravo hovoryty vysoki slova pro trahediiu Ukrainy vid imeni narodu’ (‘the right to say weighty words about the tragedy of Ukraine on behalf of the people’) (p. 5).
27 Pachlovska, ‘The Poetry of the Sixtiers’, p. 392. 28 Dmytro Stus, Vasyl Stus: Zhyttia iak tvorchist, 3rd edn (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2015), p. 61. 29 Pavlyshyn, ‘Martyrology’, p. 600. 30 Many scholars blend these two notions, speaking of Stus’s zhyttietvorchist, perhaps inspired by Stus’s own neologisms and/or drawing upon the Russian Symbolist notion of zhisnetvorchestvo. Cf. Marharyta Iehorchenko, ‘Motyv hrikha v poezii Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovi zapysky NaUKMA, 72 (2007), 18-23. The scholar highlights ‘nerozryvnyi zviazok [tvorchoho protsesu] z realnym zhyttiam avtora’ (‘the intextricable link [of the artistic process] with the real life of the author’) and their ‘vzaiemodopovnennia’ (‘complementarity’) (p. 71).
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(Post)modernist Discourse
There are two major ways in which scholars evoke modernism in the study of Stus’s poetry. The first relates to the fundamental opposition between ‘populist’ and ‘modernist’ tendencies, broadly understood, underlying Ukrainian literature. If the general notion of modernism escapes rigid definitions, in the Ukrainian context it proves to be an even more unstable category.31 The populist approach, emphasising the role of literature in shaping and articulating national consciousness, is commonly bound up with the anticolonial discourse discussed above. Dmytro Stus exemplifies this tendency, explicitly relegating modernism to ‘druhoriadna, dopomizhna funktsiia’ (‘a secondary, auxiliary function’) and arguing that ‘tradytsiinyi narodnytskyi pohliad na postat Vasylia Stusa poky maie znachno menshu aberatsiiu’ (‘the traditional populist view of the figure of Vasyl Stus is so far characterised by lesser aberration’).32 The tension between the biographical and the textual is again at stake here, as the poet himself, Dmytro Stus insists, ‘ne viddiliav zhyttia vid tekstu’ (‘did not distinguish between his life and text’) (p. 57). In this broad sense, the modernist approach places the emphasis on the textual and de-prioritises the national and the political. As we have seen, Shevelov and Rubchak pioneer this approach. The second way in which scholars understand modernism in discussions of Stus’s poetry is more specific, foregrounding such attributes of modernist poetics as subjective consciousness, the autonomy of art, intertextuality, elitism and intellectualism. Many critics, furthermore, discern postmodernist elements in Stus’s writing. Tamara Hundorova was the first scholar to discuss extensively the question of Stus’s modernism and postmodernism. Hundorova’s definitions are rather loose (modernism is for her not purely stylistic as it includes existentialism, for example), and her analysis does not always avoid mixing the poetical and the political. Yet she offers a sophisticated reading of Stus’s poetry, discussing the themes of self-reflexivity and selfsameness, alienation and Platonism, and advancing Stus’s ‘modernism, individualism, intellectualism, aestheticism’
31 In her monumental study of Ukrainian modernism Dyskurs modernizmu v ukrainskii literaturi, Solomia Pavlychko postulates that modernism is ‘ne hrupa, ne period, ne shkola, i tym bilshe ne khudozhnii napriam’ (‘not a group, or a period, or a school, or, less still, an art movement’), but rather ‘pevna mystetska filosofiia, pevna model literaturnoho rozvytku v nashomu stolitti’ (‘a certain artistic philosophy, a certain model of the development of literature in our century’). See Solomiia Pavlychko, Teoriia literatury (Kyiv: Osnovy, 2002). Hundorova perceptively argues that ‘ukrainska kulturna svidomist ne perezhyla vpovni modernistskoho etapu’ (‘Ukrainian cultural consciousness has not fully experienced the modernist phase’). See Hundorova, ‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 6. 32 ‘Zhyttia iak tvorchist’, p. 57. Dmytro Stus places Stus within ‘Shevchenkivska tradytsiia, pidvazhena v 1990- kh postmodernistamy’ (‘the Shevchenkian tradition shattered by the postmodernists in the 1990s’). See ‘Zhyttia iak tvorchist’, p. 6.
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(p. 6). Hundorova’s study also discerns its postmodernist characteristics (in particular, its playful potential, collage, and theatricality, as well as the fragmentation of the self).33 Discussing the articulation of the self in Stus’s writing, the critic comes to the conclusion that ‘Stus, perebuvaiuchy na hrani vysokoho modernismu і postmodernismu, vse zh taky lyshavsia bilshoiu miroiu modernistom, oberihaiuchy modernistskyi indyvidualism і subiektyvnist’ (‘Dwelling on the borderline between high modernism and postmodernism, Stus was nonetheless a modernist to a greater extent, defending modernist individualism and subjectivity’) (p. 17). In contrast and direct response to Hundorova, the New York Group poet Bohdan Boichuk contends that ‘[z]vychaino, modernistom Stus ne buv. Iakshcho idetsia pro styl, to buv vin tradytsiinym poetom, iakyi denede rozpykav ramky tradytsiinoi poetyky oryhinalnymy obrazamy’ (‘of course, Stus was not a modernist. In terms of style, he was a traditional poet, who occasionally pushed the boundaries of traditional poetics through original images’).34 Stus’s postmodernism also proves to be a contentious issue. While Pavlyshyn, for instance, finds postmodernist elements primarily in Stus’s early poetry,35 Moskalets speaks of ‘nezavershenist ekzystentsiinoho proektu [Stusa], kotryi poliahav u dokorinnii modernizatsii (a ne postmodernizatsii) natsionalnoi kultury’ (‘[Stus’s] unfinished existential project consisting in a radical modernisation (and not postmodernisation) of the national culture’).36 Even this limited selection of critical views showcases both a broad array of Stus’s poetical facets and a clash of definitions, where scholars variously conceive modernism as a rigorously defined style (like Boichuk), or as both an existential project and general mode of cultural modernisation (like Moskalets). A distinctive feature of the mainstream of Stus Studies, moreover, is the tendency of reading Stus’s poetry wholesale, without a nuanced delineation between different periods of the poet’s writing. Various categorisations, therefore, often stem from the fact that critics analyse Stus’s works from all stages of the poet’s artistic trajectory indiscriminately.
33 In postmodernism Hundorova sees a chance to resolve ‘odne z “prokliat” nashoi natsionalnoi istorii, a same – kolizii [...] moderniszmu i narodnytstva’ (‘one of the “curses” of our national history, namely the clash [...] between modernism and populism’). See Hundorova, ‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 6. 34 Bohdan Boichuk, ‘“Stus iak tekst”’, Svitovyd, 3 (1993), 115-117 (p. 115). Boichuk takes the same approach in a more recent piece; see Bohdan Boichuk, ‘Nevyvchenyi ukrainskyi modernizm’, Krytyka, 1-2 (2010), 147-8. 35 Marko Pavlyshyn, ‘Kvadratura kruha: prolehomyny do otsinky Vasylia Stusa’, in Stus iak tekst, ed. by Marko Pavlyshyn (Melbourne: Viddil slavistyky universytetu imeni Monasha, 1992), p. 51. 36 Moskalets, ‘Nezavershenyi proekt’, p. 25.
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Alessandro Achilli’s 2018 Italian-language monograph La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus: Modernismo e intertestualità poetica nell’Ucraina del secondo Novecento (The Poetry of Vasyl Stus: Modernism and Poetic Intertextuality in Late-Soviet Ukraine), the first and, so far, the only book on Stus’s poetry written by a scholar not of Ukrainian origin, furnishes the most consistent modernist reading of Stus’s poetry. Through rigorous analysis, Achilli demonstrates a wide range of thematic, stylistic, and compositional variations across Stus’s oeuvres from the late fifties to the late seventies, ultimately marked ‘by striking experimentalism and profound self-reflexive and meta-poetic tension’.37 While Achilli calls attention to Stus’s ‘repeated incursions into the territories ascribable to postmodernist sensitivity’ (primarily, ‘the disintegration of subjectivity’ and ‘the insatiable desire for stylistic experimentation’), he avoids considering ‘postmodernist ideas [...] a decisive and constitutive element of [Stusian poetical universe]’ (p. 324). Instead, Achilli firmly grounds the poet within the tradition of European Modernism. The lynchpin of his study is Stus’s ample intertextuality with such varied poetical voices as modernists Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rilke, and romantics Goethe and Taras Shevchenko. Another important study of Stus’s intertextuality is a recent doctoral work by Tetiana Mykhailova, who explores specifically Stus’s extensive dialogue with Russian literary tradition.38 In her turn, Halyna Kolodkevych’s recent study of the ‘polyvariant’ nature of Stus’s poetry compellingly demonstrates how the existence of multiple versions of texts and lines in Stus’s poetical corpus constitutes a salient attribute of Stus’s poetics. Through a thorough investigation, Kolodkevych shows that Stus’s texts should be regarded with phenomenological nuance ‘v rusi, zminnosti khudozhnoho myslennia’ (‘in motion, in the changeability of artistic thinking’).39 The recent scholarship advanced by Achilli, Kolodkevych, and Mykhailova represents a great step forward in the study of Stus’s poetry as they methodically carry out an in-depth textual analysis of Stus’s verse, realising a ‘Stus iak tekst’ approach by showing how the fabric of his writing is woven. In tune with the elitism and intellectualism often associated with modernist aesthetics, scholars have also repeatedly pointed out the intellectually challenging nature of Stus’s poetry, which leads many to speak of the inaccessibility of his works for a broader audience, and to highlight its hermetic nature. While Shevelov finds only twelve such poems in the
37 Alessandro Achilli, La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus: Modernismo e intertestualità poetica nell’Ucraina del secondo Novecento (Firenze: Firenze University Press, 2018), p. 321. 38 Tetiana Mykhailova, ‘Vasyl Stus i rosiiska literatura: Formy transformatsii poetychnoi tradytsii’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Taras Shevchenko Institute of Literature, 2016). 39 Halyna Kolodkevych, Variatyvnist khudozhnoho myslennia Vasylia Stusa (Kyiv: KMU, 2015), p. 6.
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1986 edition of Palimpsests,40 for other scholars it constitutes a common attribute of significant part of Stus’s writing.41 The poet’s hermeticism draws him away from the context of the shistdesiatnyky and brings him closer to that of the Ukrainian hermetic poetry of the 1970s, epitomised by the Kyiv School of Poetry (including Vasyl Holoborodko, Mykola Hryhoriv, Viktor Kordun, and Mykola Vorobiov). Mykola Ilnytskyi summarises this approach by stating that Stus might be regarded as ‘postshistdesiatnyk, perehidna lanka vid shistdesiatnykiv do predstavnykiv shvydko zadushenoi kyivskoi shkoly, v iakykh hromadianske nachalo shukalo vzhe dlia svoiei realizatsii ekzystentsiinykh vykhodiv, a khudozhnii tekst dosiahav bilshoi miry samodostatnosti’ (‘a post-shistdesiatnyk, a transitional link between the shistdesiatnyky and the representatives of the promptly repressed Kyiv school, for whom the civic element was realised existentially, and the literary text was characterised by greater self-sufficiency’).42
Philosophical Discourse
That Stus’s poetry represents the poetry of focused philosophical reflection was evident from the poet’s early works, and the first reviews of the 1960s and 1970s reflect this understanding. Bedryk describes Stus’s writing as ‘poeziia, bazovana na filosofii, i filosofiia, bazovana na poezii’ (‘poetry based on philosophy and philosophy based on poetry’, in the latter case referring to Stus’s essays on other poets).43 Scholars have commonly read Stus in the context of existentialism. In discussing Stus’s poetry, critics refer to it in narrow and broad senses. In the narrow sense, scholars evoke such existentialist thinkers as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Gabriel Marcel, and, much less often, Nikolai Berdiaiev.44 Stus’s extensive interest in existentialist philosophy and clear references
40 Vasyl Stus, Palimpsesty: Virshi 1971-1979 rokiv, ed. by Nadia Svitlychna (New York: Suchasnist, 1986). 41 Oksana Kuzmenko suggests that ‘rozuminnia hermetyzmu v Ukraini zadane bulo V. Stusom’ (‘hermeticism in Ukraine was ushered in by Vasyl Stus’). See Oksana Kuzmenko, Poetyka Vasylia Holoborodka (Donetsk: Skhidnyi vydavnychyi dim, 2004), p. 16. Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska posits that ‘osnovnyi masyv Stusovoho poetychnoho slova – tse poeziia duzhe skladna, pochasty hermetychna’ (‘the vast majority of Stus’s poetry is very complex, in part hermetic’). See Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, ‘Lehshe zhyty todi, koly znaiesh, shcho ie-taky u sviti shchos spravzhnie’, Den, 23 August 2000
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to existentialist ideas very much encourage such a reading.45 More often, scholars speak of Stus’s existentialism in a broad sense, foregrounding the existential concerns of Stus’s poetry and such recurrent themes in his works as alienation and the pursuit of authenticity. Critics, then, regard Stus’s poetry as both existentialist and existential. Rubchak and Shevelov were the first to point out strong links of Stus’s Weltanschauung with existentialism.46 The critical works of the early 1990s, in particular those of Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska and Ivan Dziuba, firmly place Stus’s work in the context of this philosophy.47 According to Bedryk, ‘chytaiuchy Stusa – potribno chytaty, nasampered, ekzystentsialista’ (‘in reading Stus, we should be primarily reading an exisentialist’).48 Kotsiubynska foregrounds the centrality of Stus’s notion of samosoboiunapovnennia, ‘filling-(one)self- with-[the]-self’, which captures the process of self-formation. In her comprehensive study of Ukrainian metaphysical poetry, Eleonora Solovei considers Stus’s verse through the prism of authenticity.49 Since these initial explorations, a number of works, particularly doctoral theses, have been written on Stus’s relationship with existentialism.50 In discussing this relationship, scholars tend not to distinguish between the real-life author and his poetry. Hundorova refers to ‘ekzystentsialistska zhertva Stusa’ (‘Stus’s
45 In an interrogation report, Stus explains that ‘statti Karla Iaspersa ia zbyravsia perekladaty – bodai dlia sebe. Bo ekzystentsializm iak filosofiia mene duzhe tsikavyt’ (‘I was going to translate Karl Jaspers’s articles, at least for myself. Because I am very interested in existentialism as a philosophy’). See ‘Protokol obshuku’ (12.01.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava Stusa Vasylia Semenovycha, No. 67298FP, sprava 47 u 12 tomakh, T. 1, pp. 1-7 [17-22] (p. 4 [19]). 46 Rubchak discusses such existentialist categories as alienation, temporality, absurdity, revolt, and death (particularly drawing parallels with Rilke). Shevelov tentatively outlines Stus’s affinities with the philosophy of ‘Heidegger, Sartre, and especially Gabriel Marcel, who is the closest to Stus’s own worldview’. See ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 26. 47 Dziuba adds Nietzsche and Ortega y Gasset to Shevelov’s list, and notes that ‘[f]ilosofy ekzystentsializmu znaishly b naibahatshyi material u tvorchosti Stusa’ (‘existentialist philosophers would find the most generous material in Stus’s works’). See Ivan Dziuba, ‘Rizbiar vlasnoho dukhu’, in Stusoznavchi zoshyty: Naukovyi almanakh, 4 (2018), 5-23 (pp. 19, 22). Kotsiubynska posits that existentialism is relevant for the understanding of Stus, as in this philosophy ‘[s]truktura “ia” spryimaietsia iak vidkryta struktura, a isnuvannia – iak [...] “buduvannia sebe”’ (‘the structure of “I” is perceived as an open structure, and existence [...] [is perceived] as the “construction of the self”’) (p. 210). 48 Bedryk, Problema spryimannia, p. 32. 49 Eleonora Solovei, ‘Problema avtentychnoho buttia (V. Stus)’, in E. Solovei, Ukrainska filosofska liryka (Kyiv: Iunivers, 1999), pp. 253-90. 50 In addition to Burianyk’s thesis, which thoughtfully explores existentialist themes in Stus’s writing, see, for example, Svitlana Sakovets, ‘Mifopoetyka Vasylia Stusa’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Odesa I.I. Mechnykov National University, 2012); Svitlana Todorova, ‘Liudyna v suspilstvi: Vidpovidno filosofii Vasylia Stusa’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Odesa National Academy of Food Technologies, 2012); Viktoria Poliuha, ‘Problema buttia liudyny u tvorchosti Vasylia Stusa: Ekzystentsiinyi vymir’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, National Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of Ukraine, 2011); Ievhenii Ishchenko, ‘Ekzystentsiini kontsepty khudozhnoi svidomosti Vasylia Stusa’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Kyiv National Taras Shevchenko University, 2010); Olena Rosinska, ‘Ekzystentsiina pryroda symvoliky v poezii V. Stusa’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Donetsk National University, 2007).
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existentialist sacrifice’).51 Eleonora Solovei speaks of ‘ekzystentsiina identyfikatsiia iz soboiu iak povnovazhnoiu chastynkoiu tsoho narodu, iaka vidchuvaie poklykannia i oboviazok buty ioho rechnykom’ (‘the existential identification with oneself as a representative part of the people that feels a calling and a duty to be its mouthpiece’).52 In this broad sense, then, Stus’s existentialism goes in tandem with national resistance and is rooted in the poet’s personal experience. From such a perception also stem the tropes of the impossibility to comprehend Stus: ‘Clearly, Vasyl Stus, having scaled the heights of the spirit, continues to remain too inaccessible to Ukrainian literary scholarship, furnishing yet another proof of the incompletion of his existentialist project’.53 While existentialism has been the predominant prism for philosophical readings of Stus, scholars have also provided other readings. Burianyk’s thesis offers an insightful account of the affinities between Stus’s poetry and Buddhism. Natalia Pylypiuk’s seminal article ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’54 offers a rigorous reading of mysticism in Stus’s poetry, foregrounding its inherent ‘philosophical, mystical, and psychological aspects of narcissism’ and complex intertextual and philosophical links with the works of Hryhorii Skovoroda, a prominent Ukrainian Baroque thinker, whose philosophy exerted a great influence on the poet. Hundorova’s study, mentioned above, also provides the first (and most comprehensive to date) attempt at a phenomenological reading of Stus’s poetry, juxtaposing ‘a phenomenological and existential’ perspective with Stus’s Platonism.
This overview of the three central discourses apparent in Stus Studies makes clear that the poet’s works problematise any easy categorisation and raise important epistemological issues. Scholars repeatedly refer to Stus’s poetry as being ‘in-between’, whether between anticolonialism and postcolonialism (Shkandrij), modernism and postmodernism (Hundorova), the sixtiers and post-sixtiers (Ilnytskyi), national and universal, or traditional and modernist. This in-betweenness stems from the distinctiveness of Stus’s own philosophy,
51 Hundorova, ‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 10. 52 Solovei, ‘Problema avtentychnoho buttia’, p. 264. Cf. Dziuba’s view of Stus’s poetry as ‘podolannia ekzystentsialnoho svitopochuvannia [...] holovni antynomii і problemy ekzystentializmu [...] poet rozmykaie v perezhyvannia doli svoho narodu i u prynalezhnist iomu, v podvyh zadlia noho’ (‘the overcoming of the existential worldview [...] the poet connects the principal antinomies and problems inherent to existentialism [...] with his lived experience of the fate of his people and his belonging to it’). See Dziuba, ‘Rizbiar’, p. 22. 53 Moskalets ‘Nezavershenyi proekt’, translated in Pavlyshyn, ‘Martyrology’, p. 599. 54 Natalia Pylypiuk, ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’, A World of Slavic Literatures: Essays in Comparative Slavic Studies in Honor of Edward Mozejko, ed. by Paul D. Morris (Bloomington, Ind.: Slavica, 2002), pp. 173-210.
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the centrality of movement and becoming in his poetry, and the virtuoso versatility of his poetics. Stus’s liminality is also related to the porosity of the mentioned categories themselves. Existentialism provides a good case in point. Walter Kaufmann argues that ‘existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets’ and that the single ‘essential feature’ shared by such varied figures as Pascal, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Rilke ‘is their perfervid individualism’. For this reason, Kaufmann uses the notion of ‘existential sensibility’.55 I find the notion of sensibility productive in discussing Stus’s works, with respect to both existentialism and other categories, representing ‘Baroque sensibility’, ‘Platonic sensibility’, ‘modernist sensibility’ and others. This notion points to important modalities of Stus’s poetry without resorting to categorical or essentialist rhetoric. Stus’s multitudinous intertextual references underpin a great range of sensibilities in Stus’s poetry. As we have seen, such abundant intertextuality has been one of the central areas of inquiry in Stus Studies. Indeed, under the surface of the poet’s text is a multi-layered structure of references, allusions, citations, and paraphrases. Stus’s consistent and focused engagement in translation is also emblematic of this radical openness and dialogism. Yet the study of Stus’s intertextuality should not obscure Stus’s originality. Pavlyshyn ironically exposes a common yet problematic logic in Stus criticism whereby ‘“dobre ie te, shcho podibne do dobroho” (otzhe Stus dobryi, bo v pevnykh rysakh podibnyi do Rilke)’ (‘“what is similar to good is good” (hence, Stus is good, because in some ways he is similar to Rilke’)).56 Indeed, it is important to ‘leave room in Stus for Stus’ (Bedryk), and to approach Stus’s poetry not as ‘a mirror that reflects other figures’ but rather as a multi-tiered palimpsest producing meaning in its own right.57 Hundorova evokes the image of a mirror to a different end, stating in the early 1990s: ‘Vse bilshe ochevydno: Vasyl Stus staie nashym dzerkalom’ (‘It is ever clearer: Vasyl Stus is becoming our mirror’).58 This proposition remains as relevant as ever. A significant reason why so many interpretations of Stus’s works exist is that the approaches to the poet’s writing reflect perceptions and definitions of Ukrainian literature as a whole.
55 Walter Kaufmann, ‘Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre’, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, rev. and expand. edn, ed. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: New American Library, 1975). 56 Pavlyshyn, ‘Kvadratura kruha’, p. 34. 57 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, pp. 56, 58. 58 Hundorova, ‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 1.
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Becoming Self
What is largely missing in the three discourses charted above is, I argue, one of Stus’s most original contributions: the poetic articulation of the self as non-coincidence. This non- coincidence manifests itself in two major ways. First, it concerns the existential gap between the present self and the potential self, what Heidegger succinctly expresses as always ‘not yet’ (Noch-nicht).59 Second, it touches upon the rift of self-consciousness, where the reflecting self never dovetails with the reflected self, bringing about the unsatisfied desire of Narcissus. In this thesis, I will organise a conceptualisation of Stus’s poetic self as both becoming-self and a relationship to itself. I advance a new reading of Stus’s poetry that redirects attention from the national and biographical to the philosophical and psychological investigation of subjectivity. In this reading, I am guided not by the sensibilities outlined earlier (be they modernist, existentialist, mystical or other), but by Stus’s unique concept of the self, to which all these multiple sensibilities make their contribution without exhausting it. With the poetry of Stus, readers find themselves in an unusual and puzzling position. We are ready to embark on a journey with the poetic subject, and yet already at the very beginning we find ourselves at a crossroads, realising that the journey itself in fact unfolds not as much with the poetic subject, as within it. The plane of the self constitutes the territory to be explored. We assume a solid poetical ‘I’ as an actor, only to see that we can make no such assumption safely. The very ‘I’ that we tend to take for granted in poetry is here not a foregone conclusion, but a question mark, both a reflection and an imperative. We enter the realm of the self in the making:
Ждання – то крику витягнута гума і за крайболю видовжена геть. Шукання – незаповнювана вирва самонезадоволень
(Waiting is the extended rubber of screaming / which has been stretched far beyond the edge-of-pain. / Searching is the unfillable crater / of self-dissatisfactions)
‘Zapliushchu ochi...’ (‘I will close my eyes...’) (DZ: 171)
In Stus’s poetry, the self signifies not an assumed point of departure but an unattainable point of destination, which is never one with itself.
59 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), p. 286.
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In elaborating this concept of the self, I draw upon the notion of selfhood proposed by the phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur. In his seminal study Oneself as Another, Ricoeur discerns two types of identity: idem-identity as sameness, and ipse-identity as selfhood.60 The criterion for distinction between the two versions of identity consists in the permanence in time. Ricoeur draws two models of temporal permanence, which he summarises as ‘character’ and ‘keeping one’s word’. Whereas within the first model, he argues, idem and ipse overlap, the ‘faithfulness to oneself in keeping one’s word marks the extreme gap between the permanence of the self and that of the same’ (p. 118) and, therefore, in this model ‘selfhood frees itself from sameness’ (p. 119). For Ricoeur, the two models correspond to two questions respectively: ‘What am I?’, and ‘Who am I?’ (p. 122-3). Furthermore, the gap between the two becomes possible because of the ethical problematic appearing in the rupture between the self and the same.61 Ricoeur encapsulates this division by saying that the ‘continuity of character is one thing, the constancy of friendship is quite another’ (p. 123). What underlies Ricoeur’s division is the difference between the self as it is present in the world and seen from the side, and the self as it is exposed to itself, and thus perceived from within. The two paradigms at work here are the self and the Other, and the self-as- (an)other, akin to the difference between biography and autobiography. ‘[I]t is above all the autobiographical impulse of memory’, Adriana Cavarero explains, ‘that produces discontinuous and fragmentary texts, which, although untrustworthy and elusive, can nonetheless never be exchanged for someone else’s story’.62 Indeed, there is a difference between my own story as I tell it, and a story of me as told by others, between me as ‘I’ and me as ‘she’ or ‘he’. While for the Other it possesses unity, my own relationship to myself and the impossibility of totality precludes this unity. It is in the sphere of sameness (the ‘what’) that the questions of nationhood and the anti/postcolonial arise, as the ‘construction of self in opposition to others’.63 What has been missing in the study of Stus’s poetry, I argue, is the focus on selfhood (the ‘who’), as the making of the self in a relationship to itself. Stus’s poetry pursues the goal not so much of expressing the self, as of making it. Shevelov rightly posits that for Stus’s poetic project ‘not being but becoming’ is of crucial
60 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 116. 61 In this regard, Ricoeur follows Heidegger’s division into permanence of substance and that of self-subsistence (Selbst-Ständigkeit) (p. 123). 62 Adriana Cavarero, Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood, trans., intr. by Paul A. Kottman (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 43. 63 Regenia Gagnier, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832-1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 8-9.
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significance. In the same vein, Kotsiubynska foregrounds Stus’s idea of samosoboiunapovnennia, ‘filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’. Palimpsests stages the very process of overcoming of the gap of non-coincidence. In Stus’s poetry, the subject represents a process and a relation. If reading Stus’s poetry might seem ‘frustrating’,64 it is likely because it creates (and does not represent) the making of the self, always postponing an arrival. It makes us aware of the fluidity of our own consciousness and allows us to follow the slightest shifts in it. While some scholars seek to ‘resolve’ the mystery of Stus, I posit that it does not represent a riddle to solve but rather a journey to join. The fact that Stus’s poetry invites so much desire for critical resolution in a sense reflects a function of the way in which desire – of unity, of self- coincidence, of being the authentic self – dwells at the very heart of his verse. For this reason especially, I avoid discussions of the question of nationhood in Palimpsests. To be sure, images of national struggle are abundant in Stus’s poetry. After all, Stus thought of naming his collection Strasti po Vitchyzni (Passions for the Homeland) in lieu of Palimpsests.65 The national question in Stus merits a separate study – one that would raise such valid questions as the reconciliation of nationhood and selfhood and nationalism in the (post)modernist age. Yet I agree with Bedryk who, in using Ortega y Gasset’s existentialist formula ‘I and my circumstances’, places the national project within ‘I’ rather than ‘my circumstances’ in Stus’s case.66 Lines like the following illustrate the validity of such a proposition: ‘Bo ty – tse ty, tse ty і ty, / bo ty і ie Vitchyzna [...] Bo ie v tobi tsilyi narod’ (‘For you are you, and you, and you, / for you yourself are the Homeland [...] For the whole people is in you’) (‘Velmozhnyi son mene opav...’, ‘The generous dream has overtaken me...’, P: 232). The powerful series of person deictics unmistakeably shows the primacy of selfhood in Stus’s poetry.67 Furthermore, unlike Ortega’s formula, in Stus’s lines
64 Some of my Cambridge students have characterised the experience of reading Stus in this way (while others have formed a very special relationship with his poetry). Parenthetically, the word frustration stems from the Latin word frustrari ‘to deceive, disappoint’. If Stus’s poetry disappoints our expectations, we might find it productive to analyse the expectations with which we tend to approach poetry. 65 See Stus’s letter to his wife dated November-December 1984, in S VI, 1: 480. 66 Bedryk, Problema spryimannia, p. 14. 67 Yeats and Whitman, who similarly faced the task of reconciling nationhood and selfhood, furnish an illuminating counterpoint here. ‘This is the tradition Yeats had in mind when he resolved in his journal for 1909: “To oppose the new ill-breeding of Ireland . . . I can only set up a secondary or interior personality created out of the tradition of myself.”’ See Terence Diggory, Yeats and American Poetry: The Tradition of the Self (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 5. Stus speaks expressly of this complex relationship in a letter to Bohdan Horyn dated 1967: ‘Zghaduiu bidnoho Dzhoisa, shcho nosyv svoiu Irlandiiu v sertsi, shcho zrobyv z nei dukhovno-beztelesu intelihentsku realnist’ (‘I think of the poor [James] Joyce, who bore his Ireland in his heart, and who turned it into spiritual and immaterial intellectual reality’). See S VI, 2: 44.
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instead of ‘I’, we see ‘you’ as self-address, which already signals a phenomenological distance. Confining Stus’s poetry purely to the context of his imprisonment and struggle against the Soviet regime is similarly unhelpful. First, Stus’s existentialist sensibility becomes clear well before his imprisonment. Dziuba righly asks whether Stus’s ‘“fundamentalnyi pesymism” svoieiu cherhoiu ne zahostriuvav spryiniattia konkretnoi absurdnosti konkretnoho suspilstva?’ (‘“fundamental pessimism’ in its turn did not exacerbate his perception of the particular absurdity of this particular society?’).68 The notion of pessimism requires some nuance (which I will touch upon in Chapter One), but Dziuba rightly reverses the causal links. Stus himself in his response to Ievhen Adelheim’s review of his draft Winter Trees, unequivocally affirms that ‘moi oskarzhennia – hlobalni, a ne iakis vuzkochasovi, rezhymni і t.d.’ (‘my concerns are universal, not confined to a specific time or regime, etc.’).69 In this respect, we can learn from the changing dynamic in the reception of Holocaust works such as the poetry of Paul Celan, which were created amid traumatic experiences ad extremum. Joanna Klink argues persuasively that to confine Celan to the context of the Holocaust would mean to narrow and impoverish both his poetry and the very experience of reading:
In the critical reception of Celan there has been some attempt to appropriate his poetry entirely to the Holocaust, as though the poems were not in themselves exemplary poems but exemplary of the kind of poem which could only be written in response to Auschwitz. [...]. Celan’s doubt cannot be separated from his experience of the Holocaust, but the poems which arise out of this doubt should be understood as contending with ontological issues which include and exceed those raised by the Holocaust.70
In a similar way, Stus’s poetry can and, in fact, should ‘be understood as contending with ontological issues which include and exceed those raised by’ the Soviet totalitarian regime.
The Poetic Subject
Drawing a clear distinction between the real-life author and the poetic subject in Stus’s poetry is critical for a number of reasons. First, in contrast to the poet’s personal stalwart resistance, his lyrical subject is fragile, fractured and disunited within: bo ty iesy ulamok tsiloty (‘for
68 Dziuba, ‘Rizbiar’, p. 13. 69 Letter to Ievhen Adelheim dated 25 August 1970, in S VI, 2: 66. 70 Joanna Klink, ‘You. An Introduction to Paul Celan’, The Iowa Review, 1 (2000), 1-18, pp. 1-2.
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thou art a fragment of wholeness’), as Stus’s speaker poignantly states in an act of self- address.71 ‘You’ serves as the principal poetic persona in Stus’s poetry, which helps to mark a difference between Stus the dissident and his poetic subject. Rifts, fissures, and cracks abound in the poetic world of Palimpsests, both within the self and beyond. The ‘multiplicity of internal tensions’ that Achilli notes with respect to Stus’s style reflects the fragmentation permeating Stus’s poetry on a fundamental psychological level. These fissures constitute not a deviation to be circumvented but the very essence of Stus’s poetry; it might be worth embracing them rather than smoothing them out in pursuit of a tidy system.72 Foregrounding these fissures, as this thesis deliberately seeks to do, allows us to revisit the question of authenticity in Stus’s works. Scholars largely draw a binary opposition in Stus’s writing: the authentic self against the inauthentic mass and/or the totalitarian regime. Yet I suggest that while the poet opposes the regime through his poetry, he does not necessarily do it in his poetry. Stus himself expresses this idea succinctly, drawing the image of protystoiannia na rivni bezmiru (‘resistance at the level of boundlessness’).73 As I argue, Stus’s search for authenticity does not predominantly consist in the struggle of a solid ‘I’ against the state, whereby resistance provides the subject with a stable stance (evident in the works of many shistdesiatnyky). Instead, Stus’s lyrical subject seeks authenticity not against or from, but for. He defies a binary structure and a dependence on the opposing force, overcoming in this way anticolonial discourse. The latter constitutes a ‘reactive response’, to use Pavlyshyn’s formulation, much like the Greek figure Echo, who mechanically repeats the utterance of the Other in an act of helpless echophraxia. Stus’s becoming self, instead, bears affinities with the poststructuralist understanding of the subject, which undoes the enclosure of a system. Second, conflating and equating Stus with his lyrical persona significantly impoverishes the experience of reading Stus’s poetry, turning it into an act of deciphering en route to an ‘ultimate’ interpretation that would conform to Stus’s life. As I will argue in this thesis, the notion of representation is highly problematic with respect to Stus’s poetry, which
71 See the poem ‘Kudy tobi prybytysia...’ (‘Where can you drift ashore...), DZ: 245. 72 Shevelov justly asserts in this regard: ‘Zhyttia i tvorchist Stusovi nadzvychaino shchilno odne z odnym poviazani [...] Ale ie mizh nymy istotna riznytsia. V zhytti Stus nikoly ne zdavavsia vorohovi і ne vyiavliav vahan. [...] Poeziia Stusa vidbyvaie ne tilky ti rishennia [...] a i ti vnutrishni diialohy [...] iaki stanovliat vnutrishniu sut dushevnoho i dukhovnoho zhyttia kozhnoi liudyny, ne tilky viaznia neliudskykh politychnykh system’ (‘Stus’s life and art are interwoven extremely tightly. However, there is a fundamental difference between them. In real life, Stus never surrendered to the enemy and never displayed doubt. [...] Stus’s poetry reflects not only those decisions [...] but also those inner dialogues [...] that constitute the essence of the psychological and spiritual life of every human being, not only those of a prisoner of inhuman political systems’). See Shevelov, ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 27. 73 See the poem ‘I dovho dostyhalo vlasne oko...’ (‘[Your] eye took long to grow...’), S III.
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destabilises mimesis and instead engages methexis (implication, co-participation).74 The making of the text is intextricably linked with the making of the self and, by extension, as we will see, with the making of the reader. By marrying philosophy and poetry and radically exploring subjectivity, Stus’s verse makes the position of the self universally inhabitable, inviting and even eliciting the participation of the reader. Furthermore, an important premise of this thesis is T. S. Eliot’s principle that ‘the difference between art and the event is always absolute’.75 A gap necessarily emerges between the experience and the text, and the intensity of the author’s experience does not guarantee the aesthetic value of the work. Not to look beyond Stus’s life would also mean seeing his writing as closed, as if the text does not exist after Stus and with us. The relationship between the reader and Stus’s text constitutes the focus of my final chapter, which foregrounds the powerful impact that Stus’s writing can have on the reader.
Palimpsests as a Palimpsest
Palimpsests covers most of the poetry that Stus wrote immediately before and in captivity between 1971 and 1979. Volume five of the twelve-volume edition of Stus’s works represents the ‘most complete’ corpus of the collection, and I use it as the central source of Palimpsests in my thesis. It contains two textual variants of the collection: the Magadan version, which Stus prepared in 1979 towards the end of his exile in the Magadan region, and the Kyiv version, which he compiled in Kyiv during the short interregnum before his second arrest in 1980. The title of Stus’s corpus eloquently encapsulates its central feature: a dynamic co-existence of several layers of language, memory, identity, and meaning.76 The two versions of Palimpsests overlap, but they are not identical. The Kyiv version combines most of the texts from the Magadan corpus with a large number of other poems, in particular some texts from Stus’s experimental collection Veselyi tsvyntar (Joyful Cemetery, 1971) written before the arrest. Furthermore, the Kyiv version contains Stus’s collection Chas
74 See Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Image: Mimesis and Methexis’, trans. by Adrienne Janus, Nancy and Visual Culture, ed. by Carrie Giunta and Adrienne Janus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), pp. 73-92. 75 Thomas S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (Methuen: London, 1920), pp. 42-53 (p. 50). 76 We can apply Joseph Hillis Miller’s characterisation of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, in which the juxtaposition of different levels and aspects of memory constitutes a pivotal concern, to Stus’s Palimpsests; it similarly ‘becomes a kind of hypertext before the fact or a palimpsest that consists of many layers and branching versions, none definitely superseded, each containing valuable and fascinating material that makes up part of the untotalizable “whole”.’ See Joseph Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 178.
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tvorchosti/Dichtenszeit (A Time of Creativity, 1972), the poems Stus wrote in provisional detention in Kyiv between January and September 1972, during the consideration of his case. Dichtenszeit may be regarded as an autonomous poetical corpus, which Stus wrote before he elaborated the concept of Palimpsests, yet it also tallies with the concerns and aesthetics of Stus’s subsequent poetry. An important element of Stus’s poetics is that, with the exception of Dichtenszeit, the vast majority of Stus’s poems written after 1972 are neither dated nor titled. The achronological arrangement of the poems complicates the interpretation of Stus’s writing in some ways. Yet at the same time this textological feature points to a significant conceptual attribute of Palimpsests: it revolves around a core set of themes and problems and investigates them in ever new ways. Despite the intricate co-existence of Stus’s collections, they reveal the consistency of his concerns, in particular the exploration of selfhood. The absence of dates has a dual implication. On the one hand, it invites us to be flexible in optical proximity. Natalia Pylypiuk speaks aptly of ‘the intricate plot of an interrupted imaginative action and not merely a group of isolated lyric moments’ in Stus’s poetry.77 On the other hand, it renders Stus’s poetry fragmented, and often self-contradictory, which I embrace in this thesis as a creative opportunity. The structure of Stus’s poetical corpus, with its different versions, elements, and variants (of poems and lines) enacts repetition-as-difference, which provides a central conceptual tenet for my study.
Outline
In Chapter One, I study the complex relationship between the subject and temporality in Stus’s writings. Stus critics have often perceived the poet’s works firmly within the confines of his historical circumstances. Yet I argue that time in Stus’s poetry largely does not correspond to that of his biography. Through studying the poet’s early essays and poems, I show, in particular, how for Stus historicity overcomes real clock time and embraces both existential and Platonic temporalities. I attend to the notions of sin and non-self-coincidence, the fundamental concepts in Stus’s poetry of the self. Furthermore, I read Stus’s essays against the background of the Soviet reviews of Stus’s early poetry collections to show both the Soviet historical context and the important ways in which Stus’s writing opposes it. In Chapter Two, I propose that Stus’s poetic self oscillates between two modalities, or sources, of authencity: recollection and repetition. Recollection implies the desire for
77 Pylypiuk, ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’, p. 182.
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sameness, whereby the self seeks to restore self-identity and wholeness. Repetition manifests itself in the constant making of the self, where ‘I’ signifies not an assumed point of departure, but rather an unachievable point of destination. To display these modalities, I scrutinise some of Stus’s most complex poems. In this part of my work, I examine Stus’s multiple neologisms of the self, his ‘self-constructions’, which form an essential part of his poetical ‘language of formation’ (Shevelov). I argue that instead of representing an identity, the poet’s neologistic language partakes in the making of the self. In Chapter Three, I explore the essential duplicity of the self that permeates Stus’s Palimpsests, where the poetic subject splits into the observer self and the observed self. I begin by showing how Stus’s prose serves as a laboratory of self-doubling, and how this later translates into his poetry. I then turn to the complex architecture of selfhood in Stus’s poetry and investigate the image of the ‘authentic other’ in Palimpsests. I pay particular attention to the power of lyric address in Stus’s poetry, in particular of self-address. I show that the address to the lyrical subject’s specular double (ty, ‘you’) allows the poet to explore the self in a phenomenological way, articulating the movement of the consciousness of consciousness. I argue not only that the study of lyric address proves to be crucial for remedying an urgent intellectual and aesthetic void in reading Stus’s works, but that Stus’s Palimpsests opens up new avenues for the study of lyric address as such. I also investigate Stus’s technique of ‘depersonalisation’, whereby the poetic self removes himself from his own experiences and observes them from a psychological distance, and thereby speaks to the human condition more generally. Finally, in my closing chapter, I study the dynamic relationship that Stus’s texts create with the reader. I show how Stus’s poetry, through decontextualisation, abstraction, deictics, in particular imperatives, and lyric address, includes the reader in the making of both the text and one’s own self. I argue that Stus’s texts largely surpass his historical conditions, deftly showcasing Derrida’s idea of iterability as the fundamental characteristic of written text. I show how, while in Stus’s poetry the lyrical subject dwells in the process of the making of the self, the poet’s writing invites the reader to re-enact its psychological trajectory and to embark on a journey of his/her own.
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CHAPTER 1. TIME FOR STUS: SUBJECT VS HISTORY
In his essay on the Ukrainian modernist poet Pavlo Tychyna (‘Fenomen doby’, ‘The Phenomenon of Our Era’, 1971, henceforth ‘The Phenomenon’), Stus defines the complex relationship between literature and political reality in the Ukrainian context:
Митця будь-якого іншого народу виносила на собі історична реальність. Специфіка українського митця в тому, що в кращому разі він змушений цю реальність нести на своїх плечах, а в гіршому, і значно частіше, – існувати всупереч реальності, в абсолютно забороненому для себе світі.
(The artist of any other nation has been maintained by their historical reality. The peculiarity of Ukrainian artists is that at best they have to carry this reality on their shoulders, and at worst, and much more often, to exist in spite of reality, in a world that has been absolutely forbidden to them.)78
For Stus, Tychyna was ‘a happy exception’ (p. 8) to this rule, as the peak of his artistic life coincided with a liberating, albeit short, period of Ukrainian history, the Ukrainian revolution of 1917. While the early Tychyna occupied an exceptional position, Stus himself did not. In his poem ‘Potoky’ (‘Streams’, 1968), he anticipates the argument of his essay and effectively includes his lyrical subject in it:
Як я жив, питаєш? Краєм, скраєчку, на жебрах, лиш прориваючись крізь грати заборон (світ білий – заборонений!)
(How I lived / you ask? At margins, at the very edge, like a beggar, / breaking through the grates of interdictions / (the world has been forbidden!)) (ZD: 71)
Khrushchev’s Thaw brought about a relative liberalisation and relaxation of censorship, enabling the emergence of the shistdesiatnyky, although the intellectuals of this generation were not even able to work freely for the majority of the decade they were named after. The coming to power of Leonid Brezhnev in 1964 brought with it a tightening of the political regime and increasing oppression in the Soviet Union. The year 1965 marked a new wave of arrests of intellectuals in Ukraine and across the Soviet Union. In 1972 an even more drastic
78 Vasyl Stus, Fenomen doby (Skhodzhennia na Holhofu slavy) (Kyiv: Klio, 2015), p. 8.
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round took place, characterised by draconian persecution of dissidents, mass arrests and lengthy sentences. While 1965 saw Stus speak out against the oppression of intellectuals and lose his official academic and poetical career, 1972 brought him imprisonment and exile, which lasted, with a very short interregnum, until his death. In the poem ‘Horde tilo moie netsenzurne!..’ (‘My proud censor-defying body!..’, likely written between 1968 and 1971), Stus’s poetic subject reflects on his bodily experience as part of material history:
Горде тіло моє нецензурне! Що мені з тобою робити? Куди податися? Як узаконити тебе? [...] Тіло моє! Четвертоване ерою. Заборонене, та моє, що мені з тобою робити?
(My proud censor-defying body! / What shall I do with you? / Where shall I go? / How shall I legitimate you? / [...] My body! / Quartered by this era. / Forbidden, but mine, / What shall I do with you?) (S I, 2: 154)
An allusion to Osip Mandelshtam’s ‘Dano mne telo...’ (‘I am given a body...’, 1909),79 this passage fashions the body as at once intimately one’s own and yet belonging to a social reality beyond the thinking self and detached from it. Soviet policies attempted to lay claim to the freedom, creative and political, of Stus and the rest of the shistdesiatnyky, advancing a tertium non datur proposition: either silence or expression tethered to a depiction of Soviet glory. The regime regarded culture as a crucial tool for its maintenance and did not tolerate a literature that would not be invested in it or that would be at odds with it. Like other poets of samvydav (the Ukrainian word for samizdat), Stus ‘defied the censor’ and chose to break through the imposed dichotomy. He did so with an audacious and innovative pursuit of the self detached from historic reality. The introduction to this thesis illustrated how scholars tend to foreground Stus’s
79 Cf. Mandelshtam’s lines: ‘Dano mne telo – chto mne delat s nim, / Takim edinym i takim moim?’ (‘I am given a body – what shall I do with it? / It is so unique and so much my own’). See Osip Mandelshtam, Sochineniia v 2 t. T. 1: Stikhotvoreniia. Perevody, ed. by S. Averintsev and P. Nerler (Moskva: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), p. 68.
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historical circumstances, which then determine a prevailing understanding of his poetic works. This chapter delves more deeply into the concept of history and, more to the point, time in Stus’s writing, which is not equal to that of his biography. While Stus’s poetry certainly reflects his time, it also witnesses its breakdown: ‘roztopyvsia chas’ (‘time has melted’) (DZ: 50). Instead, Stus offers a temporality of his own, which is grounded in subjectivity. Burianyk insightfully applies Hans Meyerhoff’s notion of ‘subjective time’ to the poet’s writing and argues that ‘time in Stus’s poetry is subjective, personal and psychological’, further emphasising that ‘Stus’ measurement of time reflects the subjectiveness of his inner time-clock’.80 Indeed, Stus turns inwards and resorts to what he calls samohermetyzatsiia, the process of ‘sealing oneself’.81 ‘Nemaie svitu. Ia isnuiu sam’ (‘There is no world. I exist on my own’), the poetic subject proclaims.82 Far from being fixed or ‘same’, to evoke Ricoeur’s notion, this ‘I’ dwells, instead, in a constant process of becoming. In this first chapter, I foreground the themes of temporality and subjectivity that underpin Stus’s concept of the self. To do so, I focus largely on two types of sources: contemporary Soviet reviews of Stus’s early poetry, and Stus’s own theoretical writing before his first arrest in 1972. Stus did not produce his work in a vacuum, of course – although the image of a vacuum represents a recurrent metaphor for Stus’s time – and an examination of these critical reviews helps to reveal the historical conditions and literary landscape within which Stus operated as a writer. Between the mid-1960s and 1972, the poet wrote a number of literary-critical essays: apart from the cited essay on Tychyna, he studied the poetry of the sixtier Vasyl Symonenko (‘Sered hromu i tyshi’, ‘Amidst Thunder and Silence’, 1966),83 modernist Volodymyr Svidzinskyi (‘Znykome roztsvitannia’, ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, 1970-71) (S IV: 346-61), and Stus’s contemporary, the poet of the Kyiv School of Poetry Viktor Kordun ([Pro poeziiu Viktora Korduna], [On Viktor Kordun’s Poetry], 1971) (S IV: 361-8). The latter two essays are especially relevant, as they best reflect Stus’s philosophical coordinates and the language of his ideas, with which the poet enters the Palimpsests period.
80 Burianyk, ‘Incarceration and Death’, pp. 199-204. 81 Stus’s samohermetyzatsiia brings to mind the relevant parallel of the Italian hermetic poetry: T. Wlassics and E. Livorni summarise, speaking of ermetismo, that ‘the only “form of rebellion” (Tedesco) available to the poet in totalitarian times is an “evasion into the self,” a solipsistic clausura, “an island of salvation” (Bo).’ See T. Wlassics and E. Livorni, ‘Hermeticism’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. by Roland Greene and others, 4th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 623. 82 See the poem ‘Shche trokhy krashche krai...’ (‘Still by the godly gates...’), in P: 286. 83 Vasyl Stus, ‘Sered hromu i tyshi’, Suchasnist, 1 (1995), 138-48.
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While Stus did not have the chance to finish the essays84 and while, admittedly, they are often rather cryptic, they provide the most comprehensive theoretical exposition of Stus’s central ideas, which resonate throughout the collection.85 Stus’s critical esssays should not impose an ultimate interpretation of his poetical works; however, they shed helpful light on them by offering unique insights into the poet’s sui generis thinking.86
1.1. Reviews: Temporality and Subjectivity
It was not easy to publish officially a collection of poetry in Soviet Ukraine in the 1960s and 1970s. In 1971, speaking of his contemporary Mykola Vorobiov (another poet of the Kyiv School), Stus noted: ‘Meni duzhe shkoda, shcho ia ne mozhu os uzhe piat rokiv vziaty do ruk zbirky Vorobiova i prochytaty’ (‘it is a great pity for me that for over five years I have not been able to take in my hands and read a collection by Vorobiov’).87 Vorobiov’s case was but one of many. Stus’s own situation was not much better. The poet submitted two collections for publication: Kruhovert (Vortex) in 1965, and Zymovi dereva (Winter Trees) in 1968 – they both were rejected. As I mentioned in the introduction, only two of Stus’s volumes were published during his lifetime, and these both outside of Ukraine: Winter Trees (1970, Brussels), ‘without knowledge or permission of the author’,88 and Svicha v svichadi (A Candle in a Mirror, 1977, New York), the first sizeable publication of poems from Palimpsests.
84 In a 1972 interrogation report Stus asserts: ‘Dodam, shcho obydvi statti bulo zabrano v stadii nezakinchenii, po suti, KDB perervalo moiu robotu nad nymy’ (‘I shall add that both articles were unfinished when they were confiscated; essentially, the KGB interrupted my work on them’). See ‘Protokol dodatkovoho dopytu obvynuvachenoho’ (8.07.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, T. 1 (pp. 1-15 [308-20]), p. 9 [314]. 85 While Stus’s reflections in his letters are extremely valuable and I will repeatedly refer to them throughout my work, they do not possess the same degree of cohesion, due to both their fragmentary genre and the obstacles related to censorship. 86 In his letter to the Ukrainian émigré poet Vira Vovk (dated 29 May 1970), Stus notes: ‘Des nedavno zakinchyv stattiu pro Viktora Korduna. Vlasne, vyishov niby komentar do avtora, hoch poterpaiu, shcho i samokomentar’ (‘I have recently finished my article on Viktor Kordun. It seems to be a commentary to the author, although I am afraid that it is also a self-commentary’). See S VI, 2: 65. The same arguably applies to many of Stus’s other essays. 87 ‘Vystup Vasylia Stusa’, p. 43. 88 In the short introductory note ‘Vid vydavnytstva’ (‘From the Publisher’), the editors of the volume explain that they publish the book ‘bez zghody, navit bez vidoma avtora [..] My oboviazani ne dopustyty do toho, shchob dukhova tvorchist nashykh poetiv bula nyshchena zhandarmamy’ (‘without the author’s permission or even his knowledge [...] We are obliged not to let the [KGB] gendarmes destroy the intellectual work of our poets’). Eventually, a copy of the book became available to Stus. Sverstiuk notes that Stus ‘chasto trymav u rukakh (a takozh davav znaiomym) rozkishno vydanu v Briusseli svoiu knyzhku Zymovi dereva’ (‘would often hold (and give to others) the beautiful edition of his book Winter Trees published in Brussels’). See ‘Vidnaidena improvizatsiia’, p. 41.
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Publisher reviews were crucial for publication. Both Vortex and Winter Trees were reviewed. Mykola Nahnybida prepared the appraisal of Vortex.89 While the reviewer notes in passing that Stus is ‘a talented person’ and that some of his texts are ‘good’, he lambasts Stus’s collection for the poet’s subjectivism and indifference to the Soviet project. Winter Trees had two reviews which were more positive than Nahnybida’s review of Vortex, despite Winter Trees’ much more tangible focus on the self. In his 1968 review, one of the shistdesiatnyky Ivan Drach praises Winter Trees for precisely what Nahnybida sharply criticises in Vortex, namely its attention to the self. He appreciates the density of Stus’s style – ‘hustobarvnist, hustronastroievist, bahatopoverkhovist, nenavmysna uskladnenist’ (‘thick colours, thick emotionality, multiple layers, unintentional complexity’) – and the ‘tuha ekspresiia’ (‘tight expressiveness’) of his writing, as well as the fact that some of the poet’s texts offer, in Drach’s view, ‘skrupuloznyi renthen naitonshykh dushevnykh porukhiv’ (‘a scrupulous X-ray image of the most subtle psychological shifts’).90 The other review of the collection, written by Ievhen Adelheim, while being favourable overall, finds the exploration of the subjective in the collection, at the expense of the historical, problematic.91 Both Nahnybida and Adelheim, therefore, foreground in their reviews the questions of temporality and subjectivity; they focus on the psychological foundation of Stus’s poetry and point to its complex relationship with time. Examining their appraisals allows us to see the dynamics of the reception of Stus’s works, as well as the thinking and language within which the poet operated and to which he responded. Nahnybida’s review epitomises Soviet expectations of art and criticises Stus’s failure to conform to them:
Перечитуєш, сторінку за сторінкою, і дивуєшся з того як молода людина, сучасник наших буремних, героїчних, а часами і драматичних подій, зуміла відмежуватися від них, заховатися від них у світ своїх дрібних переживань і невиразних прагнень. [...] Нова, найголовніша риса нашого суспільства – почуття колективізму, почуття спільності боротьби та інтересів, наче і невідомі автору. Таке складається враження після прочитання рукопису і мимоволі виникає запитання: коли писані ці поезії? Для кого вони писані?
89 Mykola Nahnybida, ‘Vnutrishnia retsenziia na zbirku “Kruhovert”’, in Zhyttia iak tvorchist, p. 173. 90 See Ivan Drach, ‘Retsenziia na rukopys knyzhky virshiv Vasylia Stusa “Zymovi dereva”’, in Ivan Drach, Publitsystyka: vybrani statti, interviu. T. 9, ed. by I. Riabchyi (Kharkiv: Folio, 2017), pp. 264-9. 91 Ievhen Adelheim, ‘Retsenziia na zbirku poezii Vasylia Stusa “Zymovi dereva”’, in Zhyttia iak tvorchist, pp. 231-3.
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(You are re-reading [the collection] page by page, and you are wondering how this young man, living through current turbulent, heroic, and sometimes dramatic events, managed to delineate himself from them, to remove himself from them into the world of his petty feelings and vague aspirations. [...] It is as if the author is not even aware of the new and most important trait of our society, the sense of collectivism, the sense of joint struggle and interests. That is the impression you get, having read the manuscript, and you cannot but ask yourself: when were these poems written? For whom were they written?) (p. 173)
Nahnybida’s two questions, ‘when were these poems written? [f]or whom were they written?’, encapsulate what is at stake in the review. First, for the critic, art must be grounded in the specific (Soviet) historical context, and poems must speak to and express the concerns of a specific time.92 Second, the question of audience is similarly of primary importance, as Nahnybida assumes a specific type of relationship between the writer and the reader. The reviewer expects the poet to express the concerns of the collective, to be its representative and mouthpiece, and galvanising force. For this reason, Nahnybida disapproves of Stus’s ‘misty’ style, which ostensibly thwarts communication with the audience, and ruins the necessary ‘transparency’. Adelheim’s review of Winter Trees provides a more subtle approach to Stus’s poetry. The reviewer does not speak directly about collectivism, although he does foreground the questions of the representation of history, of dialectical materialism, and of subjectivism. Stus’s allegedly excessive focus on the self similarly constitutes a central theme in Adelheim’s review:
Стус – поет драматичних почуттів, він живе в світі [...] неймовірно ускладнених переживань і, звертаючись до них, нічого не хоче ‘вигладжувати’ [...] Очевидно Стус і сам відчуває суб’єктивізм свого настрою і в якійсь мірі намагається його подолати; спроби ці покищо позитивно не завершуються, але наявність їх важлива, як поштовх до можливого виходу і ‘одужання’.
(Stus is a poet of dramatic feelings, he lives in the world of [...] unbelievably complicated emotional experiences. Turning to them, he does not want to ‘iron out’ anything [...] Evidently, Stus himself is aware of the subjectivism of his mood and, to some extent, he tries to overcome it;
92 In Winter Trees, the poetic subject, as if responding to the review, asks: ‘Iakyi tse chas? / Nevidomo – iakyi tse chas’ (‘What [kind of] time is this? / It is unknown – what [kind of] time this is’) before going on to satirise the Soviet routine (‘Iakyi tse chas?..’, ‘What [kind of] time is this?..’, 1965, ZD: 106). In Dichtenszeit, the poetic subject poses a similar question: ‘Iaka tse era? І iaka pora?’ (‘What era is it? And what time?’). See the poem ‘Pokhmuryi dosvitok chy pitma dnia...’ (‘A sombre dawn or the darkness of the day...’, DZ: 287).
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these attempts have not been successful so far, but their presence is important as a push to a possible way out and to ‘recovery’.) (p. 231)
For the reviewer, Stus’s complex exploration of the self reveals a malaise for which he needs to seek ‘recovery’. In fact, Adelheim repeatedly comes back to the rhetoric of disease. Elsewhere in the review, he asserts that Stus’s ‘grim mood starts to corrode the poet’, and he wishes Stus ‘the recovery of psychological harmony’.93 The metaphors of health project the reviewer’s sense of (socially sanctioned) authority and the desire to control both the psyche and the body of the poet (here we recall Stus’s ‘My proud censor-defying body...’). For Adelheim, Stus’s ‘pessimism’ and ‘despair’ stem from ‘duzhe abstraktna kontseptsiia liudyny, vyrvana z chasu i rozghlianuta v mezhakh toho nerukhomoho Absoliutu, do iakoho tak tiazhyt molodyi poet z ioho nedystsyplinovanoiu uiavoiu, romantychnym nadmirom, nevminniam myslyty dialektychno’ (‘a very abstract concept of the Human Being, torn out of time and regarded within that motionless Absolute to which the young poet gravitates so much with his undisciplined imagination, romantic excess, and the inability to think dialectically’, emphasis mine) (p. 232). By insisting on dialectical thinking, Adelheim applies the logic of Hegel’s dialectical method, entrenched in the Soviet worldview. For the critic, following Hegel, every contradiction must always lead to a synthesis, where the differences are mediated, and to ‘nevblanannyi istorychnyi postup’ (‘inexorable historical progress’) (p. 232). From this perspective the reviewer criticises Stus’s ‘undisciplined imagination’. Adelheim is keen to transpose the logic of Hegel’s mediation into the realm of the self, and to discipline it in order to find a solution to internal conflicts. In the same vein, he contends that
йому не щастить впоратися з діалектикою почуттів, простежити їх течію; він губиться в суперечностях змісту і форми, втрачає ‘контур’ [...] як правило, відсутній в низці довших віршів [...], здебільшого – розпливчастих, з неопанованим рухом суперечностей.
([Stus] does not succeed in managing the dialectics of feelings, in tracing their stream; he becomes lost in the contradictions of content and form, and loses the ‘contour’ [...] [which is] absent, as a rule, in a number of longer poems [...] that are mostly vague and where contradictions are not mastered.) (p. 233)
93 Compare Stus’s assertion in ‘Evanescent Blossoming’: ‘tvoryty – chutysia v klinichnii sytuatsii’ (‘to create [means] to find oneself in a clinical situation’) (S IV: 346).
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Here the paradigm of dialectical thinking becomes even more conspicuous, as Adelheim seeks to tame the flow of Stus’s poetry (in contrast to their fluidity, as epitomised by Stus’s metaphor of ‘streams’) by imposing the rhetoric of ‘managing feelings’ and ‘mastering contradictions’. The critic expects the poet to mediate these contradictions and to seek their resolution. As I argue in this work, Stus’s poetry does not offer solutions, as Soviet and indeed many contemporary Ukrainian scholars expect of him. Its raison d'être consists not as much in ‘tracing’ (prostezhyty) as of travelling the stream in pursuit of the self. Speaking of Stus’s ostensible pathological introspection and the ensuing ‘anti- historicism’ (antyistorysm), Adelheim posits:
у безмежно-великих масштабах, обраних у збірці, надто часто губиться [...] сама можливість поглянути на людину в рамках часу, історії, етапів суспільного поступу. Невипадково Стусу, на мій погляд, не даються вірші на історичні теми [...] Практично це історичні поезії без історії, позбавлені часової перспективи і суспільної конкретності.
(in the infinitely large scale chosen in the collection, what is very often lost is [...] the very possibility to look at the human being within the framework of time, history, the stages of social progress. It is no coincidence that Stus, in my opinion, fails at historically themed poems [...] They are essentially historical poems without history, bereft of temporal perspective and social concreteness.) (p. 231-2)
Both Adelheim and Nahnybida demand temporal concreteness, not only as a representation of specifically Soviet everydayness, but also as an image of the self fixed in a specific reality. Adelheim applies the logic of Marx’s ‘stages of social progress’ to the self, urging it to follow a clear and linear path of development, in tune with the development of the state.
1.2. Stus’s Essays: Towards Authenticity
In a 1970 journal entry, Stus expresses his desire to write a study of contemporary Ukrainian poetry:
Варто було б написати книгу про теперішню поезію. Так, поети безчасні або поети без сучасности. Показати комплекс утрачености – землі, життя, подоби людської. Сновиди вакууму. Сліпці-провидці. Утрата вертикального й горизонтального екзистенціального ряду. Виходи звідси – в божевілля, анархію, мізантропізм і т. ін.
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(It would be worth writing a book about contemporary poetry. Indeed, timeless poets [poety bezchasni] or poets without their time [bez suchasnosty]. To show the complex of loss, the loss of the earth, of life, of humanity [podoby liudskoi]. The night-walkers of vacuum. Blind prophets. The loss of vertical and horizontal existential order [riadu]. Outlets from here – into madness, anarchy, misanthropism, etc.) 94
As archive materials show, Stus did indeed start to write an essay with the title ‘Poety bez suchasnosti’ (‘Poets Without Their Time’).95 In a few extant draft fragments, he sets out to analyse the poetry of some of his contemporaries, among them Ivan Drach, Mykola Vinhranovskyi, and Viktor Kordun. In these fragments, Stus hints that this poetry manifests such attributes as abstractness, illogicality, and an opposition between the external world and the world of the self. Although Stus did not write a dedicated book on the subject, his intention to do so led to his essays on Pavlo Tychyna, and especially Volodymyr Svidzinskyi and Viktor Kordun. ‘The Phenomenon’, cited at the beginning of this chapter, represents Stus’s longest and most elaborate critical piece. It pays particular attention to Tychyna’s historical circumstances (hence, era in the title) and traces the development of Tychyna’s style from the early symbolist writing to his Socialist Realism of the 1930s to his death in 1967. In tune with the philosophical exploration in the poems themselves, Stus foregrounds the metaphysical aspects of Tychyna’s early writing and focuses on the idea of wholeness and the impersonal in the poet’s works. In describing the psychological tonality of Tychyna’s symbolist collection Soniashni klarnety (Clarinets of the Sun, or Sunny Clarinets, 1918), for instance, Stus advances the image of humanity not tied to the historical:
Це стан існування, як спалаху, існування, невимірного ні в часі, ні в просторі – адже це існування поза звичкою, каноном, необхідністю, законом, примусом. В такому стані людині нема діла ні до минулого, ні до майбутнього [...] Так, як у Рільке: ‘я водночас дитя, хлопчак, мужчина’ – у Тичини та сама єдність, стиснутість тривалості, найлаконічніший образ людського життя-радіння, тільки не в індивідуальному, вертикальному, а в усезагальному, індивідуальному через імперсональне, горизонтальному просторі.
(It is a state of existence as a flash, an existence that cannot be measured in time and space, because this is an existence beyond habit, canon, necessity, law, coercion. In such a state the human being is concerned about neither the past nor the future [...] Similarly to Rilke: ‘I am
94 Journal entry dated 30 November 1970. See ‘Shchodennykovi zapysy 1970-71’, 1202, p. 1, in Arkhiv Instytutu literatury NAN Ukrainy (Kyiv), F. 170. 95 IL Acrhive, ‘Poety bez suchasnosti’ (‘Bezchasni poety’), 1227, pp. 1-2.
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simultaneously a child, a boy, and a man’ – Tychyna has the same unity, condensed duration, the most laconic image of man’s life-happiness, although not in the individual, the vertical, but in the universal, the individual-through-the-impersonal horizontal space.)96
For Stus, in Tychyna’s early poetry, the lyrical ‘I’ does not yet experience alienation, existing ‘do pershoho iz [svitom] znaiomstva’ (‘before the first encounter with [the world]’) (p. 13). Instead, it enjoys unity with the world and an unseparated being within ‘nadsferna kosmichna muzyka’ (‘cosmic music above spheres’) (p. 14). Stus’s most concise formula of early Tychyna’s sensibility consists in ‘nulovyi riven samousvidomlennia’ (‘the zero level of self- awareness’) (p. 12). The poet notes that on the level of imagery such sensibility translates into an abstract world, where movement, sounds, colours, and a synaesthetic combination of ‘barvozvuk’ (‘colour-sound’) (p. 13) take over the concrete presence of the material world. Stus’s texts on Svidzinskyi and Kordun differ from ‘The Phenomenon’ in that they reveal a shift in Stus’s approach from the historical to the metaphysical, containing very few historical references.97 Both essays address the relationship between the individual and history, and both assert the value of individualism.98 While individualism does not constitute a goal in itself, it furnishes the only authentic response to a violent historical reality. The question of authenticity becomes crucial for Stus. Svidzinskyi, argues the poet, turns away from the world and history, and moves, instead, inwards. Authenticity is to be found in the realm not of the historical but of the existential:
Час ніби зупинився. Власне, струмування часу, хай там яке не бурхливе, поета майже не цікавить. Йому хочеться йти до джерел, до глибу, до суті, до першотвору, до сталої певності.
96 ‘Fenomen doby’, p. 11. 97 Stus’s preparatory materials for ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ show that the poet chose to take out more specific historical references in the final version of the text, not using, for example, the formulation ‘kryvavi trydtsiati’ (‘the bloody 1930s’). Compare Stus’s statement from one of the interrogation reports, where the poet clearly connects the situation of the 1960s to that of the Stalin purges: ‘dolia Svidzinskoho v 30-і roky bahato v chomu skhozha do doli tykh chy inshykh poetiv pislia 1963 roku – ioho maizhe ne drukuvaly, vin, vysokyi intelihent [...] ne mih znaity sobi zastosuvannia v chasy, koly ukrainska (ta i ne tilky ukrainska!) intelihentsiia musyla abo “perebudovuvatysia”, abo ity osvoiuvaty Bilomor-kanal [...] Pro tse, zvychaino, ia i pysav’ (‘Svidzinskyi’s fate in the 1930s in many respects resembles the fate of different poets after 1963 – he had practically no works published; an exquisite intellectual [...] he could not find his place at the time when the Ukrainian (and not only the Ukrainian!) intelligentsia had to either “remould itself” or go to construct [through forced labour, as a Gulag inmate] the Belomor-kanal [the White-Sea-Baltic Canal] [...] It is about this, of course, that I wrote’). See ‘Protokol dodatkovoho dopytu obvynuvachenoho’ (8.07.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, pp. 8-9 [313-14]. 98 In the essay on Kordun, Stus emphasises that ‘povedinka pidkreslenoho indyvidualizmu – iedyno pryrodnia povedinka’ (‘the behaviour of emphatic individualism is the only natural behaviour’) (S IV: 362), while in the piece on Svidzinskyi, the poet asserts that ‘iedynyi eliksyr proty hanhrenoznoi ery stalinskoho kultyzmu – samoviddanyi indyvidualizm’ (‘the only elixir against the gangrenous era of Stalinist cultism is self-sacrificing individualism’) (S IV: 348).
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(Time is as if stopped. In fact, the flowing of time, however turbulent, is of little interest to the poet. He strives to move towards the springs, the depths, the essence, the original [pershotvoru], towards stable certainty.) (emphasis mine) (S IV: 349)
In Svidzinskyi’s poetry Stus sees an extraordinary example of introspection, which runs against the distressing context of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s. Stus posits succinct formulae: ‘[z]mality, shchob ne pomylytysia u vlasnii suti’ (S IV: 348) (‘to become smaller in order not to make a mistake about one’s own essence’), and ‘samovymenshennia – iak samoutochnennia’ (‘self-lessening as pinpointing [precisioning] the self’) (S IV: 348). Incidentally, Stus’s neologism samoutochnennia connotes the notion of ‘tochnyi chelovek’ (‘exact man’ or ‘accurate man’, also ‘true man’) of the Ukrainian Baroque philosopher Hryhorii Skovoroda. The concept of the ‘true man’ forms part and parcel of the fundamental Platonic duality underpinning Skovoroda’s thinking. For the philosopher, everything has two versions, the true (the essential) and the false, where the latter represents but a mirror image of the former.99 The ‘true man’, writes Skovoroda, ‘is the heart in man. [...] [it is] the true creature, the existing truth, and the very essence [...] whereas without it we are a dead shadow.’100 The movement towards ‘the essence’ in Stus’s quote is akin to Skovoroda’s ‘the very essence’. In this Platonic model, the ‘flowing of time’ becomes secondary, providing only a material reflection of the ‘essential principle’. Stus postulates further:
Світ помінився в його визорі. Той, справжній, що гуркотів навколо із завзяттям небачених у світі революціонерів і заляканих революціонізованих, був для нього якоюсь ефемерією. Єдиною реальністю для поета був його внутрішній світ.
(The world was refracted in the way [Svidzinskyi] looked at it. That world, the real one, which rumbled around with the zeal of unheard-of revolutionaries and the frightened revolutionised, was ephemeral for him. The only reality for the poet was his inner world.) (S IV: 359)
99 Cf. the words of Druh (‘Friend’), the main character of Skovoroda’s ‘Narkiss’ (‘The Narcissus’): ‘Vsego ty teper po dvoe vidish: dvе vody, dve zemli. I vsia tvar teper u tebia na dve chasti razdelena. Ee kto tebe razdelil? Bog. Razdelil on tebe vse na dvoie, chtob ty ne smeshyval tmy so svetom, lzhy s pravdoiu’ (‘Now you see two [versions] of everything: two [versions] of water, two [versions] of the earth. All creation has now been divided into two parts for you. Who divided it for you? God. He has divided everything in two for you, so that you do not mix darkness with light, or a lie with the truth’). For the original text see Hryhorii Skovoroda, ‘Narkiss. Razlagol o tom: Uznai sebe’, in Hryhorii Skovoroda, Povne zibrannia tvoriv: u 2-kh tomakh. Tom pershyi (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1973), pp. 154-200 (p. 175). 100 ‘istinnyi chelovek est serdtse v cheloveke [...] est istoe sushchestvo, i sushchaia ista, i samaia essentsia [...] а bez nee mertvaia ten esmy’ (emphasis mine). See Skovoroda, ‘Narkiss’, p. 173.
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Stus opposes the external and the self, and unequivocally insists that it is only within the latter that authenticity (‘the essence’) can be found. The movement of time in the ‘real’ world is deceptive: ‘Tsia obludlyva vira v rukh iak panatseiu od smertelnoi neduhy, zvetsia prohresom. A prohres faktychno ie tilky nashym samopromynanniam, samospustoshenniam’ (‘This deceptive faith in movement as a cure-all for [our] terminal disease is called progress. But, in fact, the progress is only our missing ourselves, our emptying ourselves’) (S IV: 353). This passage might well contain Stus’s response to Adelheim’s insistence on the necessity to vyduzhaty, and to the notion of ‘inexorable historical progress’, whose logic does not apply to the existential realm. Opposing Adelheim’s Hegelian stance, Stus rather aligns with Kierkegaard, one of the principal critics of Hegel, who foregrounds the fundamental difference between the abstract world of logic and the live world of the self.101 For Kierkegaard, as for Stus, ‘subjectivity is truth’,102 and no mediation can resolve existential concerns. In the draft materials for the essay, Stus develops his criticism of historical progress advancing the self: ‘Vid omanlyvosti zhalnoho, iak monholska strila, prohresu vtekty do samoho sebe’ (‘To escape from the delusion of progress, as stinging as a Mongol arrow, into oneself’).103 In his piece on Kordun, Stus expresses the relationship between the self and time most poignantly:
На шаленому вітрі, що знеособлює все навколишнє, розпредмечує світ, залишається або втікати назад у себе, герметизуватися, або, сповненим нарікання на страшний гріх мати власне обличчя, прагнути вже й самому знеособитись, утекти од себе, спуститись на саме дно онтогенетичної штольні, ввести сьогодні в минуле й позаминуле, згорнути саму реальну тривалість часу, склавши її, як залізний метр, стопити час, як сплав металу, в якому годі й вирізнити складові першоелементи – де там минуле, теперішнє чи майбутнє?
(In the mad wind that depersonalises everything in its surroundings, that dematerialises the world, one can only either escape back into oneself, sealing oneself, or, full of complaint about the sin of having one’s own face, seek to become depersonalised as well, to escape from oneself, to descend to the very bottom of the ontogenetic adit, to introduce today into the past and the- time-before-the-past, to fold up the very real duration of time, folding it like an iron metre, to
101 Clare Carlisle, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming: Movements and Positions (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005), especially pp. 33-49. 102 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Crumbs, ed. and trans. by Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 103 ‘Pidhotovchi materialy do statti “Znykome roztsvitannia”’, in IL Archive, F. 170, N 1146, pp. 1-9 (p. 8).
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melt time, like a metal alloy, where one can hardly find the original elements – where is the past, the present, or the future?) (emphasis mine) (S IV: 366)
Stus’s choice to focus specifically on the poetry of Kordun, and his definition of the essay as samokomentar reveal important affinities between Stus and Kordun and the Kyiv School more broadly. While Stus’s poetry of the early 1960s entered in dialogue with the literature of the shistdesiatnyky with their focus on individualism and nationhood, it subsequently became increasingly concerned with the metaphysical (a tendency similarly reflected in Stus’s essays, as we have seen). Stus’s poetics differ greatly from the aesthetics of the School, which is based on the dominating use of free verse, economy of expression, and a prevailing hermeticism.104 Yet Stus shares the broad metaphysical concerns of this poetry, its abstractness and highly associative idiom with subtle metaphors, as well as the urge to write ‘tak, niby te, za shcho shche tilky treba bulo borotysia, a same: natsionalna і suspilna svoboda – vzhe nastaly’ (‘as if that which was not yet there and needed to be fought for, namely national and social freedom, had already come’).105 Stus speaks directly about overcoming such political circumstances, and about the broader aesthetic and ethical concerns of poetry in a 1971 talk on another ‘Kyiv poet’, Mykola Vorobiov.106 In his presentation, Stus unequivocally posits that ‘polityzatsiia poeta – tse rich nekonechna. Rich vdiachna, potribna, ale rich vymushena. Meni zdaietsia vazhlyvishym humanistychyi smysl poeta. Zdatnist poeta naliudniuvaty nas’ (‘the politisation of the poet is not indispensable. It is welcome and necessary, but forced. The humanistic sense of the poet seems to me to be more important. The poet’s ability to humanise us.’)107 Stus seeks to extricate poetry from the concerns of politics and to free it from the ‘turbulent, heroic, and sometimes dramatic events’ highlighted by Nahnybida. Poetry’s conscious engagement with political reality betrays an aberration of a kind from the normal functioning of art. Here Stus points up an important difference between the shistdesiatnyky and the Kyiv School, where the latter consciously cultivates the overcoming of the narrow confines of the
104 Mykola Riabchuk compares the Kyiv school of poetry to the Italian hermetic poetry during Mussolini’s rule. See Mykola Riabchuk, ‘“My pomrem ne v Paryzhi”. Peredmova’, in Ihor Rymaruk, ed., Visimdesiatnyky: Antolohiia novoi ukrainskoi poezii (Edmonton: Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 1990), p. xvi. Stus appreciated ‘absoliutna stylova tochnist’ (‘the absolute stylistic exactness’) of the Kyiv School that he opposed to the works of the shistdesiatnyky, which for him are characterised by stylistic eclecticism. See ‘Vystup Vasylia Stusa’, p. 42. 105 Viktor Kordun, ‘Kyivska shkola poezii – shcho tse take?’, Svitovyd, 1/2 (1997). 106 In his ‘Dvoie sliv chytachevi’ (‘Two Words Addressed to the Reader’) Stus also states that ‘z molodshykh suchasnykiv naibilshe tsinuiu V. Holoborodka’ (‘among my younger contemporaries, I value the most V. Holoborodko’), another ‘Kyiv’ poet (ZD: 10). 107 ‘Vystup Vasylia Stusa’, p. 42.
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historical situation. In clarifying what ‘the humanistic sense of the poet’ means for him, Stus posits:
Поети типу Воробйова – нуклеарні. Вони входять в особистість і подають її вільно, отаким відкритим голосом. Оскільки можливість промовляти поетові відкритим голосом обмежена, в такому разі поет (цілком природно) шукає того аспекту, визначеного якимись камерними масштабами. Але в цих камерних масштабах він існує відкрито. Він існує як людина. Він існує вільно. [...] І мені здається, що у цій абсолютній відкритості індивідуальности [...] одне із знаменних, і, може, одне з найвідрадніших явищ сьогочасної поезії.
(Such poets as Vorobiov are nuclear poets. They delve into individuality and convey it in a free way, with an open voice. Since the possibility to speak with such an open voice is limited for the poet, in this case the poet (quite naturally) searches for an aspect defined by an intimate scale. And on this intimate scale he exists openly. He exists as a human being. [...] And it seems to me that in this absolute openness of individuality [...] is one of the significant and, perhaps, one of the most positive phenomena of contemporary poetry.) 108
Stus is very perceptive here. Few contemporary literati shared such high appraisal of Vorobiov and other Kyiv poets.109 Sverstiuk confirms that through his talk Stus ‘rozshtovkhuie zbyti b “oboimy” imena poetiv, shcho ikh pryiniato nazyvaty reprezantantamy suchasnoi poezii [...] Tsia operatsia vyriznennia duzhe bolisna’ (‘shakes up the firmly established names of the poets commonly called the representatives of contemporary poetry [...] This operation of differentiation is very painful’).110 Stus effectively redefines the contemporary hierarchy and establishes a canon of his own, foregrounding the subjective and the metaphysical. The ‘intimate scale’ that Stus evokes in his presentation connotes the poet’s formula in his reflections on Svidzinskyi: ‘samovymenshennia – iak samoutochnennia’ (‘self-lessening as pinpointing the self’). The poet sees in this delineated territory of the self the primary venue for ‘open existence’. Stus also insightfully discerns the central tenets of this poetry, which Kordun confirms in his 1997 programmatic piece on the
108 Ibid., p. 43. 109 The poetry of the Kyiv School was indeed ‘without [its] time’, because, due to the historical circumstances, the work of the Kyiv poets was appreciated neither by their contemporaries on a broad scale, nor by subsequent literary generations that had aesthetic concerns of their own. George Grabowicz and Maria Rewakowicz note that the Kyiv poets ‘published most of their oeuvre in the 1980s and 1990s, having a limited impact on the literary process of the 1960s’. See ‘Poetry of Ukraine’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1479. For this reason, the Kyiv poets are often described as carrying out ‘a quiet revolution’ (Oleh Kotsiuba) and as being vytisnene pokolinnia, ‘an ejected generation’ (Ivan Andrusiak). 110 Sverstiuk, ‘Vidnaidena improvizatsiia’, p. 41.
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Kyiv School.111 The opposition between the polityzatsiia of the poet and the humanistic aspect also reflects Stus’s own pursuit of a resolution to this clash:
читаючи Воробйова, я відчуваю, що я не є поет. [...] Таке враження у мене виникає, скажімо, при читанні раннього Тичини, при читанні Свідзінського, при читанні Антонича, при читанні Вінграновського. Воробйов подає самі кристали поезії. 112
(when I read Vorobiov, I get the feeling that I am not a poet. [...] I get this impression in reading the works of early Tychyna, of Svidzinskyi, of Antonych, of Vinhranovskyi. Vorobiov offers the very crystals of poetry.) (p. 42)
As subsequent chapters will illustrate, Stus applies this standard in Palimpsests, where abstraction becomes an increasingly important element of his poetics. The ‘crystals of poetry’ signify for the poet not l’art pout l’art, but rather the humanistic aspect that concerns selfhood and the ethical. In the years preceding Palimpsests, then, the question that extensively occupies Stus’s thinking lies in the relationship between temporality and subjectivity. In contrast (and in opposition) to the Soviet reviews of his poetry, which focus on these questions, Stus regards historical time as secondary and discards the idea of ‘inexorable historical progress’. The poet reverses the Soviet principle that ‘being determines consciousness’ and places consciousness first. He turns inwards and advances the self, which for him provides the only way to approach authenticity.
1.3. Undoing Time: Empty Duration, Existential Present, and Cyclicity
Stus’s cycle ‘Kostomarov u Saratovi’ (‘Kostomarov in Saratov’, 1965-67) (ZD: 73-8), which Adelheim counts among ‘historical poems without history’, provides an eloquent example of how Stus problematises and even undoes the linear progression of time (and thereby progress
111 In his programmatic piece, Kordun defines the School in the following terms: ‘The Kyiv School of poetry can be discussed in several aspects: as a purely poetic phenomenon that maintained free creativity as its chief characteristic; as a group of young nonconformists who designated free will in all of its dimensions as their chosen path in life; as an experimental, psychological attempt at living in a different manner from other generations – to live as if your life were taking place in a free and independent country; as a brotherhood of creators of poetry, who held poetry itself as the main and extraordinary duty’. I borrow this translation from Mark Andryczyk, The Intellectual as Hero in 1990s Ukrainian Fiction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. 9. 112 Stus makes a similar point about the social engagement of poetry in his letter to Vira Vovk (16 October 1969), effectively heralding the ongoing changes in his own style and approach to poetry, which become most visible in Palimpsests: ‘Zanadto ploti. Zamalo dukhu. Dukh – tilky iak kryk ploti, a ne [...] sam u sobi’ (‘Too much flesh. Too little spirit. Spirit – only as a scream of flesh, but not [...] in itself’) (S VI, 2: 53).
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as well). He does so in three major ways, by juxtaposing three perceptions of time: (i) time as empty duration; (ii) time as the existential present; and (iii) time as cyclicity. Stus moves between these different perceptions of temporality with virtuoso ease. In one of his early essays, he explains the juxtaposition of different visions of temporality by the highly associative nature of the consciousness:
Широта і складність асоціацій, викликаних різноманітністю характеристик предметів реального світу, їх численними зв’язками поміж собою, специфікою образної пам'яті людини і т. д., можуть з’ясувати, яким чином ‘уживаються’ в художньому творі атрибути різних просторових і часових приналежностей.
(The breadth and complexity of associations, brought about by the variety of attributes of objects in the real world, their multiple interconnections, the specific nature of human image memory etc. might explain how attributes of different spatial and temporal frames can ‘co-exist’ in a literary work.)113
‘Kostomarov in Saratov’ consists of seven sections. Its title refers to Mykola Kostomarov (1817-1885), a prominent Ukrainian historian and thinker, who, along with Taras Shevchenko and Panteleimon Kulish, was a member of one of Ukraine’s first national political organisations, the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood. For his participation in the Brotherhood, Kostomarov was arrested and exiled to Saratov in Russia in 1848. Stus’s cycle has received historical readings. Commenting on the cycle in his review of
Winter Trees, Drach suggests that ‘[z]ahalna chornym shyta atmosfera tsarskoi Rosii, boliuchi rozdumy, intelektualna pokuta, ta vse zh vynoshena u borni vira v maibutnie svoho narodu – vse tse skhoplene sohodnishnim poetom niby z dushi odnoho z naitsikavishykh kyrylomefodiivtsiv, skhopleno tonko i vdalo’ (‘[t]he general atmosphere of tsarist Russia stitched in black, painful reflections and intellectual redemption, and yet [at the same time] the faith in the future of your people that was achieved in struggle – all this seems to have been captured by the present-day poet from the soul of one of the most fascinating members of the Cyril and Methodius Brotherhood, captured subtly and appositely’).114 Drach anchors Stus’s text in the historical context of ‘tsarist Russia’ and in the figure of Kostomarov. Vira
113 ‘Do problemy tvorchoi indyvidualnosti pysmennyka’ (‘On the Problem of Creative Individuality of the Writer’, the mid-1960s), in S IV: 209-29 (p. 214). 114 Drach, ‘Retsenziia na rukopys’, p. 266.
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Prosalova, similarly, draws parallels between ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’ and Kostomarov’s life, in particular showing Stus’s likely allusions to Kostomarov’s own poetry in his cycle.115 The first line of the poem suggests that Stus follows linear time: ‘za rokom rik roste tvoia tiurma’ (‘year after year your prison grows’) (ZD: 73). Yet the rest of the cycle undoes this impression. From the perspective of the cycle as a whole, even this opening line upsets the linearity of time: the repetition of years, words (rokom rik), and sounds turns even this seemingly specific temporal point of reference into a monotonous process, as if transposed beyond time. The epigraph to the poem already signals the blurring of historical planes. While Kostomarov constitutes the poem’s subject, for the epigraph Stus uses the words of Vasyl Mysyk (1907-1983), a Soviet Ukrainian poet and subsequently rehabilitated Gulag prisoner: ‘Ale shcho zh robyty zhyvii dushi u tsii derzhavi smerti?’ (‘But what can a living soul do in this state of death?’) Mysyk belongs neither to Stus’s own era nor to that of Kostomarov, serving as a mediatory link between them. Despite its claimed subject and subject matter, Stus opens the poem to the context beyond the tsarist Russia. The poet hardly grounds his cycle in any material conditions that would refer to Kostomarov’s era or his life. Pavlyshyn draws an elucidating comparison between Stus and Shevchenko in this respect: ‘V Shevchenka, khoch poetove “ia” znakhodylosia v tisnykh obiimakh solipsyzmu, svit-tiurma bodai perebuvaie v ploti i chasi’ (‘While Shevchenko’s poetic self found itself in the tight embrace of solipsism, [in his poetry] the world-prison at least exists in flesh and time’). By contrast, Stus, Pavlyshyn continues his argument, ‘stvori[uie] mit, adekvatnyi dlia ioho doby – doby ne amatorskoho, tsarskoho, a vzhe zavershenoho totalitaryzmu. [...] v Stusa nemaie ni istorii, ni navit natiaku na te, shcho vona kolys isnuvala’ (‘creat[es] a myth that would be suitable for his era – the era of not amateur, tsarist [totalitarianism], but of fully achieved totalitarianism [...] in Stus[’s poetry] there is no history or even a hint that it has ever existed.’)116 Stus’s cycle reflects as much Kostomarov’s vulnerable position in the Russian Empire as it does the circumstances of Stus himself and of other dissidents in the Soviet Union during the early years of the Brezhnev era. Yet the cycle transgresses both, offering the possibility of a reading that speaks to the human condition generally. Achilli rightly suggests that ‘[t]he language and theme of these verses can be read and understood even beyond the painful historical reference to [Stus’s own time]. [...] Their profound meaning transcends their possible contingent inspiration to reach an absolute existential dimension in
115 Vira Prosalova, ‘Mykola Kostomarov u poetychnii refleksii Vasylia Stusa’, Aktualni problemy ukrainskoi literatury ta folkloru, 23 (2015), 146-57 (p. 152). 116 Pavlyshyn, ‘Kvadratura kruha’, p. 45.
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full harmony with the disorientation of the central subject in the western twentieth-century tradition.’117 Stus’s cycle not only disrupts its grounding in the historical situation by augmenting its subject matter to the scale of the human condition, but also comments expressly on the theme of time. In section II, Stus’s speaker states: ‘Chas opada. Za chas ne zachepytys. / Rukamy ne vchepytys, mov za drit’ (‘Time is falling. You cannot cling to time. / You cannot hold on to it with your hands as if to wire’) (ZD: 74). Chas might mean here both an ‘era’ (Kostomarov’s time or Stus’s time) and temporality as such. Stus’s lines prefigure his perception of time, expressed in his essays, as ephemeral, fluid, and incapable of providing a firm basis for the self:
І сто, і двісті, і більше років наш інтелігент тільки те й робив, що творив усе спочатку. То була сама тільки ілюзія творення. Хто доробляв свого віку, бачив провалля зразу ж позаду себе, а той, що тільки-но приступав до роботи, бачив ще провалля під ногами попереду. Наша історія – це все і завжди спочатку, якась постійна гойданина на одному й тому ж місці, мертва хвиля еволюції.
(A hundred years ago just as two hundred years ago and more, [Ukrainian] intellectuals were nothing but making everything from the beginning. It was but an illusion of making. Those who were getting to the end of their lives could see an abyss right behind them, and those who were only starting their work could see the abyss ahead under their feet. Our history [consists in] always making everything all over again, of some kind of a permanent undulation on the same spot, a dead wave of evolution.)118
Here Stus regards timelessness in the specific context of Ukrainian history. Similarly to the essay, Stus uses the image of provallia in the cycle: ‘Svit – tilky svyst myhtiuchyi. І provallia – / nemov bezdonne’ (‘The world is but a winking whistle. And the abyss / is as if bottomless’, emphasis mine) (ZD: 74). In section IV, the poet further employs the images of obvaly lit (‘collapses of years’) and pamiati provaly (‘lapses of memory’), again conjuring up the idea of falling, a common thread running through the whole cycle. Stus compares time to space and then dismantles this architecture of time. Similarly to the repetition of ‘year after year’, the speaker further utters: ‘Pradavni roky, misiatsi і chysla / perebyraiut u zhyvii truni’ (‘Ancient years, months and dates / are shuffled in the live coffin’) (ZD: 74). While the poet evokes specific temporal units (‘years, months and dates’) they signify time’s empty duration rather than propelling the forward movement of time; one can sort them like objects.
117 Achilli, La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus, p. 143. 118 ‘Fenomen doby’, p. 6.
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Stus repeatedly comes back to the notion of the ‘dead wave of time’, which he evokes in the essay. Melted and non-solid time recurs especially in Joyful Cemetery, written shortly before Stus’s arrest. In Dichtenszeit, the speaker refers, similarly, to this image: ‘roztopyvsia chas, / ioho zmertvila khvylia nas hoidaie’ (‘time has melted, / its deadly wave swings us’, in ‘Iakymy napadamy rvus do vas...’, ‘How desperately I rush towards you...’) (DZ: 50).119 Pavlyshyn notes that, unlike Shevchenko’s narrative poetry, ‘[u] Stusovomu sviti rozpovidei nemaie. [...] Iakshcho nemaie rozpovidei, to nemaie i chasu, iak linii; nemaie poiasnen, nemaie prychyn. Ie prosto synkhronnyi, abstraktnyi svit’ (‘[t]here are no stories in Stus’s [poetic] world. [...] If there are no stories then there is no time [understood] as a line; no explanations, no causal effects. There is but a synchronic abstract world.’)120 The idea of the ‘dead wave of time’ goes beyond the specifically Ukrainian context. Mircea Eliade perceives it as part of the modern condition, where man experiences the ‘terror of history’.121 The scholar postulates: ‘there is always the struggle against Time, the hope to be freed from the weight of “dead Time”, of the Time that crushes and kills’ (emphasis mine).122 Eliade stresses the impossibility for modern man to ‘tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history – from collective deportations and massacres to atomic bombings – if beyond them he can glimpse no sign, no transhistorical meaning’ (p. 151).123 The absurdity of violence calls into question the structure of history and shatters the idea and ideal of progress emphatically heralded by the thinkers of the Enlightenment.124 The progression of history becomes a burden rather than a liberation, a problem to which Stus is extremely sensitive. In his essay on Svidzinskyi, he similarly emphasises that, as a person ‘of the mid-20th century’, he is acutely aware of ‘fakty istorii [...] koly dovedena do svoho lohichnoho kintsia ta chy insha humanistychna teza dokhodyt svoiei protylezhnosti, obertaiuchys na bezdushnu, liudynovbyvchu, katastrofichnu dlia svitu sylu’ (‘the facts of history [...] when various humanistic theses, which had been taken to their logical end, degenerated into their opposites,
119 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘te, shcho bulo 1968 roku novoi ery / viddzerkaliuie, niby v mertvii vodi, / podii 1968 roku pered Khrystom’ (‘what was before 1968 AD / mirrors, as if in dead water, / the events of 1968 BC’), in ‘Mumiia’ (‘The Mummy’, S I, 1: 160). In Dichtenszeit, the speaker further posits: ‘Sychyt pishchanym nasheptom hodynnyk, / rozvaliuiutsia khramy, shchoino zvedeni, / i holos boliu vilno roztikaietsia / po ryti chasu, shcho splyvaie vspak’ (‘The clock hisses with a sandy whisper, / the temples, which have just been erected, collapse, / and the voice of pain flows freely / along the scale of time backwards’), in ‘Iak lev, shcho prychaivsia v hashchakh prysmerku’ (‘As if a lion hiding in the bushes of the nightfall...’) (P: 103). 120 Pavlyshyn, ‘Kvadratura kruha’, p. 43. 121 Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959), see Chapter Four ‘The Terror of History’. See also Mircea Eliade, Myth and Reality, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). 122 Eliade, Myth and Reality, p. 193. 123 Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 151. 124 See Margaret Meek Lange, ‘Progress’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 17 February 2011,
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turning into a soulless, murderous power that is catastrophic for the world’) (S IV: 352). Such ‘facts of history’ are indeed devoid of ‘transhistorical meaning’, to use Eliade’s notion. Highlighting this meaninglessness, Stus’s speaker repeatedly expresses the impossibility of comprehension: ‘Shchos treba zrozumity – ne zbahnu. / Shcho same – ale treba zrozumity’ (‘There is something to comprehend – I cannot understand what. / What it is exactly – but it must be comprehended’) (DZ: 316). History loses its sense, shifting the responsibility of filling it to the individual self. Stus juxtaposes the empty duration of time with the existential present. Because historical time becomes empty, the principal movement happens within the self. In part, the poet aligns with the existentialist model of temporality in its Heideggerian expression: ‘Dasein attempts to show that this being is not “temporal” because it “stands in history” but, on the contrary, that it exists historically and can exist only because it is temporal in the ground of its Being.’125 History, therefore, does not precede the subject. Instead, the breaking of ontological wholeness and the subject’s coming into existence render the very unfolding of history possible. Existential temporality, Steven Crowell helpfully explains, ‘does not so much take place in time [at a particular moment in history] as provides the condition for linear time’ (emphasis in the original).126 In his Marburg 1924 lecture The Concept of Time, a major precursor of Being and Time, Heidegger expresses this understanding even more concisely: ‘What is time? became the question: Who is time? More closely: are we ourselves time? Or closer still: am I my time?’127 Time, therefore, is firmly attached to the self. The opening line ‘year after year’ in the cycle is followed by the sense of existential anticipation:
Живеш – і жди. Народжуйся – і жди. Жди – перед сконом. Жди – у домовині. Не назирай – літа збігають згінні без цятки неба й кухлика води.
(You live – so wait. You are born – so wait. / Wait – before the end, Wait – in the coffin. / Don’t bother watching – the fleeting years are passing by / without a speck of the sky or a glass of water.) (ZD: 73)
125 Being and Time, p. 376. 126 Steven Crowell, ‘Existentialism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 23 August 2004,
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Prosalova relates this state of anticipation to the anxious immobility of the prisoner. However, the notion of anticipation reaches beyond prison experience in the narrow sense. Anticipation reveals the irresolvable existential tension between the present and the future. In the existential mode the present calls itself into question because of its awareness and anxious anticipation of the future. The dashes in the passage enact anticipation, deferring the meaning and interrupting the line. If time were purely empty or if it were merely synonymous with motionless eternity, Stus would not evoke the notion of anticipation, which is primarily existential in its nature. While Prosalova rightly points out the historical layer of Stus’s cycle, the poet juxtaposes it with existential concerns. Representing ‘the possibility of authentic existence’, anticipation, Heidegger contends, ‘does not evade the fact that death is not to be outstripped; instead anticipation frees itself for accepting this’.128 The tension of anticipation belongs to the existential present that I mentioned earlier. Stus’s later work highlights the connection between anticipation and the human condition, foregrounding samovyzhydannia (‘self-awaiting’) (DZ: 141). Stus’s cycle further undoes linear clock-time in another way: the poet juxtaposes empty and existential time with cyclical time. The very organisation of this text as a cycle creates a common arch of the recurrent themes that holds its parts together in a cyclic fashion. Cyclicity dominates section VII, the final section of ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’. It starts with the image of the circling of a raven (‘Nezghrabno voron kruzhelia...’, ‘The raven is flying clumsily in circles...’), which further ripples to trees and to the earth:
Галактик зірна круговерть спіраллю простаного болю значить одвічну людську долю, снігами виповнену вщерть.
(Like the spiral of straightened pain / the stellar vortex of galaxies / marks the eternal human fate / filled with snow to the brim.) (ZD: 78)
In this passage and the section as a whole, Stus uses numerous circular images connoting cyclicity, in particular kruhovert (‘vortex’), spiral (‘spiral’), and kruzheliannia (‘spinning’ or ‘circling’), to which the poet refers four times. Furthermore, this closing part of the cycle, just like its section I, is based on ring composition, following the abba rhyme scheme and mostly consisting of envelope stanzas. Such poetic pattern ‘has the effect of framing the enclosed
128 Being and Time, pp. 307-8.
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material, giving it unity and closure: the reader recognises the return to the original pattern after movement away in the interim.’129 An envelope structure, therefore, enacts cyclical movement. The poet refers to the ‘eternal human fate’ and subsequently states: ‘Same kruzhliannia vikove!’ (‘There is but eternal spinning!’) (ZD: 78), thus connecting cyclicity and eternity. It is with this in mind, perhaps, that Adelheim criticises Stus’s ‘very abstract concept of the Human Being, torn out of time and considered within the motionless Absolute’. Unlike Adelheim, Shum, discussing ‘Kostomarov in Saratovi’, hails what she calls ponadchasovist (‘timelessness’, or. literally, ‘above-timeness’) of Stus’s poetry and compares it to medieval poetry.130 Stus develops themes and images of ‘The raven is flying...’ in his poem ‘Otsei svitanok...’ (‘This daybreak...’), which provides an important companion text to the final section of ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’:
(десь гавкав пес і видалося, наче сувій століть помалу став згортатись і на мезолітичному виткові так довго полотна не попускав) [...] небесна твердь мовчала, як отерпла, лиш чорний-чорний ворон пролітав – окреслював мезолітичні кола, мов діри всесвіту.
((somewhere a dog was barking and it seemed as if / the parchment of centuries started to roll back / and at the Mesolithic coil / it would not let the canvas roll further) [...] / the heaven firmament was silent as if [it were] numb, / and only a black-black raven was flying by – / [it] was outlining Mesolithic circles, / like the holes of the universe) (DZ: 46)
The images of the raven, circles and the universe connote ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’ and at the same time confirm that Stus’s reflections on time surpass the specific experience of Kostomarov himself – ‘This daybreak...’ has no historical subject and instead concerns Stus’s own poetic alter ego. The differences between the two texts are meaningful. The change from the envelope rhyme of ‘Nezghrabno voron kruzhelia...’ to the blank verse of ‘This daybreak...’ accompanies the loss of cyclicity. In the latter, the raven’s circles transpire to be ‘the holes of the universe’, thus puncturing eternity rather than maintaining it. Another
129 S. F. Fogle and T.V.F. Brogan, ‘Envelope’, in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 436. 130 Shum, ‘Poeziia Vasylia Stusa’, pp. 3-4.
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circular image, the rolling of the parchment of time, similarly undoes the possibility of return, staging reversal instead. Stus’s lines prefigure his image in the essay on Kordun: ‘to fold up the very real duration of time, folding it like an iron metre’. In ‘This daybreak...’, Stus seamlessly moves from the present – this daybreak and the physical sound of the dog – to the prehistoric time of the Mesolithic. The now of the lyrical subject does not come after the Mesolithic; because time is flattened, these two temporal planes co-exist simultaneously. The poet collapses the structure of time, shifting in a flash between different timeframes and undoing linear time.
1.4. Subjectivity as Non-Coincidence of Self
Stus’s metaphor of ‘a fragment of wholeness’ aptly captures the temporal tension permeating his work: on the one hand, his poetic subject comes to grips with at once existential and phenomenological fragmentation of the self severed from a kind of prelapsarian wholeness, and, on the other hand, he seeks to retrieve this wholeness. This temporal tension engenders the non-coincidence of the self, samopromynannia, the central concern of Stus’s poetry. In his essays on Tychyna and Svidzinskyi, Stus valorises the ideal of wholeness. The ‘zero level of self-consciousness’ that Stus evokes in ‘The Phenomenon’ is associated with ‘panteistychnyi riven samovyznachennia’ (the ‘pantheistic level of self-determination’) (p. 13). In ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, Stus refers to Svidzinskyi’s ‘tsilne pohanske svitobachennia’ (‘whole pagan worldview’) (S IV: 350). In developing the theme of Svidzinskyi’s paganism, the poet gives the following description of such a pagan world:
Цей древній і малорухливий світ вивищується над нашими емоціями його прийнятності: в цьому світі життя врівноважене смертю, а чистий план цієї рівноваги – сонна зрезигнованість (‘сон і тлінь’) – позаякісна, позаатрибутивна, позасутнісна, невиявна, як вічність. Вона могутня своєю німотою, незадуманістю, самонаповненістю і невиявленням.
(This ancient and stationary world that towers over our emotions with respect to its acceptability: in this world life is counterbalanced by death, and the pure plane of this equilibrium – dreamy resignation (‘dream and dust’) – beyond qualities, beyond attributes, beyond essence, non- manifested, like eternity. This equilibrium is powerful in its muteness, non-thinking, being-full- with-oneself, and non-manifestation.) (S IV: 356)
Stus sets the ideal of wholeness as the undisturbed unity of being, connoting Eastern philosophy (broadly defined) with its undoing of the subject and dissolution within the
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universal being. He speaks of ‘non-thinking’131 (akin to the ‘zero level of consciousness’) and thus asserts the state of the self before the emergence of consciousness (what he calls ‘doliudskyi svit’, ‘the before-human world’). Affinities with Eastern philosophy are especially evident in the idea of non-manifestation, exemplified by the expression of this recurrent idea in Tao Te Ching: ‘Ever desireless, one can see the mystery. / Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.’132 Stus comes back to the question of manifestation elsewhere in the essay, although this time he approaches it in a different way, suggesting that Svidzinskyi ‘dosiah povnoho zbihu sebe-sushchoho i sebe-vyiavliuvanoho’ (‘achieved the full coincidence of the essential self and the manifested self’) (S IV: 359). Prima facie, then, Svidzinskyi is successful in maintaining the coincidence postulated by Stus. Yet the fact that these two selves already exist betrays the irreversible fissure within the subject. The manifested self upsets the state of nevyiavlennia or ‘non-manifestation’ imagined by Stus.133 A central theme of ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, which underlies this fragmentation, is the cult of reason that Stus characterises as ‘disharmonic, with the hypertrophy of intellect’ (S IV: 353). For the poet, human consciousness, this primary sign of existence, precludes the harmonious order of the kind offered by Svidzinskyi’s poetry:
Складність, ніби шашіль, точить нашу душу. Вона спустошує нас. З нею ми втрачаємо цільність індивідуальності, наша духовна суть ніби розбивається на дрібні скалки взаємозалежних ‘я’.
(Complexity, like a woodworm, corrodes our soul. It renders us empty. With it, we lose the wholeness of individuality, and our spiritual essence becomes as if broken into small splinters of interdependent ‘I’s.) (S IV: 349)
Stus refers to the complexity of consciousness, which cannot be undone, since anything that is more than one is complex, and our self-reflexive consciousness cannot sustain unity. The Stus’s image of ‘strazhdennyi Nartsys’ (‘suffering Narcissus’) (S IV: 351) aptly captures this self-doubling. We can find an explication of this complexity in Rilke’s letters, which Stus may have had in mind: ‘the animal is in the world; we stand before it by virtue of what
131 Stus defines the poet’s sensibility rather accurately here. In a passage that Stus quotes in his essay, Svidzinskyi’s lyrical subject utters: ‘i tak zhuvy, mov prydolynnyi tsvit – bez rozmyslu, bez dum і nespokoiu’ (‘that is how I live, like a flower by the valley, with no reflection, thoughts or unrest’) (S IV: 357). 132 See Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, transl. by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 3rd edn (New Work: Vintage Books, 2011), Chapter One. 133 In Tychyna’s poetry, Stus posits similarly, ‘spryimannia-vyiavy ... maizhe totozhni’ (‘perceptions- manifestations... are almost identical’, emphasis mine). ‘Almost’, of course, means that no identity is possible any longer.
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peculiar turn and intensification which [sic] our consciousness has taken’ (emphasis in the original).134 In glossing this passage Heidegger contends that ‘[t]he higher its consciousness, the more the conscious being is excluded from the world’.135 Stus is acutely aware of both alienation from the world and alienation from oneself engendered by consciousness.136 His poetry offers a succint formula for this: ‘Bo, vidhorodyvshys, / my rozghorodzhuiemosia naviky’ (‘For, having fenced ourselves off, / we partition ourselves off forever’) (DZ: 86). In ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, Stus explicitly refers to alienation:
В цьому лагідному овиді Свідзінського світ і людина почуваються єдиночинними. Людина в світі поета не має жодних тобі комплексів неповноцінності, жодних відчужень – все це існує так, як існувало до Адама і Єви, до їхнього первородного гріха.
(In Svidzinskyi’s kind vision, the world and humanity feel equal. The human being in the poet’s world has no inferiority complex, no alienation – everything exists the way it did before Adam and Eve, before their original sin.) (S IV: 355)
Alienation for the poet is bound up with sin, which I will consider in more detail shortly. In the passage above, Stus seamlessly alludes to Ortega y Gasset’s distinction between ‘ancient realism’ and ‘subjective idealism’ developed by the thinker in his lectures ‘What is Philosophy?’ For Ortega, the overcoming of the latter constitutes ‘the theme of our times’. The Spanish thinker postulates:
The idealist self has become a tumor; we must operate on it. [...] For the Greek, the self was a mere detail in the Cosmos. Hence Plato almost never uses the word ‘ego’ [...] And where does this absolute Adam, which is thought, go when he sees himself thrown out of the Cosmos? He has nowhere to put himself, he must come to grips with himself, must thrust himself within himself. 137
In the idealist world, the ego is not only there; it also becomes completely absorbed by itself. It loses organic unity with the world and seeks to be a world of its own. The self, argues Ortega, suffers from the burden of subjectivity. The opposition between ‘I’ as part of the
134 See Rilke’s letter dated 25 February 1926 explicating his eighth elegy to a Russian reader, cited in Martin Heidegger, ‘What Are Poets For?’, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. and intr. by Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001), p. 105. 135 Ibid., p. 106. 136 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘Ty – shpara / zemnoho stohonu’ (‘You are a crevice in the groaning of the Earth’) from ‘Streams’ (ZD: 65). 137 Jose Ortega y Gasset, What is Philosophy?, trans. by Mildred Adams (New York: The Norton Library, 1964), pp. 178-9. In the essay on Kordun, Stus expressly refers to Ortega’s concept of ‘biological vitality’. While in ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ Stus does not mention the Spanish philosopher directly, the essay contains several allusions to his works, in particular his 1928-29 course of lectures ‘What is Philosophy?’ and, likely, his early essay ‘Adam in Paradise’ (1910).
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cosmos, and Adam expelled from paradise is a familiar one: Stus uses similar images to stage a conflict between the organic (pagan or pantheistic) wholeness and the alienation of the self. While Stus enters into a dialogue with Ortega, he formulates ‘the theme of our times’ differently. Admitting the impossibility of return to ancient naivety, Ortega nonetheless seeks to reunite the self with the world. For Stus, however, such unity is no longer possible.138 The poet rejoices in the restored (or even intact) wholeness that Svidzinskyi seeks to achieve in his poetry, yet the theme of his times he sees as a scrutiny of the self in his project of pursuing authenticity in the face of the mass society and the totalitarian regime. Stus conjures up the prelapsarian world that existed before ‘pervorodnyi hrikh’ (‘the original sin’). The poet repeatedly evokes sin in his writing. In his piece on Svidzinskyi alone he refers to sin eight times. We encounter the images and sense of guilt and sin in Stus’s works as early as Winter Trees. In ‘Streams’, the poet employs the refrain ‘Velykyi hrikh na sertsi ia noshu’ (‘I carry a great sin in my heart’)139 and develops the theme of sinfulness:
Таж від народження берем правічний гріх собі на душу [...] Всі прогріхи минулих душ, напевне, ще від неоліту ввійшли у серце, оповите гріховністю. 140
(Since the time of [our] birth we take the original sin / into our souls [...] All the misdeeds of the past souls, / perhaps since as early as the Neolithic, / have entered the heart [, which is] enwreathed / in sinfulness.) (ZD: 71)
Sin is at once universal (‘since as early as the Neolithic’) and intimately personal (‘[s]ince the time of [our] birth’). In both cases, it is fundamentally bound up with time; it emerges after
138 The poet also expresses this alienation poetically: ‘Ia znav, shcho svit khovaietsia od mene, / shcho v kozhnii rechi prychailas rich [...] / bo vtracheno doviru isnuvannia / i pryiazn – mizh liudynoiu і svitom’ (‘I knew that the world was hiding from me, / that in every thing a thing was waiting [...] / for the trust of existence and sympathy / have been lost – between humanity and the world’) (‘I knew that the world was hiding...’) (DZ: 74). 139 This line might allude to Svidzinskyi’s poem ‘Koly ty bula zo mnoiu, lado moie...’ (‘When you were with me, my dear...’, 1932), where the poet uses a similar refrain: ‘Stalo tiazhko nesty meni chas’ (‘It has become hard for me to carry time’). If Stus had this line in mind, the substitution of time with sin further shows the connection between these two notions for Stus. 140 In the coda of the poem, Stus specifically draws the image of Eden: ‘I khai nova doba hriade – / v nii mezozoiu temni dushi... / Stari hrikhy epokha dushyt / і liudstvo dushytsia, v Edem / daremne prahnuchy...’ (‘And even though the new era is coming, / the dark souls of the Mesozoic will be there... / The epoch strangles the old sins / and humanity suffocates, in vain / striving to reach the Eden’) (ZD: 72). Perhaps the poet’s most poignant expression of fundamental sinfulness is to be found in these lines: ‘ty, perevantazhenyi hrikhom, / niby nizh, v svoikh zastriahlyi rebrakh’ (‘overburdened with sin, / you are like a knife stuck between your own ribs’) (ZD: 63). Cf. also Stus’s undated early poem ‘To zlochyn – pomyraty rano” (‘To die early is a crime...’), where references to sinfulness form the organising principle of the text.
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(vid) a certain point. While on the surface sin appears to belong to religious discourse, it primarily stems from Stus’s existential sensibility. Indeed, the notions of sin or guilt constitute part of the vocabulary of Kierkegaard (sin), Jaspers (guilt), Heidegger (guilt), and Sartre (guilt and sin). For Heidegger, for instance, guilt signifies the underlying existential trait of humanity, what he calls ‘primordial Being-guilty [Schuldigsein]’.141 Stus himself notes in ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ that ‘bodai deiaki z nas chuiut za soboiu kuchuhury ekzystentsialnoho strakhu, provyny, hrikha’ (‘at least some of us are aware of the mounts of existential fear, guilt, and sin’) (S IV: 354). Sin forms an inescapable part of the human condition.142 It is not a sin but rather the sin that the very coming into existence of the self and the related emergence of temporality bring about. Stus’s speaker states that ‘khtos vyhadav lysh chas – zadlia pokut’ (‘someone simply invented time – for repentance’) (‘O shcho to – iednist dush?..’, ‘The unity of souls – what is it?) (ZD: 18), clearly connecting sinfulness and time.143 In analysing Svidzinskyi’s poetry, Stus thus outlines his complex vision of the self as oscillating between the lost primordial wholeness, and existence, which brings about time, consciousness and, most crucially, non-coincidence of the self. To be sure, Stus’s exposition of the self is far from straightforward. As we have seen, under the surface of ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, various subtle allusions to numerous philosophical and poetical traditions work together to contribute to Stus’s own multi-layered image of the self. This stylistic heterogeneity and striking range of intertextual links enact the disunity of the self on the level of form.
141 Being and Time, p. 332. These are not moral, but rather ontological terms. The philosopher postulates: ‘This essential Being-guilty is, equiprimordially, the existential condition for the possibility of the “morally” good and for that of the “morally” evil’ (p. 332). Therefore, just as existence provides the condition for history, the guilt of existence supplies the condition for the ethical. 142 Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. and intr. by Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). Sartre uses the notions of both guilt and sin, exploiting religious discourse for his existentialist purposes. Hazel Barnes, the translator of Sartre’s monumental work into English, helpfully distinguishes between psychological and existential guilt, where the latter is unavoidable and consists of ‘an inescapable guilt, a species of Original Sin’ (‘Translator’s Introduction’, p. xxxii). Sartre himself asserts: ‘My original Fall is the existence of the Other’ (p. 263, emphasis mine), and ‘I am guilty due to the very fact that I am an object, I am guilty toward myself since I consent to my absolute alienation’ (p. 378). Barnes explains: ‘[For-itself] is guilty because it consents to this alienation and again guilty in that it will inevitably cause the Other to experience this same alienation’ (p. xxxii). 143 Intense historical experiences exacerbate the sense of time being filled with guilt. Italian hermetic poetry aptly exemplifies this tendency. Dorothy Glenn notes with respect to Giuseppe Ungaretti, who went through the First World War, for example: ‘Ungaretti sees time as both the source of man's existential torment and his only means of remedying it, his sin and his only means of salvation, for it both distances him from the prelapsarian purity for which he longs and yet remains the sole medium in which its echo or memory can be given perceptible form.’ Glenn further adds that for Ungaretti ‘[t]ime is the paradoxical foundation on which the text is built, and its contradictory impulses towards destruction on the one hand, and redemption on the other, constitute the internal dynamics of the verse’. See Dorothy M. Glenn, ‘The redemption of historical time in Ungaretti’s Il dolore’, The Italianist, 1 (2000), 121-55 (pp. 121-2).
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Stus articulates the non-coincidence of the self on two temporal levels: as a rupture at once between the present and the past, and between the present and the future. The first of these ruptures concerns the sphere of the phenomenological, as self-reflexivity, while the other rupture is bound up with the existential, as the gap between the present self and the potential self. In the next two chapters, I will analyse closely how Stus’s poetry explores these two kinds of rupture respectively. To conclude this chapter, I wish to outline how Stus defines them theoretically. In his preparatory drafts for ‘Evenascent Blossoming’, Stus asserts that ‘[p]oeziia – tse samovtrata. Tse shukannia smyslu vlasnoho isnuvannia v obkhid. Ne zhyttiam, a spohadamy. Ne predmetno, a v tini, ne v sohodni, а u vchorashnomu’ (‘Poetry is a self-loss. It [consists in] looking for the sense of one’s own existence in a roundabout way. Not through life but through memories. Not through the material, but in the shadow, not in today but in yesterday’).144 The notion of searching v obkhid betrays the impossibility of reaching the centre as one’s ultimate authenticity (the ‘sense of one’s own existence’). Stus’s definition also makes clear that any searching means loss. In ‘The Phenomenon’, speaking as much about Tychyna as about his lyrical subject, the poet foregrounds ‘nezavershenist, dvoistist tuhy – tuha vtraty і tuha napivdorohy’ (‘incompleteness, [and] the double nature of longing – the longing of loss and the longing of [being] halfway’) (p. 15). Loss precedes the searching itself. Poetry, as the process of searching, captures the tension between the lived and the understood. Maurice Merleau-Ponty explains this temporal fracture from a phenomenological perspective:
I shall never manage to seize the present through which I live with apodeictic certainty, and since the lived is thus never entirely comprehensible, what I understand never quite tallies with my living experience, in short, I am never quite at one with myself [je ne fais jamais un avec moi- même].145
Opposing materiality and shadow, yesterday and today, Stus, similarly, emphasises how the self does not fully coincide with itself. It dwells in a constant effort to retrieve one’s selfsameness (‘tsilnist indyvidualnosti’, ‘the wholeness of individuality’, S IV: 349).
144 ‘Pidhotovchi materialy’, p. 1. 145 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 404 (original French edition: Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p. 399). Cf. Derrida’s assertion that the ‘post-deconstructive’ re-conception of the subject would have to be ‘a non-coincidence with self’ and ‘the finite experience of non-identity to self’. See Jacque Derrida, ‘“Eating Well”, or the Calculation of the Subject: An Interview with Jacque Derrida’, in Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, eds, Who Comes After the Subject (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp. 102-3.
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Merleau-Ponty foregrounds the gap inherent to reflective consciousness and perception, a gap he defines as ‘a thickness of duration’ between ‘myself who have just thought this, and myself who am thinking that I have thought it’.146 In ‘The Phenomenon’, Stus poses the possibility of the balanced co-existence of temporal layers, referring to Rilke: ‘“I am simultaneously a child, a boy, and a man” – Tychyna has the same unity, condensed duration’ (p. 11). In his earlier piece on Rilke, which Stus wrote in the mid-1960s, he refers to the same line, positing that ‘[v] poezii iakos harmoniiuietsia mynule, suchasne і maibutnie’ (‘in poetry, the past, present, and future somehow become harmonised’) (S IV: 238-9) akin to Henri Bergson’s notion of ‘la durée’ defined as ‘la coïncidence de notre moi avec lui-même’ (‘the coincidence of our self with itself’).147 For Stus, on the contrary, such unity becomes disjointed: these same temporal aspects of the self (past, present, and future) preclude this unity and mark a fundamental rift within ‘I’. The poet’s radical focus on subjectivity inevitably brings about the aggrevation of temporal fracturing and self-doubling,148 exposing ‘davnie rozdvoiene samoprotystoiannia – samospohliadannia i samoriatunok’ (‘the old bifurcated self-opposition – self-observation and self-rescue’).149 While Merleau-Ponty pays attention to the relationship between the present and the past, the gap between the present and the future is no less poignant for Stus. Heidegger describes this gap by way of his formula of Dasein as always ‘not yet’ (Noch-nicht), which I mentioned earlier. Further explicating the notion of Being-guilty, cited above, Heidegger posits that ‘[t]he call of conscience has the character of an appeal [Anruf] to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning [aufrufen] it to its ownmost Being-guilty’ (emphasis in the original).150 The self is bound to repent for the rupture and the loss of primordial unity that accompanies its existence.151 The passive and inborn burden of sin transforms into the active personal duty of
146 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 47. 147 Henri Bergson, L'Évolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908), p. 218. 148 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘Mynule ne vernuty. / Sohodni – zghybilo. Maibutnoho – nema’ (‘The past is gone. / Today has vanished. The future does not exist’), in ‘Plach, nebo...’ (‘Skies, weep...’) (DZ: 166). This passage connotes Symonenko’s poem ‘Mynule ne vernut’ (1962): ‘Mynule ne vernut, / ne vypravyt mynule, / Vchorashnie – niby son, / shcho vypurkhnuv z ochei’ (‘It is impossible to return the past, / it is impossible to mend it, / Yesterday is a like a dream, / which has flown out of [your] eyes’). See Vasyl Symonenko, Zemne tiazhinnia: Poezii (Kyiv: Molod, 1964), p. 29. 149 ‘Pidhotovchi materialy’, p. 8. 150 Being and Time, pp. 314, 334. 151 For a discussion of different interpretations of sin in Stus’s poetry (sin as a fracture in time, but also sin in the context of redemption for others), as well as intertextual links with Skovoroda regarding this theme see Marharyta Iehorchenko, ‘Motyv hrikha v poezii Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovi zapysky NaUKMA, 72 (2007), 18-23. See also Alessandro Achilli, ‘Vasyl Stus – chytach Mykoly Berdiaieva’, Naukovi zapysky Natsionalnoho universytetu ‘Ostrozka akademiia’, 41 (2014), 3-7. Cf. Tarnashynska’s insightful discussion of sin, guilt,
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repentance as the realisation of one’s ‘ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self’. This tension within the self between the present and the future engenders the unremitting process of becoming, enunciated by Stus’s poetic subject: ‘I chym ty stav? І chym ty mozhesh staty?’ (‘What have you become? What can you become?’) (‘The unity of souls – what is that?’, ZD: 18).152
Therefore, while scholars tend to attach Stus’s poetry to his historical circumstances, his works destabilise the idea of the linear temporality of clock time, announcing that ‘time has melted’. The poet advances a different vision of temporality, one that is grounded firmly in the self as the only venue for the search for authenticity. Stus’s essays on modernist and contemporary poets clearly show the centrality of subjectivity for him, in marked contrast to the Soviet reviews of his early poetry collections, which foreground ‘turbulent, heroic, and sometimes dramatic events’ (Nahnybida) and ‘inexorable historical progress’ (Adelheim). The radical focus on selfhood punctures the wholeness of being and brings about the problem of samopromynannia, the non-coincidence of the self, which serves as the central concern of the poet’s works. While samopromynannia proves to be impossible to heal, Stus perceives it as a call to action rather than a verdict, casting his subject as the self-in-the-making, perpetually embarked on the journey of becoming.
redemption and catharsis as recurrent topoi in the works of the shistdesiatnyky, in Tarnashynska, Siuzhet doby, pp. 133-45. 152 Cf. Stus’s lines from ‘Streams’: ‘Nashcho peredrik / tsi boli samozrechennia v khvylynu, / koly ia vzhe samym soboiu stav?’ (‘Why did you prophesy / these torments of self-renouncement at the moment / when I became myself at last?’) (ZD: 70).
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CHAPTER 2. RECOLLECTION AND REPETITION: THE MODALITIES OF AUTHENTICITY IN PALIMPSESTS
In response to Adelheim’s review, Stus reflects on the fundamental duality of his thinking: ‘Mii optymizm-pesymizm: zhyvu ne ia, a – mnoiu. Zhyve pryroda – cherez mene, tomu ia mushu zhyty – mushu na rivni zdatnosti moiei ekzystentsii’ (‘My optimism-pessimism: it is not I who lives, but rather I am being lived through. It is nature that lives, through me, therefore I must live, I must, to the capacity of my existentia’, emphasis in the original).153 This dictum juxtaposes two disparate, if not opposite, worldviews. On the one hand, the poet refers to a pre-determined image in which ‘nature’ realises itself through him (‘I am being lived through’). On the other, he speaks of his ‘capacity’ to make his own existence. Stus no doubt consciously uses the Latin word ekzystentsiia (the italicised Latin existentia in my translation) instead of the Ukrainian equivalent isnuvannia (the neutral ‘existence’) and thus clearly alludes to existentialism. The question that sets these two attitudes apart is a significant one: what is the source of the authentic self? To use Sartre’s seminal formula: in the plane of nature, essence precedes existence, whereas in the plane of existentia it is existence that is primary. Put differently, with nature one discovers the self, whereas with existence one creates it. Scholars have noted this duality in Stus’s poetry, which juxtaposes ‘zlahoda i napruzhennia’ (‘harmony and tension’),154 ‘ekzystentsiialnyi bunt, z odnoho boku, і mistychne prymyrennia z usesvitom – z druhoho’ (‘an exisential revolt on the one hand, and a mystical reconciliation with the universe on the other’),155 and ‘deterministic attitudes towards fate and an existentialist approach to authentic existence’.156 Stus himself succintly defines it as ‘styk obachnosty i zukhvalstva’ (‘the junction of prudence and daring’).157 Moskalets insightfully notes that in Stus (we can extend this to his poetry) ‘pratsiuie zasada komplimentarnosty, koly kraini chleny binarnoi opozytsii ie umovoiu odna odnoi i todi istotnishym ie zviazok mizh nymy ta funktsiia samoi opozytsii, a ne vydyme protystoiannia’
153 See Stus’s letter to Adelheim dated 25 August 1970, S VI, 2: 66-7. Pylypiuk translates ‘zhyvu ne ia, a – mnoiu’ as ‘it is not I who live but [I live] through myself’. See ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism and the Great Narcissus’, p. 187. I believe that Stus uses the pronoun mnoiu (‘I’ in the instrumental case) in a less assertive way: the poet implies not a solid ‘I’ that lives through himself, but rather ‘nature that lives, through me’, as the poet specifies later, or ‘inshyi khtos – za mene zhyve mnoiu’ (‘someone else, who lives instead of me through me’), as Stus puts it in a letter to his family dated 6-10 May 1984 (see S VI, 1: 465). 154 Carynnyk, ‘Povernennia Orfeia’, p. 19. 155 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, p. 83. 156 Burianyk, ‘Incarceration and Death’, p. 106. 157 See the poem ‘I strilku smerty vidvedem nazad...’ (‘And we will move the hour hand of death back...’), in Pa: 193.
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(‘at work is the principle of complementarity, where the extreme elements of a binary opposition are the condition for each other, and their interplay, as well as the function of the opposition itself are more significant than the visible confrontation’).158 In the same vein, Shevelov notes that ‘syla Stusa [...] v konfliktakh ioho emotsii i nastroiv, v tomu diialozi protylezhnostei, iakym ie ioho poeziia, [...] v znaidenni sebe v pletyvi protylezhnostei’ (‘Stus’s strength [...] lies in the conflicts of his emotions and moods, in that dialogue of contradictions, of which his poetry consists, [...] in finding oneself in the wicker of contradictions’).159 Moskalets and Shevelov justly emphasise the importance of the very interplay between contradictions in Stus’s poetry, in contrast to Adelheim’s urge to ‘master’ them. While scholars have pointed out the importance of these two fundamental modalities for Stus, their dynamic and subtle co-existence in his poetry demands much closer examination. I undertake this task in the present chapter. Focusing on such a dynamic as co- existence means embracing the complexity and internal contradictions in the poet’s works. Stus’s poetry captures a human being at the edge, between two visions, in the moment of fundamental uncertainty yet with resolution to act. In this chapter, I focus on how Platonic and existential modalities of authenticity feed the becoming self in Stus’s verse. For my analysis, I draw upon Kierkegaard’s seminal concepts of ‘recollection’ and ‘repetition’, which aptly capture these two basic sensibilities in Stus’s works.160 While recollection implies the Platonic recovery of essence, repetition foregrounds existence as the making of the authentic self. These categories are by no means exhaustive, and I use them as broadscale points of orientation to help organise a more wide- ranging discussion of such concepts as memory, desire, lack, and edge in Stus’s work. Indeed, such an extensive and complex poetical corpus as Palimpsests cannot yield to orderly taxonomy. Yet the double-vision approach that I propose here can help us to find our way through Stus’s poetical philosophy and navigate the intricacies of becoming in his texts.
158 Kostiantyn Moskalets, ‘Strasti po Vitchyzni’, Krytyka (1999), p. 12. Dmytro Stus aligns with Moskalets’s proposition, suggesting that in contending so the critic has come ‘the closest to the understanding of [Stus’s] worldview’. See ‘Zhyttia iak tvorchist’, p. 57. 159 Shevelov, ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, pp. 30-1. 160 Stus took great interest in Kierkegaard’s work, as is evident from his letters, archive materials, and others’ memoirs. In a letter dated February 1973, Stus mentions that he has read the following book on Kierkegaard: Bernard Bykhovskii, Kierkegor (Moskva: Mysl, 1972), S VI, 1: 16. Cf. also Stus’s letters: to his family dated 10 November 1975 (S VI, 1: 178), to Christine Bremer dated 9 October 1978 (S VI, 2: 155), and to Sverstiuk dated 30 April 1979 (S VI, 2: 155, 162), which contain references to the Danish philosopher. Dziuba also confirms Stus’s interest in Kierkegaard’s philosophy. See Bohdan Pidhirnyi, ed., Netsenzurnyi Stus, 2 vols (Ternopil: Pidruchnyky i posibnyky, 2002; 2003), vol. 2, p. 238.
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2.1. Recollection and Repetition
Kierkegaard defines the notion of repetition by opposing it to recollection. While the latter represents an emblem of Greek thought, repetition serves as an epitome of Modernity. In Kierkegaard’s treatise Repetition, his pseudonym and narrator Constantin Constantius (whose name ironically points to illusionary constancy) distinguishes between them in the following way:
When the Greeks said that all knowing is recollecting, they said that all existence, which is, has been; when one says that life is a repetition, one says: actuality, which has been, now comes into existence.161
What lies at the heart of the fundamental difference between recollection and repetition is that recollection belongs to the realm of ‘knowing’, whereas repetition to that of ‘existence’. In evoking ‘the Greeks’, Kierkegaard alludes primarily to Plato’s idea of anamnesis, whereby the physical world constitutes only a copy of the essential Ideas: we recollect the essence that precedes us (the idea that also largely underpins Skovoroda’s philosophy). For this reason, Constantin posits that ‘all existence, which is, has been’. Niels Nymann Eriksen, a thoughtful commentator of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, clarifies Constantin’s somewhat abstruse dictum, asserting that ‘recollection means assuming a fundamental unity of thought and being. The labour of thought is to trace all differences back to the primordial sameness of being.’162 Recollection, therefore, prioritises the sameness of identity and thus implies authenticity-as- sameness. Stus explicitly refers to Plato’s concept of anamnesis in ‘The Phenomenon’, suggesting that ‘v tsiomu druhomu zhytti [perechuvannia svoho dytynstva u doroslomu vitsi] bulo znaiomstvo zi svitom upershe (chysto po-platonivsky: zhyttia – iak pryhaduvannia)’ (‘in this second life [enjoying his childhood in his adulthood] there was the coming-to-know of the world for the first time (in a typically Platonic fasion: life as recollection)’ (p. 8).163 In the previous chapter, we have seen how Stus’s study of Tychyna’s and Svidzinskyi’s works reveals his Platonic sensibility, underpinned by the idea of returning to one’s ‘essence’. Another important dialogical intertext for Stus that feeds the modality of recollection in his poetry is the work of Goethe, whom Stus extensively translated whilst in custody between
161 Søren Kierkegaard, Repetition: An Essay in Experimental Psychology, trans. by Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1946), p. 34. 162 Niels N. Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category of Repetition: A Reconstruction (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), p. 14. 163 Stus also evokes this idea in his poem ‘Vertaiut zhuravli na vetkhi hnizda...’ (‘Cranes are returning to their old nests...’): ‘otse zhyttia stareche, / nemov pryhaduvannia’ (‘this elderly life / [is] like recollection’) (DZ: p. 164).
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January and September 1972. Numerous echoes of Goethe’s poetry resound in Stus’s poems, especially in Dichtenszeit, which the poet wrote alongside his translation of Goethe’s texts.164 Just like early Tychyna, and Svidzinskyi, Goethe provides for Stus optimistic hope of the possibility of wholeness and the point of identitarian stability. He regards Goethe’s poetry as a counter-balance to the chaotic, and appreciates the movement and renewal in it. Among Stus’s translations of Goethe’s poems published as early as 1967 in the Dnipro journal is an extract from the poem ‘Vermächtniß’ (‘Legacy’, 1829; which Stus translates as ‘Zapovit’ (‘Testament’)):165
Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen! Das Ewge regt sich fort in allen, Am Sein erhalte dich beglückt! Das Sein ist ewig [...] Das alte Wahre, faß es an! [...] Sofort nun wende dich nach innen: Das Zentrum findest du da drinnen, Woran kein Edler zweifeln mag. [...] Genieße mäßig Füll und Segen; Vernunft sei überall zugegen 166
Goethe’s poem eloquently captures the idea of recollection as the existence of eternity where ‘the primordial truths are sacred’; the self should turn inwards to retrieve the knowledge of the pre-existent self.167 Similarly, in the poem ‘Urworte. Orphisch’ (‘Primal Words. Orphic’,
164 See Alessandro Achilli, ‘Das goethesche Element im lyrischen Ich und in der Poetologie von Vasyl’ Stus’, in Lyrik transkulturell, ed. by Eva Binder, Sieglinde Klettenhammer, and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2016). 165 See V. Petryk [V. Stus], ‘Velykyi z naibilshykh’, Dnipro, 7 (1967), 101-3 (p. 102). ‘V. Petryk’ is one of Stus’s pseudonyms. For the original German text of Goethe’s poem see J. W. von Goethe, Gedichte und Epen I, Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Band IX (München 1998: C.H. Beck), p. 369. 166 Cf. Stus’s translation: ‘Vse suchche na zemli – netlinne! A vichne tvorytsia nevpynno, / V butti znakhodysh shchastia ty. / Vono – odvichne. [...] pravichni istyny – sviati! [...] Zvernys do vnutrishnoho zoru: / Tam vidnaidesh sobi oporu / – mitsnu, bez sumniviv lykhykh [...] / Vishchuiut nadmiry pohrozu. / Khai vsiudy zapanuie rozum’ (‘All that exists on Earth is imperishable! And the eternal is being incessantly created, / You find happiness in being. / It is eternal. [...] the primordial truths are sacred! [...] Turn to your inner gaze: / There you will find your firm / support, [one] without harmful doubts [...] Excess forebodes a threat. / Let the reason reign supreme everywhere’). For discussion of Goethe’s ‘Vermächtniß’, in particular of Kantian echoes in the poem, see Nicholas Boyle, ‘Kantian and Other Elements in Goethe’s “Vermächtniß”’, The Modern Language Review, 3 (1978), 532-49. 167 Ellis Dye explains the importance of recollection for Goethe: ‘Goethe’s focus, however, is not on the agonies of a prior, transcendent ego, but on the lonely, indivisible self that enters being and time through a separation at
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1817) (also translated by Stus)168 Goethe muses: ‘Sibyls and prophets told it: You must be / None but yourself, from self you cannot flee’.169 In ‘Vermächtniß’, Goethe uses the notion of ‘das Zentrum’ (‘the centre’, or opora, ‘support’, in Stus’s translation). Stus must have also felt the resonance of Jaspers’s image of Goethe as a counterpoint to the fractured self of modernity, an epitome of wholeness, unity, reason, and optimism.170 In an interrogation report, when asked about Jaspers’s volume, which KGB officers found upon searching his flat,171 Stus answered: ‘statti Karla Iaspersa ia zbyravsia perekladaty – bodai dlia sebe. Bo ekzystentsializm iak filosofiia mene duzhe tsikavyt. Krim toho, tam ie stattia pro moho uliublenoho Iohana Volfhanha Gote’ (‘I was going to translate Karl Jaspers’s articles, at least for myself. Because I am very interested in the philosophy of existentialism. Besides, [in Jaspers’s volume] there is an article on my beloved Johann Wolfgang [von] Goethe’).172 As we have seen, in his essays Stus speaks of the recovery of the true essence, which lies beyond historical time. His notion of ‘the original’ (pershotvir), which he explores in ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, implies a primordial essence that provides ‘stable certainty’ and to which the self can return in recollecting itself.173 Repetition, on the other hand, provides the opposite of such static perception. It presupposes no prior knowledge of the self, and looks for its meaning in the dynamic realm of existence. In repetition, Eriksen suggests, ‘[t]he self is no longer a fact from which we can proceed, but a goal that lies ahead, something we must become. Self-realisation has become a matter of self-appropriation and self-coincidence’.174 Instead of hinging upon sameness, repetition foregrounds the essential difference within the self. Stus’s interest in and his
a particular instant in time from the primal unity, and whose earthly sojourn is propelled by its desire to return – to home, to the mother, or into the open arms of God.’ See Ellis Dye, Love and Death in Goethe. ‘One and Double’ (New York: Camden House, 2004), p. 27. 168 See DZ: 443. 169 I use Christopher Middleton’s translation from Goethe’s Collected Works, Vol. 1: Selected Poems, ed. by Christopher Middleton (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1983), pp. 231-3. 170 See Karl Jaspers, Rechenschaft und Ausblick: Reden und Aufsätze (München: Piper, 1958), in particular his essays ‘Unsere Zukunft und Goethe’ (‘Our Future and Goethe’, 1947, pp. 30-58) and ‘Goethes Menschlichkeit’ (‘Goethe’s Humanity’, 1949, pp. 59-80). 171 ‘Protokol obshuku’ (12.01.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, T. 1, p. 4 [19]. 172 ‘Protokol dopytu pidozriuvanoho’ (3.02.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, T. 1, pp. 1-9 [141-9] (p. 6 [146]). 173 Svidzinskyi himself links recollection and authenticity. Cf. Svidzinskyi’s poem ‘Vorittia’ (‘Return’): ‘V bezmezhnosti chasu my pryidemo znov. [...] Mynule pokryietsia vichnoiu tmoiu; / Ta shcho nam na skorbnomu spomyni? / My vpershe stanem soboiu, / Zasiaiem, iak zoriani promeni’ (‘In the infinity of time we will come back again. [...] Eternal darkness will cover the past; / Yet what should we make of this mournful memory? / We will become ourselves for the first time, / We will shine like stellar beams’). See Volodymyr Svidzinskyi, Poetychni tvory u dvokh tomakh. Tom pershyi, ed. by Eleonora Solovei (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2004), p. 48. 174 Eriksen, Repetition, p. 9.
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particular vision of Ukrainian modernist poetry and the works of Goethe reversely mirror the fragmentation in his own poetry. Recollection and repetition imply disparate perceptions of temporality. While both ideas circumvent historical time, they do so in different ways. Eriksen posits that ‘a person understands himself in recollection as being rooted in the realm of Being or the eternal, the truth of his life lies within him or behind him, in the origin of his being’.175 The self, therefore, relates to the eternal and to the past in retrieving itself. Repetition, on the other hand, directs the self towards the future and its own possibilities. Constantin famously asserts in this regard:
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, just in opposite directions, because what is recollected has already been and is thus repeated backwards, whereas genuine repetition is recollected forwards.176
Thus, in repetition the self is being constructed (collected), whereas in recollection it is reconstructed (re-collected). Likely drawing upon Kierkegaard’s notion of repetition,177 Heidegger asserts: ‘The resoluteness which comes back to itself and hands itself down, then becomes the repetition [Wiederholung] of a possibility of existence that has come down to us.’178 Repetition, therefore, signifies the repeated coming back to the possibilities of the self in contrast to the return to the pre-existent self within recollection.179 Interplay between recollection and repetition underpins Palimpsests. Stus’s texts stage constant collisions between these two sensibilities. On the one hand, Stus’s poetic subject searches for a firm foundation for his identity. He strives to coincide with his true self. On the other hand, he realises that the authentic self does not consist in a fixed image. Instead, it dwells in the constant process of self-formation.
2.2. Recollection: Primordial Unity and Memory
The idea of recollection as the return to the true essence recurs in Palimpsests. Parenthetically, this recurring itself enacts the gesture of returning at a structural level.
175 Ibid., p. 12. 176 Kierkegaard, Repetition, p. 3. 177 Cf. Clare Carlisle, ‘Kierkegaard and Heidegger’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. by John Lippitt and George Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 178 Being and Time, p. 437. Calvin Schrag explains that for Heidegger ‘repetition is a matter of reclamation rather than recurrence, and what is reclaimed are possibilities rather than factual historical incidents’. See Calvin Schrag, Philosophical Papers: Betwixt and Between (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), p. 52. 179 Cf. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994).
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Through coming back, Stus’s poetic subject seeks to approach authenticity. In his pursuit, he strives for sameness, while being aware of its unattainability. Yet this knowledge, however frustrating it might be, only galvanises the pursuit. Stus’s poetry is affirmative in this sense. It is the very desire of sameness, the willing and striving to coincide with oneself, that matters. In Palimpsests, the movement backwards, towards the true self, takes place on two principal levels: (i) as the return into the primordial unity/wholeness, which precedes existentia; and (ii) as the recollection of the past, the sphere of material memory.
2.2.1. Primordial Unity
Palimpsests stages a series of collisions between recollection and repetition. There are few poems that advance recollection in its own right. ‘Tse, prypiznila molodoste...’ (‘It is you, my belated youth...’) provides an instrumental exception that elucidates this modality:
Це, припізніла молодосте, ти спроваджуєш мене на горні кручі. Збираються над головою тучі, відстрашливої повні ліпоти. А я дерусь – з щовба на щовб – увись – куди мої дороги простяглись, куди мене веде вельможний порив, не відаючи втоми, ні покори, так, як було в забутому колись.180 Це, припізніла молодосте, ти, це я себе вертаю – скільки змоги, зближаючись до древньої дороги, де дерева чорніють, як хрести.
(It is you, my belated youth / that leads me to the mountain hills. / Clouds gather above my head, / they are full of frightening beauty. / And I make my way – from spire to spire – heavenward – where my paths lie, / where my noble / generous impulse leads me, / tireless and disobedient, / just as it was in the forgotten once-was. / It is you, my belated youth, / it is me returning myself – the best I can, / approaching the ancient road, / where trees are black like crosses.) (emphasis mine) (DZ: 356)
180 In the poem ‘I penzel holosu siahaie sfer...’ (‘The brush of voice reaches the spheres...’) (P: 137) the poet states: ‘Zhdy sebe. / Kolys’ (‘Wait for yourself. / One day’). Unlike in ‘It is you, my belated youth...’ kolys here refers not to the past but instead to what is yet to come, at an indeterminate point in the future, illustrating contrasting perceptions of temporality in Stus’s poetry.
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The poem’s reference to the ‘forgotten once-was’ clearly echoes Plato’s idea of anamnesis, which Stus aptly summarises in his dictum ‘life as recollection’. The task of the lyrical subject, then, consists in recollecting the original image of the self. Similarly to the final section of ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’, in this text the poet uses the enclosed abba rhyme scheme, which further represents a gesture of return. ‘It is you, my belated youth...’ conjures up an ‘ancient road’ connoting the sense of a pre-existing primordial route. The poem as a whole stages a dynamic journey of the lyrical subject. However, even this, at first glance, optimistic movement of return reveals worrying signals. Where does the poem (and, by the same token, the journey, embedded in it) end? On an ancient road, ‘where trees are black like crosses’. The supposed liberation of motion runs into the solidity of the trees (paralleled by the ending edge of the poem). Furthermore, Stus evokes the image of the cross, a symbol of amor fati, what the poet himself defines in ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ as ‘khrystyianske vpokorennia fatumovi’ (‘the Christian submission to fate’) (S IV: 358).181 Stus, therefore, juxtaposes the Platonic ‘forgotten once-was’ with the Christian image of the cross, which signifies the acceptance of fate (another aspect of the pre-determined image of the self).182 The primeval unity serves as the ideal for the poetic subject, even though he cannot escape the fact that it has been irrevocably corrupted:
У темінь сну занурюється шлях. Все вище й вище засягають води терпкого забуття. Все ближче край. Дивлюся в порожнечу днів і літ – і думаю: де та межа, котрою вертається утрачена душа у прапервні.
(The path submerges in the dark of sleep. / The waters of the bitter oblivion reach ever / higher. And ever closer is the edge. / I gaze into the emptiness of days and years – and wonder: where is that borderland / by way of which the severed soul goes back / to the primordial.)
‘U temin snu...’ (‘The path submerges...’) (P: 78)
181 For further discussion of Christianity and amor fati in Stus’s poetry and their co-existence with existentialism in the poet’s worldview see Burianyk, ‘Incarceration and Death’, pp. 105-7, and Moskalets, ‘Nezavershenyi proekt’, pp. 21-33. 182 Stus’s vidstrashlyva lipota (‘frightening beauty’) might also allude to Rilke’s image of Schönheit und Schrecken (‘beauty and terror’) from his 1905 poetry collection The Book of Hours imbued with religious meditations. See Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, trans. by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, 1996), I 59.
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The notion of prapervni alludes to the works of the Ukrainian modernist writer Bohdan-Ihor Antonych (1909-1937), a self-styled ‘zakokhanyi v zhytti pohanyn’ (‘pagan in love with life’) and a poet of ‘great harmony’, as one of his collections is entitled.183 On a recent visit to Stus’s private library, which now belongs to his son, Dmytro Stus, I discovered on the shelves one of Stus’s notebooks, entitled ‘№1. I. B. [sic] Antonych’ (undated), which contains numerous extensive extracts from Antonych’s works and Stus’s comments on them. In the notebook, Stus, inter alia, comments on the poem ‘Zmiia’ (‘Snake’, 1934), one of the texts in which Antonych touches upon the idea of the primordial:
Мов папороть, перед очами стає прапервісність твоя: ти ще рослина, ти ще камінь, тебе обкручує змія.
(Your primordiality appears / before your eyes, as if a fern. / You’re still a plant, you’re still a stone, / you’re encircled by the snake.) 184
Expressing his fascination with the poem, Stus writes against its title ‘prekrasne!’ (‘wonderful!’), and notes under the poem: ‘Tse shukannia sebe vhlybu prapervniv, tse vysvitliuvannia samoho sebe na ploshchi materii’ (‘This searching for oneself in the depths of primordial origins [prapervniv], this illumination of oneself on the space of matter)’. Stus’s poetic subject yearns for the unity with nature that Antonych’s poetic self enjoys. Yet he unequivocally states that the soul has been severed from such wholeness. Stus develops this idea in ‘U peredsvitti mav ia dyven vik...’ (‘In the before-world it was an incredible age...’), which stages a transition from wholeness to the world where recollection is no longer possible:
183 Stus’s letters contain a number of references to Antonych. Stus repeatedly comes back to the idea of writing a study of Antonych’s poetry. Cf. Stus’s letters to his fmaily dated 23 December 1974 (S VI, 1: 111), 7 January 1975 (S VI, 1: 114), 2 February 1975 (S VI, 1: 122), 10 May 1975 (S VI, 1: 140), 1 June 1977 (S VI: 1, 269). In Stus’s private library, I found two volumes of Antonych’s poems with Stus’s notes. 184 Bohdan Ihor Antonych, Zibrani tvory, ed. by Sviatoslav Hordynsky and Bohdan Rubchak (New York, Winnipeg: Slovo, 1967), p. 88. Antonych also refers to prapervni in such poems as ‘Zelena vira’ (‘The Green Faith’, p. 228) and ‘Pralito’ (‘The Primordial Summer’, p. 87). In the former, the lyrical ‘I’ evokes the image of ‘prapervni u kypinni, / u vichnii zmini vse nezminni’ (‘effervescent primordial origins, / [that] are unchangeable in their eternal change’), and in the latter he expresses the desire ‘v pravisnyi pryrody morok, / v pradavniu vpasty hlybynu’ (‘to fall into nature’s primordial darkness, / into primeval depth’). For a thorough study of Antonych’s work and his understanding of the primordial, see Lidia Stefanowska, Antonych. Antynomii (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2006); see also Lidia Stefanowska, ‘Between Creation and the Apocalypse: The Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych’, in Bohdan Ihor Antonych, The Essential Poetry of Bohdan Ihor Antonych. Ecstasies and Elegies, trans. by Michael M. Naydan, intr. by Lidia Stefanowska (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2010), pp. 21- 40.
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У передсвітті мав я дивен вік, ані турбот, ані гризот не знавши. І тільки по народженні пропащі постали літа. Дольний чоловік, збагнув я першу смерть – і стало лячно. Збагнув я другу – і урвався стерп. Побігло древнє сонце на ущерб, до тебе осміхаючись двозначно. Життя – пішло убік. Руїна душ. Руїна існування прозначила тобі стежу і владно повеліла ступати нею. І тепер не руш днедавніх спогадів. Твій передсвіт хіба що в сні привидився. Химери тобі іржаві прочинили двері, де гнались кажани услід харит.
(In the before-world it was a wondrous age, / where I knew neither worries nor torments. / And only upon birth did my wretched years / emerge. Earthly man, / I came to know the first death – and I became frightened. / I came to know the second death – and I ran out of patience. / The ancient sun started to wane rapidly, / smiling to you ambiguously. / Life – aberrated. The ruins of souls. / The ruins of existence marked / your path and imperatively ordained / to take it. Now – don’t move / your old memories. Perhaps your before-world / was just a dream. Chimeras / half-opened rusty gates for you, / where bats were chasing the Charites.) (DZ: 216)
Peredsvittia (what was before the world) is an idyllic image of a metaphysical paradise. In his theory of the profane and the sacred, Eliade refers to this image as illud tempus (‘those days’),185 that is ‘the mythical illud tempus of Paradise, of primordial plenitude’186 or what he elsewhere calls ‘the mythical beginning [...] when the world was not yet made’.187 The ‘world’ in Stus’s poem signifies the plane of existence and, therefore, that of finitude and disunity. Entering the world means dying twice. First, it implies entering the realm with the possibility of death. Second, it means the realisation of this possibility. ‘In the before- world...’ marks a dramatic shift from the ‘wondrous age’ of the first lines to the image of ruins, which permeates the rest of the text. The poet opposes the metaphysical past to the fragmented and uncertain existence, which calls into question the possibility of
185 Eliade, Cosmos and History, p. 29. 186 Ibid., p. 73. 187 Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion, trans. by Willard R. Trask (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1959), p. 83.
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recollection.188 Whereas in ‘It is you, my belated youth...’ the poet evokes the image of drevnia doroha (an ‘ancient road’), here it is the sun that is ‘ancient’ (drevnie). Yet instead of guiding the poetic self the sun disorients him. In the landscape of ruins, it too becomes fractured and loses its wholeness. The poet depicts a sun that wanes, shrinking like a moon. The shift from ‘I’ to ‘you’ marks the loss of the prelapsarian unity and enacts the disunity of the self. The coda of the poem grounds the text in a mythical rather than purely metaphysical context. The poet draws the jarring picture of bats chasing the Charites, the ancient Greek deities of beauty, mirth, and elegance. The figures of chimeras and Charites echo Goethe’s mythological imagery. However, Stus goes back to the ancient Greek context only to turn it on its head through its own imagery. The ‘ruins of existence’ are simultaneously the ruins of the past whose stabilising unity has been irrevocably lost. Stus’s poem reenacts and at the same time upsets the Platonic image of returning to the pristine wholeness.189 Stus’s poetic subject breaks though the supposed initial wholeness and challenges the temporality where ‘eternity’ is possible:
І так здалося: предковічним мітом не можна вже душі переконати, [...] Бо вже давно усе те пережите, що довго крилося будучиною. Майбутнє – все в минулому. Сьогодні – лиш alter ego мертвої душі.
(It appeared to me that the soul can no longer be convinced / by the primordial myth [...] Because all that was looming in the future / has already been lived through. / The future is all in the past. Today / is but an alter ego of the dead soul) (DZ: 46)
188 Cf. poem ‘I os vona, otsia hlukha dusha...’ (‘Here it is, this deaf soul...’) (S III, 2), where the lyrical subject has a vision of two worlds: ‘this’ world, which he describes as ‘thorny’ (koliuchyi) and compares to ‘the wild flint of age-old endurance’ (‘dykyi kremin vikovykh terpin’); the other world is ‘the ancient one, before the eras / of self-coming-forth’ (‘drevnii, azh do er / samopostannia’), the plane of ‘non-memory’, nepamiati. The latter world is the world before sin, pain, and temporality. Stus’s speaker associates the existential realm with pain and memory (thus, inevitably with finitude and forgetting). The ‘ancient’ world precedes ‘the eras of self-coming- forth’, that is the existence of selfhood as such. 189 Returning serves as a recurrent motif in Skovoroda and in the poetry of the Baroque more generally. Henry Vaughan’s ‘The Retreate’ provides a striking counterpart to Stus’s poem: ‘Happy those early days! when I / Shined in my angel infancy. / Before I understood this place / Appointed for my second race, [...] / When on some gilded cloud or flower / My gazing soul would dwell an hour, / And in those weaker glories spy / Some shadows of eternity’. See The Works of Henry Vaughan, Vol. 1: Introduction and Texts 1642–1652, ed. by Donald R. Dickson, Alan Rudrum, and Robert Wilcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 81-2.
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‘Bazhannia zhyty – tilky-no na dni...’ (‘The desire to live is at the very bottom...’) (DZ: 134)190
All three temporal elements are blended into what I earlier referred to as empty duration, where the image of the present as an ‘alter ego of the dead soul’ evokes the poet’s perception of time discussed earlier in this thesis: ‘time has melted / its deadly wave swings us’. Stus’s line ‘[m]aibutnie – vse v mynulomu’ repeats, almost verbatim, Kierkegaard’s Platonic formula: ‘all existence, which is, has been’. Just like in ‘In the before-world...’, here the poet turns ancient mythology upside down, disrupting the logic of recollection by, paradoxically, following it. Unlike Vaughan’s poem, however, he overcomes historical time not through eternity, but through the non-progression of time. In the poem ‘The desire to live...’, the poetic subject juxtaposes these perceptions of temporality. He yet again emphasises the empty nature of time: ‘te, shcho ie, i shcho bulo, / i te, shcho bude – tilky chasu dliannia’ (‘all that is, all that was, / and all that will be is but the lingering of time’) (DZ: 134). Yet, simultaneously, he seeks a possibility of return to the mythical past that precedes existence:
А прозирни за перші припочатки, де все було незаймане, як твердь, по той бік всіх бажань, не мавши гадки, що то таке – життя , а що то – смерть.191
(So look beyond the very first beginnings, / where everything was innocent like the firmament / beyond all desires, not knowing / what life is and what death is).
Offering another image of illud tempus, Stus foregrounds the uncorrupted wholeness of being, which precedes life, desire, and death.
2.2.2. Memory
Memory furnishes another potent source of authenticity and the most conspicuous instance of recollection. In one sense, being authentic means maintaining an identity anchored in the material past. Stus’s poetic subject recollects his true self through correlating the present with
190 Cf. Stus’s neologism nedonovonarodzhennia (‘not-yet-being-born-again’): ‘probuty / v peredzhytti, naprypochatku sprob / v nedonovonarodzhenni. Darma’ (‘to dwell / in the pre-life, at the beginning of attempts / in the not-yet-been-born-again. In vain’), in ‘Pity b u lis’ (‘To go to the woods...’) (DZ: 206). 191 Cf. the poem ‘U trydtsiat lit ty tilky narodyvsia...’ (‘You have only been born at the age of thirty...’) from Joyful Cemetery: ‘Ponevazhaiu indyvidualnist – / spravikovyi nabutok lykholit. / Otozh bredy nazad. I skilky syly / prostui nazad. Bo tilky tam zhyttia – / shche do narodzhennia. Iz svitu imitatsii / – vpovzy u kozhnu z vyminenykh shkur’ (‘I disrespect individuality – / the age-old heritage of wretched centuries. / So go back. And head towards the past / as much as you can. Because life is only there – / before the birth. From the world of imitations / – crawl into each of [your] shedded skins’) (S I, 1: 173).
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the past. Yet the ground for this process proves unstable: the poetic subject oscillates between remembering and forgetting. Because memory has an inextricable link with temporality, it simultaneously implies elusive sameness and inevitable difference. Consider this passage from ‘Streams’:
А пам’ятаєш? Так багато губим за пам’яттю: колись переінакшить з нас кождого. А треба пам’ятати? А треба пам’ятати. Пам’ятай.
(Do you remember? We lose so much / with memory: some day it will remould / each of us. But must we remember? / But we must remember. Remember.) (ZD: 66)
Here Stus alludes to the lines of the Ukrainian neoclassicist poet Maksym Rylskyi (1895- 1964), which he quotes in his journal:192
Ти пам’ятаєш чорну темінь ночі і тих людей, що іменем любові Любов згубили? Так пам’ятаю…
(Do you remember the black darkness of the night / And those people who killed [their] love / In the name of love? / Yes, I do remember...)193
Stus’s lines characteristically manifest more intricacy. Memory does not provide the possibility for the affirmative tak of the kind that Rylskyi’s text (in Stus’s version) enunciates. It does not secure a safe repository, which keeps things intact; instead, it changes the very subject of recollection. The reiteration of the question and the repetition of the very act of recalling (which Stus mentions five times within the space of four lines) enact the instability of memory. While the speaker concedes that memory has a protean nature, modifying the self rather than holding it together, he nonetheless insists on the necessity of remembering. ‘Streams’
192 Journal entry dated 12 February 1963. See ‘Shchodennykovi zapysy’, in IL Archive, F. 170, N 1200, pp. 1- 79 (p. 12). 193 See Rylskyi’s poem ‘Vin i vona’ (‘Him and Her’, 1919), in Maksym Rylskyi, Zibrannia tvoriv u dvadtsiaty tomakh. Tom pershyi: Poezii 1907-1929. Proza 1911-1925 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1983), p. 148. However, Stus misquotes Rylskyi here, perhaps citing the poet’s lines from memory (and thus effectively enacting its modifying nature). The original passage reads: ‘Chy ty zabula chornyi vykhor nochi / I tykh liudei, shcho imenem liubovi / Liubov ubyly? – Tak. Movchy. Zabula’ (‘Have you already forgotten the black whirlwind of the night / And those people who killed [their] love / In the name of love? – Yes. Say nothing. You have’).
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provides a catalogue of concrete images, which ground the speaker in the material past, especially in his childhood. Stus’s lyrical subject exclaims bitterly: ‘O Hospody! Tak iasno pochynalos!’ (‘Oh Lord! The beginning was so bright!’) (quite similarly to Vaughan’s lines ‘Happy those early days! when I / Shined in my angel infancy’). Adelheim, who is keen to find points of stability in Stus’s poetry, rightly argues in his discussion of ‘Streams’ that ‘[s]ered zapytan “Khto ty? I shcho ty? I de ty?” tsei spohad pro dytynstvo [...] dopomahaie poetovi i zhyty, i vyznachyty svoie ‘Ia’, osobystist’ (‘Amidst the questions “Who are you? And what are you? And where are you?” this reminiscence of childhood [...] helps the poet to live, to determine his “I”, his identity’).194 Childhood serves as an anchoring point of reference and hope, yet Stus’s poetic subject is only able to perceive it in this way retrospectively. Stus records the impossibility of re- entering his childhood as early as 1964 in the poem ‘Mynaie chas moikh dytiachykh vir...’ (‘The time of my childhood hopes is passing...’):
Минає час моїх дитячих вір. І я себе з тим часом проминаю. І вже не віднайдусь. І вже не знаю, А чи впізнав би на човні новім Свій давній берег. [...] Ти сам пливеш, відринутий від себе.
(The time of my childhood hopes is passing. / And I am passing myself by with that time. / I won’t find myself anymore. And now I don’t know / Whether I would recognise my old shore / In the new boat. [...] / You are sailing alone, cast away from yourself.) (ZD: 79)
This early text introduces the recurrent theme of self-recognition in Stus’s writing, in both his poetry and prose, as I will show in the next chapter. Homecoming represents a central topos for a number of poems in Joyful Cemetery, which repeatedly evoke Stus’s hometown Donetsk. In Palimpsests the poet seldom comes back to the locus of Donetsk (or any other city, for that matter); his later verse – with the clear exception of the exile period in Kolyma, between 1977-1979 – is of a largely abstract nature, where specific places become increasingly blurred and give way to a geography of the self. The homecoming poems from Joyful Cemetery, some of which Stus ultimately included into Palimpsests, herald the problems of self-recognition and selfsameness, crucial for Stus’s poetic subject. We see the centrality of these concerns both in Stus’s early texts, written a few years before the poet’s
194 Adelheim, ‘Retsenziia’, in Zhyttia iak tvorchist, p. 233.
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arrest, and in his later poems from Palimpsests. The poem ‘Vdastsia chy ni...’ (‘Will it be possible...’) starts with a repeated question:
Вдасться чи ні сього разу повернутись додому? Вдасться чи ні?
(Will it be possible / to come back home this time or not? / Will it be possible or not?) (S I, 1: 187)
The poetic subject observes that his familiar home landscape has changed irreversibly. He describes the changed ‘[s]taryi terykon shakhty 10-bis, / de ty v dytynstvi zbyrav vuhillia’ (‘the old slagheap of coal mine 10-bis, / where you used to gather coal as a child’), strangers, and the elderly couple whose son died ten years ago in a plane crash and who now cradle a baby. On the list of all that has transformed appears the poetic subject himself:
і навіть мама з недовірою позирає на тебе – це ти чи ні?
(and even your mother / looks at you with suspicion – / is it you or not?) (S I, 1: 187)
This encounter of the subject (the poetic self) and the object of memory (home) reveals that both have become different. While the speaker attests to the change in the home, his mother attests to changes in him. The poem poses the question of whether it is possible to coincide with one’s own past. Stus grounds the imagery of this text in specific detail, but even this concreteness does not secure the certainty of sameness. Incidentally, the speaker replicates the experiment that Kierkegaard’s Constantin Constantius undertakes in Repetition. Just as Kierkegaard’s character seeks to re-enact in detail his previous journey to Berlin, the speaker in Stus’s poem goes back home to ascertain the possibility of the true return. The opening question frames it precisely as an experiment: ‘Will it be possible / to come back home this time or not?’ The possibility of homecoming primarily signifies the possibility of the sameness of ‘home’, which consists not in its various material paraphernalia but rather in the subject’s specific experience of it. The fact that the poem poses a series of questions and yet gives no answers betrays that a violation of sameness has already happened. The experiment of Stus’s poem, just like that of Constantin’s, shows that repetition of the same is impossible. In the poem ‘Ia blukav mistom svoiei iunosti...’ (‘I was wandering in the city of my youth...’), which Stus eventually incorporated into the Kyiv version of Palimpsests, the
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speaker finds himself similarly estranged from ‘the city of [his] youth’, which has undergone significant changes and now meets him with new ‘avenues, hotels, streets, monuments, stadiums, and trees’. In this new landscape, he admits, ‘heohrafiia vtrachena’ (‘geography has been lost’; S, I, 1: 193). Here Stus’s lyrical subject grounds metaphysical disorientation in a specific urban landscape. Yet while he describes the transformations of his hometown in detail, what is really at stake is the subject himself:
Сподівався зустріти бодай себе отут, де струменіє фонтан, лямований штучним мармуром. Марно. Нема. Пропалий безвісти.
(I was hoping to meet at least myself / right here, where flows the fountain, / engraved by artificial granite. / In vain. / Gone. / Gone missing.) (S I, 1: 193)
Despite the unobtrusive qualifier ‘at least’, it is precisely the memory of himself that the poetic subject searches for in this familiar yet altered place. The self he hopes to meet belongs to the past. The very image of ‘the city of [his] youth’ blends time and space, and offers a chronotope of a kind: while the ‘city’ exists in a specific time, the ‘youth’ belongs only to the city, and neither is conceivable without the other. The speaker fails to find his double, yet he effectively turns into a double within himself in the lines that follow in the poem: ‘Znialysia v nebo lehki vysotni budynky, / a ty bilia nykh – malenkyi-malenkyi’ (‘The light high-rise houses have taken off into the sky, / and you are very very small next to them’, emphasis mine). ‘I’ suddenly turns into ‘you’, as the poetic subject becomes alienated from himself, as if seeing himself from a distance. I examine thoroughly such self-doubling in the next chapter, yet it is worth noting here that the estrangement of Stus’s poetic subject is related to ‘the uncanny’, a pregnant notion of psychoanalytic theory. Freud explains the uncanny through the anxiety that one experiences when the familiar (not without its reference to ‘family’) turns into the unfamiliar, as ‘that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’.195 He suggests that the German word for the uncanny, unheimlich (literally, ‘unhomely’) is closely linked with its opposite, heimlich (‘homely’), and shows how it stems
195 Sigmund Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, in Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVII (1917-1919), trans. and ed. by James Strachey, 24 vols (London: The Hogarth Press, 1999), pp. 217-56 (p. 219).
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from this opposite. Stus’s poem enacts this transformation in notably similar terms. Freud links the notion of unheimlich to ‘the compulsion to repeat’. Freud’s repetition provides a counterpoint to the concept of repetition in Kierkegaard and Deleuze. It implies the urge to re-live over and over the same traumas of the past. In ‘I was wandering...’ the speaker returns to the familiar that becomes different and thereby unfamiliar and uncanny. Yet in another poem, which Stus specifically entitles ‘Vertannia’ (‘Returning’, or even ‘Homecoming’), the poet makes his signature move and reverses the situation. ‘Homecoming’ echoes, both thematically and structurally, Aleksandr Blok’s notable poem ‘Noch, ulitsa, fonar, apteka’ (‘Night, street, street light, drugstore’, 1912). Similarly to Blok’s poem, the same landscape bookends Stus’s text:
Перерізане світлом вікно вулиці – біле по білому аж до болю. Насип. Далеке шосе. Машини. I небо вологе – над.
(The window of the street cut through / with light – white on white / painfully. / Embankment. / Distant highway. / Cars. / And the wet sky – above.) (S I, 1: 175)
The speaker’s subsequent observation establishes a clear connection between the return to this place and his identity:
Шлях у себе: вабить (уже закритий), відкривається (на розлуці).
(Path into (your)self: / [it] tempts (already closed) / [it] opens up (upon separation).) (S I, 1: 175)
Homecoming, then, brings about a paradox: it tempts the speaker as a way to re-establish his own image, and at the same time conceals this image when he approaches it. The image, in fact, only emerges post factum as a memory of what has never been. The reason for the speaker’s anxiety in ‘Homecoming’ is seemingly opposite to that of ‘I was wandering...’: it is not the coming back to the different, but rather the unsettling return to the same (similarly to Blok’s poem: ‘Vse budet tak. Iskhoda net’ (‘Everything will stay the same. There is no way
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out’)):196 Душе, шалій. Скільки не повертайся (черга даремних спроб)
(Rage, soul. / However hard you try to return / (a series of futile attempts)) (S I, 1: 175)
Yet as Freud suggests, sameness produces an uncanny feeling, which Stus’s poetic subject precisely describes as such in the poem: ‘zachudovane’ connotes the idea of the uncanny.197 Freud explains that ‘whatever reminds us of this inner repetition-compulsion is perceived as uncanny’ (p. 238). The theme of homecoming, which recurs in Joyful Cemetery, continues in Dichtenszeit. Similarly to ‘Homecoming’, ‘Zapliushchu ochi...’ (‘I will close my eyes...’) (the longest poem in the collection, at 164 lines) interweaves the material and the metaphysical in the poetic subject’s attempt to return:
Заплющу очі – темінь. Навмання ітиму вслід за тугою. Дорого повернення – яка ти невпізнанна! Усе бо стало сторч, і все – чуже. А ти іди. Повернення своє відшукуй ген за віддаллю чекання. Старі будинки, ніби обгорілі. Глухий завулок. Балка. Терикон.
(I will close my eyes – [there will be] but darkness. I will / haphazardly follow my longing. Oh road / of returning – you are so unrecognisable! / For everything has turned upside down and all is alien. / But you must go. You must search for / your returning over there, beyond the distance of waiting. / Old houses, they are as if burnt down. / Secluded backstreet. The ravine. The slagheap.) (DZ: 168)
196 See Aleksandr Blok, Polnoie sobraniie sochinenii i pisem v 20-ti tomakh. Tom 3: Stikhotvoreniia (1907- 1916) (Moskva: Nauka, 1997), p. 23. For discussion of Stus’s textual interplay with Blok’s poem and other instances of Stus drawing upon its syntactic structures see Kolodkevych, Variatyvnist, p. 76, and Mykhailova, ‘Vasyl Stus i rosiiska literatura’, p. 118-9. 197 Freud describes his own uncanny experience of coming back to the same place: ‘Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a while without being directed, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, but only to arrive yet a third time by devious paths in the same place. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to abandon my exploratory walk and get straight back to the piazza I had left a short while before’ (p. 237).
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The tangible details of the familiar landscape (‘Secluded backstreet. The ravine. The slagheap’, again reminiscent of the syntactic structure in Blok’s poem) serve as anchors and a projection of the speaker’s memory. At the same time, recollection proves problematic, because what Stus’s speaker intends to recollect does not bear a resemblance to itself. Like ‘Will it be possible...’, this poem intimates the estrangement of the poetic subject: in returning he realises that what he seeks to recollect is ‘unrecognisable’ and ‘alien’. Yet in the same poem the speaker endeavours to own the impossibility of recollection and makes it, illogically yet convincingly, desirable:
Мокрий сніг, і збоку надбігає жовтий вогник. Реве літак. Заходить маячня. Де небо? Зорі де? Навколо – безкрай, і так незатишно! Лише зблудивши, ти пізнаєш себе.
(Wet snow, / a yellow spark comes closer from the side. / The roar of a plane. Delirium sets in. / Where is the sky? Where are the stars? There is / no-land around and [it is] so unsettling! Only by getting lost / do you come to know yourself.) (DZ: 169)
The place the poetic subject longs for not only loses its sameness but vanishes altogether. In the final two lines, the speaker makes an abrupt shift. Whereas at the beginning of the poem he conjures up the image of a road that leads him back (both home and into himself), here he asserts that only by losing this road can he come to know himself (the imperfective form ‘piznaiesh’ emphasises the continual nature of this process). The recollection implies a stable identity to be recollected, a sort of sameness to come back to. For this very reason it precludes the self from becoming. It is a form of knowledge rather than existence. By not following any road (by ‘getting lost’) the poetic subject enters the realm of the uncertain, which liberates him from a fixed image of the self, while at the same time imposing the uncertainty of selfhood. In the poems from Palimpsests written after 1972, memory continues to play a crucial role for the poetic subject, serving as both a healing remedy and a distressing burden. A cluster of commonly cited poems explicitly address the ambivalent nature of remembering, where even the first lines (which simultaneously serve as their titles) furnish a clear idea of this ambiguity: ‘Skhylys do mushli spohadiv – і slukhai...’ (‘Bend down to the seashell of memories and listen...’, P: 33), ‘Idy v kubeltse spohadu – zohriisia!..’ (‘Go to the nest of
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recollection and warm yourself!..’, P: 38), ‘Verny do mene, pamiate moia!..’ (‘My memory, come back to me!..’, P: 39), and yet ‘Het spohady – spered ochei...’ (‘Memories – get out of my sight...’, P: 16). Most poems evoke hardly any specific images to which the poetic subject could hold on to. As Anna Berehulak aptly puts it, these are poems ‘pro spomyny, [iaki] samykh spomyniv ne zobrazhu[iut]’ (‘about memories, which do not describe the memories themselves’, emphasis in the original).198 Yet they still impose the duty of remembrance. Rubchak notes that ‘Stus napoliahaie na iakomus svoieridnomu imperatyvi pamiati: pamiataty vin musyt za vsiaku tsinu, nenache pamiat tse iedyna doshka dlia poriatunku dlia liudyny, shcho tone’ (‘Stus insists on a certain peculiar imperative to remember: he must remember at any cost, as if memory is the only rescue remedy for a drowning person’).199 Berehulak insightfully employs the psychoanalytic notion of repression to explain this incongruous juxtaposition of the imperative to remember and the absence of concrete memories: ‘bliokuvannia detaliv pamiati umozhlyvliuie samozberihannia poetovoho “ia” pered nadmirnoiu chitkistiu svitu, iakyi yomu vzhe nedostupnyi’ (‘the blocking of the details of memory enables the self-preservation of the poet’s “I” in the face of the overwhelming concreteness of the world that is no longer available to him’) (p. 58). Berehulak also rightly points out that an important way for Stus’s poetic subject to oppose the denial of the world to him is to ‘amplify’ this denial. Just as Stus’s lyrical self seeks to own the impossibility of recollecting by deliberately moving away from recollection (‘Only by getting lost / do you come to know yourself’), he also combats the external repression by deliberately repressing his own memories. While in his early poetry Stus’s poetic subject seeks recollection within his own memory, in later poems from Palimpsests the Other becomes a significant repository of the subject’s authentic image. Going back to images of his family means going back to himself. The Other provides the possibility for the restoration of the speaker’s identity, enacting Martin Buber’s idea that ‘[m]an becomes an I through a You’,200 as Stus’s lyrical subject reconstitutes himself through his wife:
я в тобі єдиній собі вертаю певність, що живий і жив, і житиму, щоб пам’ятати
198 Anna Berehulak, ‘Rolia pamiati u zberihanni identychnosty ta poetychnoho “ia”’, in Stus iak tekst, ed. by Marko Pavlyshyn (Melbourne: Viddil slavistyky universytetu imeni Monasha, 1992), p. 58. 199 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, p. 80. 200 Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 80.
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[...] Тобою я запізнав ті розстані, які нам доля не прощає. За тобою, спинив я часу плин. І кождодня вертаюся в витоки. Надто тяжко ступати безворотною дорогою, де втрачено початки і кінці.
(in you alone / I regain certainty that I am alive / and that I have lived, that I will live in order to remember [...] / Through you / I came to know the parting that fate does not forgive us. After you / I stopped the flow of time. And every day / I return to the origins. It is too hard / to walk the one-way path, / where all beginnings and ends have been lost)201
‘Ty des zhyvesh na pryzabutim berezi...’ (‘You live somewhere on a half-forgotten shore...’) (P: 67-8)
The Other, just as one’s own material past and the image of primordial unity preceding the subject, therefore serves as a source, however fragile, of recollection.
2.3. Repetition: Becoming, Desire, Neologisms
2.3.1. Imperfective Mode of Being
When, in his letter to Adelheim, Stus posits that ‘I must live, I must, to the capacity of my existentia’, he fashions existence as a ‘capacity’ (rather than essence) and thereby emphasises the potential of the self in the making of itself. Within repetition, the self looks for its authentic image not in the past (enacting the primordial essence), but in the future, the realm of uncertainty and creativity. In repetition, Kierkegaard postulates, ‘actuality, which has been, now comes into existence.’ Carlisle summarises that repetition denotes ‘an inward movement, an intensification; it is an actualizing movement, expressing a power of becoming’.202 Heidegger
201 Cf. Stus’s poem ‘As if a lion...’: ‘vid tebe vidmezhovanyi naviky, / i vsespohaduiu – nemov zhyvu’ (‘forever separated from you / I am incessantly remembering as if living’) (P: 103). These lines allude to Paul Celan. Cf. Celan’s poem ‘Lob der Ferne’ (‘In Praise of Distance’): ‘Ich bin du, wenn ich ich bin’ (‘I am you, when I am I’), which Stus translates as ‘tilky zalyshaiuchys soboiu, / mozhu skazaty: ia ie ty’ (‘only remaining myself, / I can say: I am you’) (S V). Similarly, Stus’s lines ‘ia vid tebe / daliiu, nablyzhaiuchys’ (‘I am moving away / from you by coming close to you') are reminiscent of Celan’s ‘Du bist so nah, als weiltest du nicht hier’ (‘You are as close as if you were not lingering here’) (‘Der Tauben weißeste...’, ‘The whitest of doves...’). I use Werner Hamacher’s translation. See the original German text and Hamacher’s translation in Werner Hamacher, ‘The Second Inversion: Movements of a Figure through Celan’s Poetry’, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985), 276-311 (p. 283). 202 Carlisle, Movements and Positions, p. 529. Carlisle shows that Kierkegaard’s category of repetition draws upon Aristotle’s notions of actuality (energeia), potentiality (dunamis), and kinesis (roughly, ‘movement’) as
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similarly defines repetition exactly as the ‘repetition of a possibility of existence’ (emphasis mine) rather than a mechanic reiteration of the past. In the same vein, Sartre emphasises the capacity of the self to transcend itself, speaking of ‘the double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence’.203 (Kierkegaard’s Constantin similarly states that ‘in the sphere of freedom [...] the next thing constantly emerges, not by virtue of immanence but of transcendence’).204 Unlike authenticity-as-sameness (returning to the pre- existent essence), this model of authenticity casts authenticity as difference. Within this latter model, “‘the true self’ [...] is an on-going narrative construction [...] What is at stake in the ideal of authenticity is not being true to some antecendently given nature [...] but being a person of a particular sort’.205 Existence, therefore, problematises the possibility of ultimate self-knowledge, as nothing can remedy the gap between the present and the future. Stus expressly uses the notion of repetition in one of his poems:
Вкипiла пiд ногами магма, й ствердiла товщ i магма почувань, i прагнення ствердiлостi – повтори. … А змучений повторами, натрудиш з’ятрiлу душу
(The magma has boiled under your feet, / the mass has hardened and so has the magma of feelings / and the striving for firmness – repetitions... / Exhausted by repetitions, you will tire / the harrowed soul).206
‘Liudyna fliuher...’ (‘Man is a weather wane...’) (S I, 1: 174)
While it is not certain that Stus alludes specifically to the philosophical category of repetition here, this passage bears significant affinities with this concept. Characteristically, it stages a
‘the transition from potentiality to actuality’, ‘a movement of actualization’, which Kierkegaard transposes from the physical world into the realm of the self. See Clare Carlisle, ‘Kierkegaard’s Repetition: The Possibility of Motion’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 13:3 (2005), 521-41 (p. 527). 203 Being and Nothingness, p. 56. Somogy Varga and Charles Guignon helpfully explain this postulation: ‘As transcendence, I am always more than I am as facticity because, as surpassing my brute being, I stand before an open range of possibilities for self-definition in the future’. See Somogy Varga, and Charles Guignon, ‘Authenticity’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Edward N. Zalta, 11 September 2014,
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tension between solidity and fluidity, a common tug of war throughout Stus’s whole poetic corpus. Compare Stus’s lines from 1969: ‘vyiavy – samostraty. / Kamianii. Kamianii. Kamianii. / Tilky tverd – symvol samozberezhennia’ (‘manifestations [are] self-executions. / Harden. Harden. Harden. / The [earthly] firmament alone knows [what] self-preservation [means]).207 ‘Man is a weather wane...’, written around the same time as ‘Learn to wait...’, treats solidity not as a conceivable resolution but specifically as a desire: prahnennia (‘striving’). Much in line with ‘repetition’, Stus repeats the image of magma, first as part of the physical world and second as part of the self: the magma beyond his body, under his feet, and ‘the magma of feelings’. Instead of acquiring stable solidity (connoting a fixed image of the self within recollection), the poetic subject is bound to go through an unceasing series of repetitions. In ‘Man is a weather wane...’ the speaker further asserts the succinct formula ‘[s]amopiznannia – samozahasannia’ (‘coming-to-know-oneself [is] self-fading-away’), which, incidentally, subverts the Socratic imperative ‘know thyself’ (also repeatedly evoked by Skovoroda). The closing lines of the poem make clear the impossibility of such Platonic self-knowledge:
Зухвало як – цуратися душi i навертати й повнитись. I вiчно летiти в сонмi самопочезань.
(‘How daring it is – to run away from [your] soul / and to return and to become filled. And to fly / eternally in the host of self-disappearances’) (S I, 1: 174)
The verb povnytys prefigures Stus’s later iconic neologism samosoboiunapovnennia (‘filling- (one)self-with-[the]-self’). Both return and the process of becoming filled give way to the repetition of self-disappearance (the poet uses the plural form of the word, samopochezan). Stus’s lines bring to mind Heidegger’s discussion of Being-towards-death and totality. Heidegger postulates: ‘That Dasein should be together only when its “not-yet” has been filled up [aufgefüllt] is so far from the case that it is precisely then that Dasein is no longer.’208 Stus’s samopochezannia belong not to where ‘Dasein is no longer’ but rather to the very existence of the self for which ‘navertaty i povnytys’ are illusory remedies. ‘I will close my eyes...’ offers a dynamic poetic articulation of repetition, which yet again appears against the background of a Platonic sensibility:
207 See the poem ‘Vchysia chekaty druzhe...’ (‘Learn to wait, my friend...’), in ZD: 31. 208 Being and Time, p. 287.
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Бо унизу – праджерело. Початки твоїх початків. Далі – у тепло, і темінь і вологу і незрушність малого паростка. Отам – твій діл. Там – нерозпочаткована дорога. Там – той бік – тебе. Той бік – досвітів. Ждання – то крику витягнута гума і за крайболю видовжена геть. Шукання – незаповнювана вирва самонезадоволень
(For down there – there is the primeval source. The beginnings / of your beginnings. Further – into warmth, / and the darkness and moisture and stillness / of a little sprout. Over there – there is your vale. / There – there is the unbegun road. / There – beyond – yourself. Beyond – [are] the before-worlds. / Waiting is the extended rubber of screaming, / which has been stretched far beyond the edge-of-pain. / Searching is the unfillable crater / of self-dissatisfactions) (DZ: 170-1)
Here the collision of recollection and repetition becomes most conspicuous. The final quatrain, which might at first seem to flow organically from the preceding lines, in fact subverts them, both semantically and stylistically. The opening lines promise the ‘primeval source’ and ‘the unbegun road’, and through a series of deictics (unyzu, tvoikh, dali, (o)tam, toi, tvii, tebe) ground us in the stable position of the subject. The repeated spatial deictic tam orientates the poetic subject and provides a route. Yet even within these initial lines, the stitches of supposed wholeness, which telegraphic sentences and numerous dashes embody, begin to tear. Devoid of a subject, the closing quatrain enacts through the extended flowing sentences the very process of the becoming of the self. These lines capture the moment of tension of being in-between (eloquently metaphorised as rubber). The poetic subject dwells in the imperfective mode of being, as it were, which is grammatically reflected in the imperfective nezapovniuvanyi (‘unfillable’, rather than unfilled). This adjective provides an additional gloss to Stus’s neologism samosoboiunapovnennia (‘filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’): it does not presuppose a set image of ‘I’, for the self ultimately remains ‘unfillable’, much in tune with Heidegger’s emphasis on the intrinsic ‘not-yetness’ of the self and the impossibility of being filled up existentially. ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ provides an elucidating counterpoint here: the equilibrium in Svidzinskyi’s poetry, Stus notes, is characterised by ‘nezadumanist, samonapovnenist і nevyiavlennia’ (‘non-thinking, being-full-with-oneself, and non- manifestation’, emphasis mine) (S IV: 356). The imperfective ending -nnia implies incessant
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movement, in contrast to the static -nist, which describes a fixed state. Furthermore, the two selves in Stus’s neologism, samo and soboiu, expose the duality of the self-reflexive subject. In line with repetition, bound to be ‘recollected forward’, as Kierkegaard puts it, the speaker enters the uncertain realm of the future instead of looking into the past, and moving from the ‘unbegun road’ of recollection to the ‘crater’ of repetition. The notion of samonezadovolennia, which Stus uses in the plural to signify the unfinished nature of the self, likely alludes to Jaspers’s essay ‘Goethes Menschlichkeit’ (‘Goethe’s Humanity’), which forms part of the volume taken from Stus upon his arrest. The poet would have been familiar with Jaspers’s characterisation of Goethe in the essay:
sein [Goethe’s] Leben [ist] ein ständiges Sichnichtgenügen. […] Dieses Menschsein ist nicht ein eindeutiges Gutsein, ist nicht Inordnungsein und nicht Harmonischsein, sondern ist Suchen und Sichwiederherstellen
(his [Goethe‘s] life [is] a constant self-dissatisfaction [literally, self-not-enoughing]. [...] This being human is not unequivocally being good, it does not mean being alright or being in harmony, rather it is searching and self-restoring) (emphasis mine) 209
Stus’s image of Goethe, as we have seen, is precisely ‘being in harmony’. The poet would perhaps have most agreed with the self-restoring part in Jaspers’s proposition. Stus draws upon Jaspers’s definition to establish ‘self-dissatisfactions’ of his own, which transgress Goethe’s return to the essence of the self by foregrounding instead the making of the self. Stus’s poem ‘The unity of souls – what is it?..’ from Winter Trees, adds the crucial element of variability to the understanding of repetition in Stus’s poetry. It also alludes to Goethe:
О наломи гіркоти, що трудять груди! Ти – недолюдина, хтось вигадав лиш час – задля покут, щоб скверну німоти зітерши з уст, лиш причаститися первоглагола, котрий не може вгамувати спраги поздовжньої, як прямовисний лет, котрий вже не жалить, а тільки вабить, а тільки врочить – втраченим початком, сподіваним кінцем.
209 Jaspers, Rechenschaft und Ausblick, p. 62.
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Ти – варіант. Невчасний гість. З запізненням зустрів тебе твій вік. А ти прийшов зарання, і, доростаючи, лиш серцем покривив. І чим ти став? І чим ти можеш стати? 210
(Oh the breakages of bitterness, / which tire out your chest. You are a not-yet-man, / someone simply invented time – for repentance, / so that, having wiped the blasphemy of muteness from your lips, / you could touch the primal word, / which fails to satisfy the thirst / that is lengthwise like a vertical flight, / which stings no more, but seduces / and tempts – with the lost beginning, / with the anticipated end. / You are a variant. / You’re an untimely guest. Your age has welcomed you in / with delay. You have come too early, / and, reaching yourself, you have contorted your heart. / And what have you become? And what can you become?) (ZD: 18)
The poetic subject is acutely aware of the problem of becoming: the self is a possibility, a project in and of itself, never at a fixed point but rather always on a journey. In the previous chapter, I showed how the line ‘someone simply invented time – for repentance’ is underpinned by Stus’s understanding of time as the corruption of wholeness. The ‘bitterness’ in this passage stems from the same poignant realisation that, since the self is already in existence, it can coincide neither with its past nor with its future. Winter Trees contains a related poem characteristically titled ‘Z hirkotoiu...’ (‘With Bitterness...’), which reveals this fragmenting nature of existentia: ‘Iak koloti rany, my prahnemo vyhoitys. / Ale rany buly ranishe naneseni?’ (‘Like puncture wounds we seek to heal ourselves. / But the wounds were inflicted earlier?’) (ZD: 51). The image of the contorted heart (‘sertsem pokryvyv’) similarly points to the impossibility of coinciding with the image of one’s authentic self. In using the notion of pervohlahol Stus alludes to Goethe’s cycle ‘Urworte. Orphisch’. In Russian translations of the cycle Urworte is often rendered exactly as pervoglagoly. For the poetic subject, pervohlahol, which denotes an illusionary primordial image, ‘fails to satisfy the thirst’ that ‘tempts – with the lost beginning, / with the anticipated end’. The beginning has been lost whilst the end is in sight. However, the central dictum of the poem ‘The unity of souls...’ is arguably to be found in the short yet illuminating assertion ‘[y]ou are a variant’, which cuts to the very heart of repetition. A variant is not a copy, as it does not have the original to replicate. In a sense, it is not accurate to speak of a variant of (an object), as each new variant changes the very nature
210 Stus is likely to have written this poem between 1966 and 1969, before his arrest. Poems like this problematise any straightforward links between Stus’s imprisonment and his poetry.
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of the object. A variant of the sonnet as a genre changes the whole definition of the sonnet as such. When Stus defines ‘you’ as ‘a variant’, he accepts that there is no original to come back to, which stands in contrast to Stus’s notion of pershotvir in his essay on Svidzinskyi. While the poetic subject searches for this original, he ultimately finds but a position of the self, which never acquires totality. The existence of variants entails a loss of unity. A variant cannot exist without another variant, because it is only in relation to its counterpart that it can be perceived as such. The notion of a variant, furthermore, intimates a subtle relationship between the psychological and the textual. The very structure of Palimpsests reflects the ‘variablity’ of the poetic subject. As I mentioned in the introduction, not only is there no canonical version of the collection, but it also contains numerous variants of individual poems and lines. It would indeed be difficult to imagine how a stable structure with titles and dates could adequately accommodate the changing musical keys of Stus’s poetry.211 Discussing the structure of Palimpsests, Kolodkevych helpfully evokes the musical genre of fugue:
За таким музичним принципом фуги будуються й тексти В. Стуса періоду ‘Палімпсестів’, коли через варіанти тексту певна тема [...] породжує одразу множинність текстових ходів, різноманіття асоціативних рядів, багате образне та емоційне насичення.
(Stus’s texts of the Palimpsests period are constructed similarly to the composition principle of fugue, where a certain theme, through different variants of the text [...] at once produces a plurality of textual moves, a diversity of associations, [and] rich metaphorical and emotional density).212
Pointing to this same variability, Shevelov draws another revealing comparison – from the domain not of music but of visual art:213
у Кльода Моне знайдемо десятки картин, що відтворюють той самий портал руанського собору [...] в поезії Стуса повторюється той самий образ колимських сосен, колимської скупої весни, переходячи з одного вірша до другого. Його поезія не прагне екстенсивного поширення. Але тут і велика різниця. Моне, коли він тримався того самого об’єкта, шукав його зміни в зміні освітлення. Для Стуса і освітлення [...] теж річ занадто зовнішня. Його лірика від образу баченого світу йде до поетового почуття, до внутрішнього.
211 Incidentally, such structuring of Stus’s writing provides a notable contrast to the organised composition of the books, elegies and sonnets of Rilke, to whose works scholars commonly compare Stus’s poetry. Of course, this stylistic difference only enacts the poets’ contrasting visions of the self. 212 Kolodkevych, Variatyvnist, p. 144. 213 Shevelov finds a comparison from the sphere of music too, comparing Stus to Brahms: ‘V pevnomu sensi Stus pyshe v bilshosti svoikh poezii [...] odnu, svoiu, vlasnu symfoniiu’ (‘In a sense, in the majority of his poems [...] Stus writes the same, his very own symphony’) (‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 21).
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(in Claude Monet’s art, there are dozens of paintings representing the same portal of the Rouen Cathedral [...] in Stus’s poetry, the same images of Kolyma’s pine trees or its meagre spring are repeated, moving from one poem to another. His poetry does not seek extensive expansion. There is a significant difference [between Stus and Monet] in this regard. When Monet sticks with the same object, he looks for its changes in the changing light. For Stus, even light is too external. His poetry goes from an image in the visible world to the poet’s emotions, to the inner.)
The repetition of images reflects and reinforces the fundamental repetition within the poetic subject, his changing emotional and spiritual experiences. In Stus’s poetry, repetition serves as a vehicle of intensive deepening, in contrast to ‘extensive broadening’, as Shevelov puts it (p. 21). Monet’s impressionist series indeed vividly instantiates this repetition-cum- intensification, and Deleuze similarly advances through Monet’s water lilies the proposition that repetition ‘do[es] not add a second or a third time to the first, but carr[ies] the first time to the “nth” power’.214 Shevelov rightly foregrounds the changes in the subject, in line with Monet’s own explanation that he was ‘seeking to render [his] impressions of the most fleeting effects’ (emphasis mine).215 Similarly, for Stus, of importance are not repetitions of an object (such as a water lily or haystack), but rather repetitions within the subject. The dynamic plane of existence fundamentally differs from the static plane of objects: ‘ide repetytsiia strazhdannia, / premiera samopochezannia’ (‘the rehearsal of suffering is underway, / [as is] the premiere of self-disappearing’) (‘Tu Keliiu...’, ‘That cell...’. P: 177). The notion of repetition is as if embedded in the very image of repetytsiia, a never-ending existential rehearsal of suffering. The fact that Stus’s alternative version of the final line is ‘premiera samopochynannia’ (‘the premiere of self-beginning’) (Pa: 319) highlights the close relationship between these two processes (even their paradoxical identity) and the unfinished nature of the project of the self. Furthermore, the image of rehearsal brings to the fore the performative aspect of such becoming. Reflecting in his letters upon a certain repetitiveness of his images, Stus remarks that in the circumstances of captivity these recurrent images serve as ‘znaky svoiei pevnosti, samozberezhennia’ (‘signs of [my] certainty and self-preservation’) and ‘opertia’ (‘support’).216 However, while this observation holds true for the poet himself, repetition,
214 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. by Paul Patton (London: Athlone, 1994), p. 1. 215 From a letter to Evan Charteris, dated 21 June 1926, quoted in: Steven Z. Levine, ‘Monet’s Series: Repetition, Obsession’, October, 37 (1986), 65-75 (p. 65). Offering an insightful discussion of Monet’s own struggle between recollection and repetition, Levine proposes to regard Monet as ‘a melancholy philosopher of repetition as irrecuperable difference’ (p. 73). 216 See Stus’s letter to his family dated 7-10 December 1975, in S VI, 1: 198.
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present as it is on different levels in Palimpsests, functions differently in his poetic discourse: it removes any ‘certainty’ by offering instead numerous variants. Deleuze’s notion of ‘the first time’ (which, through repetition, is brought to the ‘nth power’) is not applicable to the subject, where the ‘firstness’ of any image of the self is problematic. While Stus’s poetic subject is looking for the first image, the original, he fails to find it in the shifting kaleidoscope of variants. In seeking recollection, he realises that the origin is missing, and that all he has at his disposal are the constant changes that he is bound to go through.
2.3.2. Originary Lack: The Desire for Sameness
The poem ‘My rado polyshaiem vlasni hnizda...’ (‘We gladly leave our nests...’) elucidates the dynamics of lack and desire in Palimpsests:
Ми радо полишаєм власні гнізда і, випускаючи бажання в лет, все квапимось до самопочезання, мов шлях од себе – справжній для душі. [...] О це протистояння напівдуш – цих двох кавалків серця, що надію все не доточать спогадом, а спогад зі сподіванням в’яжуть уводно! Рознапрямкована глуха душе! Затиснутій минулим і майбутнім, тобі ані знайтись, ні загубитись – ти мого тіла яро-чорна тінь. [...] ніяк не виблагаєш поєднання душі із тілом, радості – з журбою, життя зі смертю, неба із землею, тебе на безголів’я світ несе ошуканим твоїм бажанням власним. Чи ти ж ще чуєш прикорні свої?217
217 Cf. the poem ‘Komu zhyty, a komu ne zhyty...’ (‘Who will live and who won’t...’): ‘Slaven, Bozhe, bud za vsi napasti [...] bo ne dav nam tyshi kamianoi, / kamianoho spokoiu ne dav, / ale, podilyvshy nas nadvoie, / iedynytysia zoboviazav’ (‘God, may glory be yours for all the hardships [...] for you have given us neither stonelike silence, / nor stonelike repose, / but, having split us into two, / [you] have obliged us to unite [ourselves]’) (DZ: 305).
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(We gladly leave our nests / and, setting our desires aflight, / we hasten our self-disappearance, / as if the path away from oneself is true for the soul [...] Oh this confrontation of half-souls, / of these two fragments of the heart, which corrupt hope / with memories, and tie the memories / to hope! / Multi- directed deaf soul! / Hemmed in between the future and the past, / you will neither find yourself, nor lose yourself, / you are the dark black shadow of my body [...] you fail to reach the unity / of soul and body, / of happiness and sorrow, of the earth and sky; / deceived by your own desire, / you are swirled by the world. / Can you still feel your origins?) (DZ: 80)
It is impossible to make the self whole again (in fact, the recuperation of wholeness would mean undoing the self altogether). A multiplying series of dichotomies takes over the poem and produces tension. Binary oppositions, common in Stus’s poetry,218 reflect his Baroque sensibility and his intertextual affinity with Skovoroda, whose work centres on duality, as pointed out earlier: ‘Now you see two [versions] of everything: two [versions] of water, two [versions] of the earth. All creation has now been divided into two parts for you. Who divided it for you? God. He has divided everything in two for you’. In ‘We gladly leave...’, Stus gives a similar Baroque catalogue, yet what distinguishes the poet’s list from that of Skovoroda is that the division happens not ‘for you’, but within you. Indeed, Stus’s poetic subject internalises the duality: ‘tse protystoiannia napivdush – / tsykh dvokh kavalkiv sertsia’ (‘this opposition of half-souls – / these two fragments of the heart’). Whereas for Skovoroda the duality foregrounds the primacy of the ‘true essence’, in ‘We gladly leave...’ none of the binary counterparts prevail. Instead, the poem articulates the unresolved (and unresolvable) opposition on many levels, in particular between the past and the future, recollection and repetition. In Stus’s text the rupture within the self is bound up with desire, which permeates Palimpsests in various shapes and guises – as, for instance, bazhannia, protobazhannia, zhadannia, volinnia, derzannia, prahnennia, zghaha (‘згага’), zhaha (‘жага’), spraha, poryv, rvinnia, volia, zhada. Apart from directly evoking desire, Stus’s poetic subject also implies it via a number of recurrent images and motifs, especially those of trace/track and edge/border, both of which evince the non-coincidence of the self. As Sartre and Lacan explain, desire has a fundamental connection with absence. Sartre argues that ‘[t]he existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human reality
218 See, for example, Svitlana Sakovets, ‘Mifopoetyka tvorchosti Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovi zapysky Natsionalnoho universytetu ‘Ostrozka akademiia’, 10 (2008), 428-35; Motria Myshanych, ‘Binarna opozytsiia iak sposib poetychnoho samovyrazhennia Vasylia Stusa’, Aktualni problemy ukrainskoi literatury i folkloru, 6 (2001), 120-31. Although in the latter piece the author comes to the questionable (and symptomatic) conclusion that ‘the radical polarity of images and ideas in Stus’s poems demonstrates the clarity and unambiguity of the conceptual, aesthetic, and moral positions of the author’.
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is a lack’, which he describes as a ‘lack of being.’219 He adds that ‘[i]t is through human reality that lack comes to things in the form of “potency,” of “incompletion,” of “suspension,” of “potentiality”’ (p. 196). Similarly, one of the central concepts of Lacan’s psychoanalysis is his notion of manque (‘lack’), which he explicates in the following terms: ‘Desire is a relation of being to lack. The lack is the lack of being properly speaking. It isn’t the lack of this or that, but lack of being whereby the being exists’.220 Lack, in other words, is ‘the metonymy of the lack of being’.221 The possibility of desire, therefore, reveals a disturbed wholeness, which no longer provides totality. Stus’s speaker feels nostalgia for coincidence, an after-image of supposed wholeness and selfsameness, which, in fact, have never been. Sameness in Stus’s poetry exists not as such, but specifically as the desire for sameness. Because the pursuit takes place within the subject, the sameness is sought after from the position of its absence:
Тиші дай: зупину. Або ж – самоповертання до роздоріж.
(Grant me silence: / an end. Or – [grant me] self-returning / to crossroads.)
‘O Bozhe, tyshi dai!..’ (‘Oh God, grant me silence!..’) (DZ: 204)
Indeed, it is only to a crossroads that the self can ultimately return. The origin is not firm, solid, or certain; it is a question in itself.222 The movement of ‘self-returning to crossroads’ marks the inertia of returning, even though Stus’s speaker realises the emptiness of the beginning, which Heidegger and Derrida explain through the notions of die Spur and la trace, respectively, as signifying both ‘trace’ and ‘track’. Commenting on Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, Heidegger states that ‘even the trace [die Spur] of the holy has become unrecognizable. It remains undecided whether we still
219 Being and Nothingness, pp. 136-7. 220 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar. Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–55, trans. by Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: Norton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 223. 221 Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 259. Gerald Moore explains helpfully that Lacan’s theory articulates ‘a pre-ontological cut, a rupture that prevents the totalisation of being in any form of self-identity’. See Gerald Moore, Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011), p. 65. 222 In the poem ‘Svichado nochi vabyt liachnyi pohliad...’ (‘The mirror of the night attracts [my] frightened gaze...’), Stus comes back to the notion of samopovertannia, which the poetic voice perceives as a dreamlike image: ‘otsia utecha v samopovertannia – / tse niby vysnenyi v dytynstvi son’ (‘this escape into self-returning – / [it] is like a dream that was dreamt in childhood’) (DZ: 314). Cf. another variant of the first line: ‘otsia utecha het za sebekrai’ (‘this escape far beyond the-edge-of-self’) (P: 396).
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experience the holy as the track [die Spur] leading to the godhead of the divine, or whether we now encounter no more than a trace [eine Spur] of the holy’.223 Derrida uses the notion of la trace (similarly signifying both ‘track’ and ‘trace’ in French), one of the fundamental concepts of deconstruction: ‘The trace is not a presence but is rather the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates, displaces, and refers beyond itself. The trace has, properly speaking, no place, for effacement belongs to the very structure of the trace.’224 Derrida’s definition of la trace is in tune with his concept of différance as ‘the non-full, non-simple “origin”; [...] the structured and differing origin of differences’, revealing the originary lack.225 Stus repeatedly uses the notion of slid in Palimpsests, which also has a double meaning as someone’s ‘footstep’ (a track) and as the ‘trace’ of something.226 Perhaps most notably, in ‘Za chytanniam Iasunari Kavabaty’ (‘In reading Yasunari Kawabata...’), the speaker proclaims:
Посередині – стовбур літ, а обабоки – крона. Посередині – вічний слід (тінь ворушиться сонна).
(The trunk of years [is] in the middle, / and the crown [is] on either side. / The eternal trace/track [is] in the middle / (the dreamy shadow is moving).) (DZ: 18)
Here slid signifies both a track and a trace. The first two lines present the concrete physical images of trunk and crown. In the final lines, however, the poet substitutes these solid images with the immaterial trace/track and shadow. The first and third lines mirror each other, placing the trunk of years and the eternal trace/track into a relation of equivalence. In Palimpsests, Stus also repeatedly uses the notion stupaty u (vlasnyi) slid – ‘to step into (one’s own) steps’, which signifies a movement of entering into one’s authentic self.
223 ‘What Are Poets For’, p. 95. For the original German text see Martin Heidegger, ‘Wozu Dichter?’, in Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Band 5, Holzwege) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann), pp. 269-320 (p. 275). 224 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. by David Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 156. 225 Ibid., p.141. 226 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘Stupaiu v slid. Kudy zh tvoi slidy / proslalysia – do chorta chy do Boha?’ (‘I am following in [your] footsteps. So where do your footsteps / lead – to the devil or to God?, emphasis mine) (DZ: 240); ‘Tozh vyshepochy sprahlo, iak molytvu, / pereideni i vtracheni slidy, / shchob vydalosia davnie tykhym snom / i merekhtinniam vichnoho zhadannia’ (‘So whisper with thirst, like a prayer, / your crossed and lost track, / for the ancient past to appear as a quiet dream / and as the flickering of eternal craving’, emphasis mine) (P: 409; DZ: 288)
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The fundamental way in which desire finds its expression in Stus’s poetry is the recurrent, almost obsessive, motif of missing the self, the unsatisfied desire for sameness. We recall that in his preparatory drafts for ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, Stus posits that ‘poetry is a self-loss. It is looking for the sense of one’s own existence in a roundabout way’. Stus’s poetic subject is attracted to the centre, to his own supposed authentic self, yet he constantly avoids it, because this centre represents a metonymy of totality, which the subject can never grasp in its completeness. Just as the origin stands for an ‘origin of differences’ (as per Derrida), this centre remains but an image of the centre, a centre of differences, unlike, for example, Goethe’s lines from ‘Vermächtnis’ discussed earlier: ‘There you will find your firm / support, [one] without harmful doubts’. Rubchak points out the split of Stus’s poetic subject into ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, exposing self-doubling, which reflects the absence of ‘metafizychnyi tsentr, shcho ioho prahnuly tezh chyslenni inshi poety, napryklad, Rilke chy Yeats’ (‘the metaphysical centre sought by many other poets, such as Rilke or Yeats’).227 However, there is an important difference here between Stus and Rilke. In the poem ‘Schwerkraft’ (‘The Force of Gravity’, 1924) Rilke’s speaker pronounces: ‘Mitte, wie du aus allen / dich ziehst [...] Mitte, du Stärkste’ (‘Center, how you draw yourself / out of all things [...] Center, strongest of all!).228 Perhaps alluding to Rilke’s image, Stus also refers to gravity, yet to a different end:
Неначе стріли, випущені в безліт, згубилися між обидвох країв, проваджені не силою тятив, а спогадом про образи почезлі [...] Так душі наші [...] В дорозі довгих самопроминань під знадою земного притягання проносяться від ранку до смеркання.
(As if arrows, shot into the space, / [which have] got lost between the two ends, / carried not by the force of their bowstrings / but by the memory of vanished images [...] That is what our souls are like [...] On the road of continuous self-missing / under the attraction of gravity, / [they] flash from dawn to dusk’)
‘Nenache strily... (‘As if arrows...’) (P: 49)
227 ‘Peremoha’, p. 69. 228 See ‘What Are Poets For’, p. 102.
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Gravity represents one of Stus’s frequent metaphors drawn from the realm of physics. Stus complicates its logic by applying it to the plane of the self: memories, not physical characteristics, define movement in the poem. In fact, gravity provides an instrumental metaphor for the discussion of non-coincidence in Stus’s poetry. While the earth exerts a gravitational pull on the objects in its orbit (most notably, the moon), these objects do not fall to the earth because of inertial momentum, which keeps them at a distance from the earth. In other words, the objects are always attracted to the earth, but they miss it because of their velocity. ‘As if arrows...’ directly refers to this process, casting samopromynannia (‘self- missing’) as gravity. Just as the moon moves towards the earth but misses it, the self moves towards the supposed centre (essence) and yet never reaches it, remaining at a remove from itself, as the following lines foreground: ‘Otse zbavliannia dovhykh lit zhyttia / na vidstani od vitchyny і sebe’ (‘This spending of the long years of life / at a distance from the homeland and from oneself’) (‘This spending...’, P: 212). The theme of self-missing repeatedly recurs in Palimpsests and Stus’s poetry more generally.229 The poetic subject constantly reiterates the impossibility of coinciding with oneself. The images of the double movement of attraction to the centre and repulsion from it eloquently capture it: ‘Tsei shliakh do sebe’ (‘This path [lies] towards yourself’, P: 252), and its opposite: ‘Ne v sebe. Ty vid sebe – povertaiesh’ (‘Not into yourself. Away from yourself you turn’, DZ: 89), ‘Usi shliakhy – vid sebe. Povertai / teper nazad, piznavshy okrai sertsia’ (‘All the paths [lead] away from [yourself]. Now / turn back, having come to know the edge of [your] heart’, P: 402), ‘Mov shliakh od sebe – spravzhnii dlia dushi’ (‘As if the path away from [yourself] is the true path for [your] soul’, DZ: 80), to mention but a few. Stus’s repeated use of the images of self-missing and movement towards and from oneself throughout Palimpsests enacts on the level of structure the repetition inherent in these images. In trying to retrieve the origin, the poet becomes a cartographer of a kind, drawing a map with no clear centre, one akin to Deleuze and Guatarri’s centreless rhizome. The centre, as I have argued, only represents a phantomic lack, an idea of a centre never to be pinned down. For this reason, the poetic subject inevitably finds himself at a distance from it. In a
229 Cf., for example, Stus’s lines ‘І ia sebe z tym chasom promynaiu’ (‘And I am passing myself by with this time’) (ZD: 79), ‘U vlasne tilo uviity / dano lyshe nesamovytym’ (‘Only those who are frenzied / might be able to enter their own bodies’) (P: 100), ‘bo zh samopromynannia – tvii prydil’ (‘for missing yourself is your fate’) (DZ: 195), ‘Tse – torzhestvo: / nadii, promynan, i nablyzhen’ (‘This is a triumph: / of hoping, missing, and approaching’) (P: 8), ‘ta vzhe promynuv tebe [...] tvii chas’ (‘but your time has already missed you’) (P: 115).
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familiar gesture, he responds to the impossibility of self-coincidence by reinforcing this impossibility: ‘Rushai ubik, de spravzhnii kraii dushi’ (‘Move to the side, where the true edge of the soul is’).230 Stus’s lyrical subject, therefore, moves away from the imagined centre to the very margin of the map, which, as we shall see, constitutes not an ultimate edge but rather a fold. The poetic subject is on the move with no destination in sight:
ота зухвала згага самовтеч, жага згоряння, спалення, авто дафе. Та паморозь терпінь і вічна недоконаність дерзання, рух руху руху. [...] Ось ти є, непевносте. Оце ти й є, дорого, котра прожогом навертає нас до серця серця, ув аорти шалу
(that daring thirst for self-escapes, / the desire for flaring, and for burning, and for auto- / dafe. That hoar frost of endurance / and the eternal incompleteness of endeavour, / the movement of the movement of the movement. [...] Here you are, the road / that has so powerfully turned us straight / to the core of the heart, to the arteries of frenzy)
‘U temin snu....’ (‘The path submerges...’) (P: 78)
The passage pivots on the pregnant image of the ‘heart of heart’. In his analysis of unification and disunity in Stus’s poetry, Rubchak regards Stus’s ‘heart of heart’ as a manifestation of ‘the healing of “I”’ and ‘its unification with the universe’.231 Yet the passage above complicates this view. The polyptoton sertsia sertsia, incidentally reminiscent of Hamlet’s phrase ‘in my heart of heart’, serves as a phantomic centre, a destination rather than a stable locus.232 The poet uses the preposition do (‘towards’) and evokes his signature image of a road, which he explicitly associates with ‘uncertainty’. The accompanying image of aorty shalu (‘aortas of frenzy’) parallels sertsia sertsia grammatically but contrasts it semantically.
230 See the poem ‘Rushai ubik...’ (‘Move to the side...’, DZ: 233) Cf. the poem ‘Kokhana, shchoino ia distav vid tebe...’ (‘My love, I have just received...’): ‘Zhuvy-chekaiu, nibyto podosi / isnuiu v mezhysviti – skraiu smerti / і skraiu isnuvannia’ (‘I am living and waiting, as if I am still / existing in a between-world – at the margins of death / and at the margins of existence’) (DZ: 182). 231 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, p. 24. 232 Compare Stus’s letter dated 3 January 1974: ‘struktura nashoi zhyttovoi vytryvalosti potrebuie ne tilky nas [...] Ii treba shyrshoi ploshchi, tiiei, shcho zmistyla nashe sertse vlivo’ (‘the structure of our vitality wants not just us [...] It is in need of broader space, one that has displaced our heart to the left ’) (S VI, 2: 62).
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Whatever temporary harbour the heart of heart provides, its unnerving counterpart immediately calls it into question. The heart ceases to be an abstract metaphor and acquires a concrete physical, even biological, meaning, as if enacting the heartbeat through iambic tetrameter and (repeated) repetition: do sertsia sertsia, uv aorty shalu (stressed syllables underlined). What further problematises the unity suggested by Rubchak is that this passage, short as it is, contains three different instances of desire: zghaha, zhaha, and, most notably, vichna nedokonanist derzannia, which directly reveals an unsatisfied desire. Little could convey the incessant becoming in Stus’s poetry more vividly than the triple polyptoton rukh rukhu rukhu, which epitomises Stus’s extensive use of this stylistic device throughout his poetical corpus.233 Polyptoton fulfils a double function. On the one hand, it intensifies the relevant object. Analysing Stus’s image of ‘[n]ich nochi. Temin temini’ (‘the night of night. The darkness of darkness’), Pavlyshyn aptly notes: ‘Tut maizhe matematychno: nich х nich = nich2, sebto nich do kvadratu’ (‘It is almost mathematical here: night x night = night2’, that is night squared’, emphasis in the original).234 In this phrase, the poet emphasises the core of the night, the maximal nightness in it, as it were, turning it into a superlative of itself and enhancing its expressivity. On the other hand, polyptoton also repeats the object and thereby upsets its unity. Once the word splits into two, further (and hence endless) replication becomes possible, as is evident from the three-tiered rukh rukhu rukhu and even the four- tiered ‘O boliu boliu boliu boliu mii!’ (in ‘Treny M.H. Chersnyshevkoho’ (‘M.H. Chernyshevskyi’s Laments’), part 2) (P: 89). While the latter example represents epizeuxis, not polyptoton proper, it nonetheless foregrounds the possibility of a series. With the emergence of such a series, a desire arises, just as the object, or rather its expression, becomes inexhaustible. To the previously mentioned examples of repetition, we can also add the reiteration of sounds, in the form of assonance, consonance, and alliteration (a, z, h, v in the first two lines, a, t, p, r in the third line, a, n, d in line four, and, of course, the r and u in line five, to give but a few examples), which the poet constantly employs throughout his work more generally.
233 Cf. other examples of polyptoton in Stus’s poetry, such as ‘son snu’ (‘the dream of dream’), ‘mezha stomezhi’ (‘the edge of a hundrefold edge’), ‘dzerkalamy dzerkala’ (‘mirrors by mirrors’), ‘kryk kryku, kryku kryk’ (‘the scream of scream, scream’s scream’), ‘Ia mahma mahmy, holos boliu boliu’ (‘I am the magma of magma, I am the voice of the pain of pain’), ‘tysha tysh’ (‘the silence of silences’). 234 Pavlyshyn, ‘Kvadratura kruha’, pp. 39-40. Similarly drawing a number of examples of polyptoton in Stus’s poetry, Hundorova argues that these instances ‘vidbyvaiut krainiu napruhu oznachen [...] Pry tsomu shche nemaie samoi nazvy obiekta chy stanu (nazva lyshe samopovtoriuietsia)’ (‘reflect the extreme energy of definitions [...] At the same time there is as yet no name for the object or state (the name only repeats itself)’ (‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 26).
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‘The path submerges...’ shows how desire and the movement of becoming preclude the poetic subject from reaching the ‘heart of heart’. While desire hinders self-coincidence through reaching one’s essence, it removes another possibility of self-identity at the same time:
Немов нурець, що цілив просто в смерть, але не влучив, бо, занадто прагнучи, змістив бажанням вертикальний лет ачи гордливе небуття відтрутило, чи в мить крутого самопочезання він надто пильно стежив шлях утрат, – лиш так його спотворило дерзання тим виразом вибачливих жалів, самодосад, стеребленої волі і отворами поглядів зчужілих, що він навік лишився під собою для пробування, нижчого за смерть.
(Like a diver bird that was aiming straight at death, / but missed it, because in striving too much, / [it] displaced the vertical flight with its desire, / or, perhaps, the proud non-being pushed it away, / or in the moment of dramatic self-disappearance, / it watched the path of losses too closely, – / the daring perverted it so much, / with the expression of condescending pity, / self-reproaches, frightened will / and the holes of the others’ gazes, / that it remained forever under itself / for trials [that are] lower than death). (P: 73)
The whole poem (12 lines) consists of only one sentence, which works as an extended metaphor. It exposes pure desire, as there is no poetic subject who would be the source of desiring. The first word ‘nemov’ transposes us into the realm of simile. It presupposes a comparison, yet the other part of this equation (what or who is compared to the bird) is missing. Nemov is one of the many simile words that Stus repeatedly uses in his poetry (nache, nenache, niby, mov, iak are other examples). Numerically, these connecting words are the most frequent in Palimpsests. They also represent a form of repetition. Just as polyptoton takes unity away, simile takes the object out of its stable semantic position and repeats it. Comparison serves as its repetition, which enacts repetition-as-difference. The poet gives the theme of self-missing a concrete shape in this poem. Desire prevents the bird from hitting the mark. Totality, even in its most real form (death for existentialists), is not achievable, being a moving target. The poem ‘Vershnyk’ from Winter Trees prefigures this
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image: ‘Strashysia potsiliannia. Promynannia – / vono pidnosyt’ (‘Be afraid of hitting the target. Only missing / will elevate you’) (ZD: 61). Since only missing is available to the poetic subject, he celebrates the missing in the double gesture of submission and action. Desire comes forth in multiple manifestations in the poem: prahnuchy, bazhannia, derzannia, volia. The speaker again perceives non-coincidence through spatial characteristics: desire displaces a clear trajectory by situating an intangible experience lower (a manifestation of material space) than the target (death, which is, again, immaterial). In ‘Evanescent Blossoming’, Stus regards desire as a crucial obstacle for the achievement of wholeness:
Створюється ситуація постійної кризи. [...] кожна визначена розумом мета дуже вже приблизна: вигодуване чуттєвістю бажання, тьмяне і незбагненне в своїх мацаках, ніяк не збіг[ається] із задоволенням од осягнення мети. Задоволення маліє, поки не зникає зовсім. [...] Схильний до компромісів, розум іде на свідоме збіднення раніше визначеної мети – аж до розчинення мети в засобі [...] А ця змінена мета, що, власне, стала інометою, будучи навіть здійсненною, залишає на екрані нашого бажання нашу ж таки подобу стражденного Нарциса.
(The situation of a constant crisis occurs. [...] every goal defined by the reason is very approximate: the obscure and incomprehensible desire, fed by sensitivity, never coincides with the satisfaction from reaching the goal. The satisfaction diminishes until it is completely gone. [...] Prone to compromise, reason consciously accepts the impoverishing of the earlier defined goal, until the goal becomes dissolved in the means [...] And this altered goal, which, in fact, has turned into a substitute goal, even though it is achievable, leaves on the screen of our desire our very own image of a suffering Narcissus.)235
Self-consciousness brings about ‘the situation of a constant crisis’ and indeed brings to mind the figure of Narcissus, who epitomises the impossibility of self-coincidence. Narcissus is bound to suffer because of the tension between his (constant and pressing) desire and the
235 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘Rozum tvii zbahnuv, / de krai derzan, ale hlybynni nurty / shtormuiutsia podalenilym krykom / protobazhan. Vidlunniam dykykh prahnen’ (‘Your reason has comprehended / where the edge of daring [lies], yet the deepest swirls / are storming with the remote scream / of proto-desires. With the echoes of wild striving’) (DZ: 222); and ‘Na vidstani spynys / i nakhyliaisia, skilky v tebe stane / zukhvaloho bazhannia. Ni na krok / ne zblyzhuisia. Bo vidstan – ispyt sertsia’ (‘Halt at a distance / and lean forward – as much as your daring desire / will allow you. Do not come closer / even by a step. Because distance is [your] heart’s exam’) (Pa: 161). Stus’s reference to an ‘altered goal’ in satisfying the desire of defining the self also brings to mind T. S. Eliot’s lines from ‘Little Gilding’, the fourth of Four Quartets (1943): ‘And what you thought you came for / Is only a shell, a husk of meaning / From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled / If at all. Either you had no purpose / Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured / And is altered in fulfilment.’ See Thomas S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1971), p. 50.
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unattainability of its satisfaction. Reason precludes totality by producing the repetition of the self through self-reflexivity. The relationships between death, desire, and repetition come together in the image of edge/border that is strikingly frequent in Palimpsests. Stus uses a number of words to speak of the edge: mezha, krai, hran, Rubikon, shelomian, rubizh, to name but a few. The edge suspends the very moment of transgression and epitomises the peak of desire. As I noted earlier, the poetic subject fails to hit the centre and thus to reach satisfaction. In Stus’s cartography, edges are the crucial signposts that expose the very unfolding of movement, as it is at the edge that motion has the greatest momentum and reaches peak concentration. While edges form part of physical geography,236 their primary location is within the self:
Дорога рвіння прикорочена – і не зайти за дальні далечі, і за крайсебе не зайти.
(The road of striving has been truncated, / – you cannot reach beyond the far horizon, / and you cannot reach beyond the-edge-of-self).
‘Znachy sebe spadnoiu khvyleiu...’ (‘Mark yourself [as] a descending wave...’) (P: 159)237
The edge epitomises a partition in the body of wholeness. In this text, rvinnia at once signifies desire and connotes rupture, exposing the stem of the word rv(atysia) (‘to tear’). Stus’s neologism kraisebe reveals how intrinsic the sense of limit is to the self. The repeated return to the edge enacts the fundamental psychological instinct, which is to be found at the heart of desire. To explain this process, Lacan uses the notion of jouissance: ‘the result of transgressing the pleasure principle is not more pleasure, but pain, since there is only a certain amount of pleasure that the subject can bear. Beyond this limit, pleasure becomes pain, and this “painful pleasure” is what Lacan calls jouissance.238 The poetic subject dwells on the edge, in the very process of transgressing it. Much in tune with Lacan’s jouissance, he expressly commands:
236 Cf. ‘Siahny rukoiu – i ne dosiahnesh / ni kraiu vserozluk, ni muky kraiu’ (‘Stretch out your hand – and you will reach / neither the edge of separation nor the edge of torment’), where geographical mapping and the cartography of the self are superimposed. 237 Compare other instances of dwelling on and crossing the edge: ‘Otse buttia za kraiem. Tsia khystka / mezha – sebe i ne-sebe’ (‘This being beyond the edge. This delicate / boundary – of [the] self and non-self’) (DZ: 270); ‘nesterpni vykhody za hran [...], zastupannia za / vydymu smert’ (‘the unbearable journeys beyond the edge [...] stepping beyond / the visible death) (DZ: 78); ‘ia nepomitno pereishov mezhu / samoho sebe’ (‘I [have] crossed the edge / of myself without noticing it’) (DZ: 96), to draw but a handful of examples. 238 Lacan Dictionary, p. 93.
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Знову і знову прозначай собі межу для болю, ніби щастя.
(Again / and again mark your edge / for pain as if for happiness) (DZ: 222)
Stus paradoxically equates pain with happiness, in tune with the notion of jouissance.239 Both the poet’s emphatic znovu i znovu and the overwhelming number of instances when Stus’s subject returns to the edge enact repeitition. In ‘The Phenomenon’, Stus affirms that Tychyna ‘prahne harmonii, bilshoi za mozhlyvu – i, vidoma rich, daietsia vznaky nadmir prahnennia – odna z nairealnishykh form dysharmonii’ (‘searches for a larger-than-possible harmony – and, of course, the excess of striving, one of the most real forms of disharmony, takes its toll [on him]’, emphasis in the original) (p. 15). The ‘excess of desire’ permeates and underlies Palimpsests. Stus speaks about it precisely in the context of harmony, which cannot sustain such excess. We recall the advice from Goethe’s ‘Vermächtnis’: ‘Genieße mäßig Füll und Segen’, valorising enjoyment in moderation. It is exactly this enjoyment that jouissance overcomes, a point that Stus very well understood, translating Goethe’s words as ‘[v]ishchuiut nadmiry pohrozu’ (‘excess harbingers a threat’).240
2.3.3. Stus’s Self-Constructions: An Innovative Language of Self
Stus’s model of authenticity as the repetition of difference becomes particularly evident in his neologisms, especially in his ‘self-constructions’ (to create another neologism), that is the participles, verbs, and, most notably, nouns (often nominalised verbs) that contain the particles samo or sebe (the nominative and genitive aspects of ‘self’, respectively, similar to the particles selbst and sich in the German language). I have already referred to a number of self-constructions, such as: samopovertannia (‘self-returning’), samozahasannia (‘self- fading-away’), samopochezannia (‘self-disappearance’), and samopostannia (‘self-coming- forth’). Just what an important role these compounds play in Stus’s poetry becomes clear when we look at their frequency. The Dictionary of Stus’s Poetical Language contains 74 such words, including 64 nouns, six participles, and four verbs, and this is not a complete
239 Cf. Stus’s line ‘spohadiv bil-zhada’ (‘[the] pain-desire of memories’), where suffering and longing are intimately entangled (Pa: 379). 240 ‘Velykyi z naibilshykh’, p. 102.
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list.241 The vast majority of Stus’s self-neologisms are nonce words (occasionalisms): the poet mostly uses them only once and never refers to them subsequently. This forging of ever new words, which revolve around the self, enacts repetition-as-difference: time and again the poet faces the same problem of the coincidence of the self, yet this is never resolved, which leads him to continue his search and repeat difference. In studying the poet’s neologisms, Stus scholars tend to approach them from a linguistic perspective, foregrounding their expressivity and categorising them into different groups.242 Yet an even more important question to ask concerns the role that Stus’s coinages play in his project of becoming self. Stus creates the new words not as a mere trick or creative play with the language. New thinking requires a new idiom, and Stus stretches the limits of the existing language to accommodate an innovative picture of selfhood that he brings into poetry. In this respect, Stus’s new words are different (although not unrelated) to the experimentation with the poetical language popular among Ukrainian modernist authors and the shistdesiatnyky.243 The poet seeks to re-imagine verbally not so much the world outside of the lyrical subject as the inner processes within him. The self-constructions epitomise Stus’s vision of the self as always being in the making. While we find no extensive direct reflections on neologisms either in Stus’s essays or in his letters, they form part and parcel of his literary practice. Stus starts to use his self- constructions extensively in his early essays, in particular in his articles ‘Amidst Thunder and Silence’ and ‘Evanescent Blossoming’ on Symonenko and Svidzinskyi respectively. In the former, Stus uses neologisms such as samorozdarovuvannia (‘giving-(one)self-away-as-a- gift’), samonarodzhuvatysia (‘to-give-birth-to-(one)self’), samovidrodzhuvatysia/ samovidrodzhennia (‘to-regenerate-oneself’/‘self-regeneration’), samoisnuvannia (‘self- existence’). Stus shows how Symonenko expresses the search for authenticity in his works and moves from ‘oboviazkovo imperatyvne “my”’ (‘the mandatorily imperative “we”’) to
241 See Lesia Olifirenko, Slovnyk poetychnoi movy Vasylia Stusa. Ridkovzhyvani slova ta indyvidualno-avtorski novotvory (Kyiv: Abrys, 2003). 242 See, for example, Nataliia Sheremeta, ‘Perspektyvy kodyfikatsii neolohizmiv Vasylia Stusa’, in Mova ta movlennia: zbirnyk materialiv I Mizhnarodnoi naukovo-praktychnoi konferentsii (Kamianets-Podilskyi: Kamianets-Podilskyi natsionalnyi universytet imeni Ivana Ohiienka, 2019), 241-4; U. B. Haliv, ‘Pozaslovnykova leksyka u tvorakh Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovyi visnyk DDPU imeni I. Franka. ‘Filolohichni nauky’, 9 (2018), 47-50; Halyna Shmilo, ‘Imennyky okazionalizmy v poezii V. Stusa’, Moloda natsiia, 1 (2006), 206-28. 243 For a discussion of the extensive coinage of neologisms by the shistdesiatnyky see Halyna Vokalchuk, ‘Neolohiia shistdesiatnykiv’, Naukovi zapysky Natsionalnoho universytetu ‘Ostrozka akademiia: Seriia Filolohichna, 21 (2011), 35-49.
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‘usvidomlennia tsinnosti liudskoho zhyttia, do vlasnoi samodostatnosti’ (‘the realisation of the value of human life, to one’s own self-sufficiency’).244 Stus postulates that
стояти на тому, що бути собою – це найперший обов’язок людини. Самоіснування – це та сталість, яка допомагає відчути життя і його плин, дає змогу творити це життя. [...] Тим більше – в нашому суспільстві, де, як пишуть у газетах, усе робиться для людини. Тут потреба індивідуального самозбереження особливо велика.
(to insist on being oneself is the primary human obligation. Self-existence is that [kind of] constancy that helps us to feel life and its flow, and enables us to create this life. [...] Particularly in our society, where, as they write in newspapers, everything is being done for man. Here the need for individual self-preservation is especially significant.) (emphasis mine) (p. 145)
The poet opposes false collective reality and the authentic personal existence, samoisnuvannia, which means here ‘to be oneself’, to exist as one’s authentic self. Stus starts to coin self-constructions en masse in his essay on Svidzinskyi. In this piece, the poet uses samo-compounds 50 times. The vast majority of these are Stus’s own neologisms, such as: samokompensuvatysia (‘to self-compensate’), samoprykhyshchenist (od svitu) (‘self-refuge from the world’), samovymenshennia (‘self-lessening’), samoutochnennia (‘self-precisioning/pinpointing the self’’), samosmysl (‘self-sense’), and samopodvoiennia (‘self-doubling’). In both essays, Stus makes a clear emphasis on radical introspection as a response to the dehumanising nature of both the Soviet regime and the modern condition. Already in one of the first poems in captivity, ‘Meni zoria siiala nyni vrantsi...’ (‘A star was shining to me this morning...’), Stus asserts his fundamental principle of samosoboiunapovnennia (‘filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’) (DZ: 7). Stus’s increasing focus on the self, and his usage of self-constructions, coincides in time with the increasing deterioration of the political situation in the Soviet Union and his own personal circumstances. Through his neologisms Stus enters, directly or indirectly, into conversation with other philosophers and poets of the self and becoming. Extensively translating the works of Rilke, the poet was no doubt inspired by Rilke’s ‘stud[ding of] the apparently translucent matrix of his verse with the occasional dialect or obsolete word, with a startling neologism or an abstruse name or phrase or technical term, or even with syntax stretched well beyond the
244 Stus, ‘Sered hromu i tyshi’, p. 144.
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norm’.245 As an example, Moskalets argues that ‘[o]dne z kliuchovykh poniat Stusovoi poetyky i filosofii – “mezhysvity” (abo “mezhyprostir”, abo “pomizhsvit”) ie replikoiu z bahatolitnoho hermenevtychnoho dialohu mizh nym i poeziieiu Rilke’ (‘one of the key notions of Stus’s poetics and philosophy – “between-worlds” (or “between-space”, or ‘in- between-world”) is a an echo from the many-year hermeneutic dialogue between [Stus] and the poetry of Rilke’).246 Stus also felt affinity with Nietzsche’s philosophy of self-creation.247 His early collection Vortex contains the poem ‘Ecce homo!’, clearly alluding to Nietzsche’s book Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. Stus’s ‘Ecce Homo!’ opens with a characteristic line: ‘Niiak ne mozhu zrostu ia diity’ (‘I never manage to grow into myself’) (S I, 1: 218-9). As Tarnashynska notes, for Stus ‘buty – tse ne statychne tryvannia v butti, a dialektychnyi protses “dorostannia” do samoho sebe – spravzhnoho’ (‘to be is not a static lasting in being, but rather a dialectical process of “growing [up] [in]to” his own self, his true self’).248 The theme of growing (in)to oneself recurs in Stus’s later poetry,249 translating, in particular, into other self-constructions: samopererostannia (‘self-outgrowing’) and samodokhodzhennia (‘self-reaching’).250 Earlier, I also showed how Stus’s concept of samosoboiunapovnennia bears certain affinities with Heidegger’s reflections on ‘not yet’ and
245 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours: A New Translation with Commentary, trans. by Susan Ranson, ed. and intr. by Ben Hutchinson (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2008), p. xlii. 246 The scholar quotes an entry from Rilke’s Worpswede 1900 diary (dated 13 December): ‘Such days, I fear, don’t belong to death, just as they don’t belong to life. They belong to... oh, In-between land’. I quote the English translation from Eric Torgersen, Dear Friend: Rainer Maria Rilke and Paula Modersohn-Becker (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 95. Cf. Stus’s lines: ‘isnuiu v mezhysviti – skraiu smerti / i skraiu isnuvannia’ (‘[I] exist in the in-between-world – aside from death / and aside from life’ (DZ: 182). Also: ‘Ty v mezhyprostori. І – posered. / Zhyttia i smert – otse i vsia vystava’ (‘You are in the between- space. And – [you are] in the middle. / Life and death – that is the whole show’) (DZ: 255). 247 See Paul Franco, ‘Becoming Who You Are: Nietzsche on Self-Creation’, Journal of Nietzsche Studies, 1 (2018), 52-77. Stus alludes to Nietzsche’s self-creation in a letter to his family dated 14 September 1981 (S VI, 2: 394): ‘Liudyna – tse oboviazok, a ne tytul (narodyvsia – i vzhe liudyna). Liudyna tvorytsia, samonarodzhuietsia. Vlasne, khto Ty ie poky shcho? Kavalok hlyny – syroi, plastychnoi. Bery tsei kavalok u obydvi zhmeni i mny – doty, poky z noho ne vyide shchos tverde, okreslene, peremiate. Uiavy, shcho Boh, iakyi tvoryt liudei – tse Ty sam. Ty ie Boh. Otozh, iak Boh samoho sebe, mny svoiu hlynu v rukakh, poky ne vidchuiesh pid mozoliamy kremin. Dlia tsioho v Tebe naikrashchyi chas – Tvorysia zh!’ (‘Being human is an obligation, not a status (you have been born – and [you are] already a human being). The human being creates herself, she gives birth to herself. Who are You as of yet, in fact? A piece of raw and plastic clay. So take this piece into your hands and knead it until something hard, defined and moulded comes out of it. Imagine that You yourself are the God that creates human beings. You are God. Hence, as the God of yourself, knead your clay in your hands until you feel flintstone under your hard skin. This is the best time for you to do that – Create yourself!’) Stus’s words reveal an unmistakable intertextual link with Nietzsche: ‘In human beings, creature and creator are combined: in humans there is material, fragments, abundance, clay, dirt, nonsense, chaos; but in humans there is also creator, maker, hammer-hardness, spectator-divinity and seventh day’ (emphasis in the original). See Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. by Rolf- Peter Hortsmann and Judith Norman, trans. by J. Norman (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 117. 248 Tarnashynska, Siuzhet doby, p. 245. 249 Cf. the Palimpsests version of the poem ‘Sto dzerkal...’ (‘A hundred mirrors...’): ‘Dosi zrostu svoho ne dosiah?’ (‘Have you not yet reached yourself?’, P: 10). 250 See the poem ‘I os vona, utrata vsikh zhaliv...’ (‘Here it is, the loss of all pity...’, P: 395).
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being ‘filled up’ (although it is uncertain whether Stus was aware of Heidegger’s metaphor). Heidegger’s own ‘linguistic innovations’ largely stem from his ‘fight[ing] against the substance ontology appropriate to the present-at-hand, in favour of movement and of relationships.’251 Even for his most notable notion, Dasein (‘existence’, ‘presence’), Heidegger ‘revives the original sense, “being there”, often writing Da-sein to stress this’ (emphasis in the original).252 In the same vein, Stus seeks to articulate the movement and relationship inherehent to becoming self. Stus’s self-constructions also draw upon the vocabulary of Karl Jaspers, for whom becoming similarly constitutes a pivotal concept: ‘Das Selbst is darum nicht da, sondern jeden Augenblick im Werden. Das Selbst ist etwas, das entstehen soll’ (‘The self is therefore not there, rather at every moment [it is] in becoming. The self is something that must be emerging’). 253 In his essays on Goethe and Kierkegaard, which Stus read,254 Jaspers also uses words such as Sichnichtgenügen (‘self-not-enoughs’) (p. 62), Sichwiederherstellen (‘self- restoration’) (p. 62), selbsteworbene (‘self-acquired’) (p. 62), and such existing words as Selbstmord (suicide, literally ‘self-death’, p. 150) and Selbstsein (‘selfhood’) (p. 157).255 Jaspers’s vocabulary is likely to have had some influence on Stus. Earlier, I suggested an intertextual link between Jaspers’s Sichnichtgenügen and Stus’s samonezadovolennia (both signifying ‘self-dissatisfactions’). In its turn, Jaspers’s word Sichwiederherstellen connotes Stus’s notion of samovidrodzhennia (‘self-regeneration’), which the poet employs in his essay on Symonenko. Stus might also have translated literally some of the existing German self-words into Ukrainian, where they appear as neologisms. Consider, for instance, Stus’s coinages samoisnuvannia and samosmert. The word Selbstsein used by Jaspers might underlie Stus’s compound samoisnuvannia (drawing upon the literal translation of Selbstsein, ‘self-existence’), while samosmert might stem from the German word Selbstmord: ‘nedozvolennyi prostir / zhyvoho dukhu klyche samosmert / podoboiu zhyttia’ (‘the forbidden space / of the living spirit calls self-death / an [imitation / image] of life’) (S I, 1: 173).
251 Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 2, 4. 252 Ibid., p. 42. 253 Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (München: Piper, 1947), p. 542. In this colossal, albeit underappreciated in English-language scholarship, work, Jaspers refers to the notion of Selbstschöpfung (‘self-creation’), and coins words such as Sichgeschenktwerden (‘becoming-given-(as-a-gift)-(to-oneself)’), Selbstgewordensein (‘self- becoming’) (pp. 542-4), to name but a few. 254 Jaspers, Rechenschaft und Ausblick. See ‘Protokol obshuku’ (12.01.1972), p. 4. 255 However, as Paul Coates notes, ‘the nature of the German language renders it extremely difficult to distinguish the neologism from the word formed by assembling existing words into new combinations.’ See Paul Coates, Words After Speech: A Comparative Study of Romanticism and Symbolism (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), pp. 180-1.
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In a familiar gesture of surpassing borders, Stus renders the frontiers between languages porous, especially drawing upon the German-language philosophical and poetical tradition. Stus makes the most of the flexibility of the Ukrainian language, which, similarly to German, enables creative forging of new words. For all the significant differences between Nietzsche, Rilke, Heidegger and Jaspers, their innovative vocabularies to a great extent enact the centrality of movement and becoming, which similarly constitute the central concern of Stus’s poetry. Yet while I have pointed out Stus’s likely sources of inspiration, the poet’s own self-constructions are unique and organic to the poet’s idiosyncratic philosophy of the self. In many ways building upon philosophy, Stus, nonetheless, chooses to explore the becoming of the self specifically through poetry, thus putting philosophy into practice. Indeed, when we juxtapose Stus’s reflections on Symonenko and Svidzinskyi with Palimpsests, we see a tangible difference between the way Stus uses self-neologisms in his articles and in his poetry. In the essays, the poet foregrounds the model of authenticity-as- recollection, stating, as we recall, that ‘[s]elf-existence is that kind of constancy that helps us to feel life and its flow’. The notion of stalist (‘permanence’ or ‘constancy’) implies the existence of a stable image of the self. It provides a stationery reference frame that allows the self to perceive the ‘flow of life’ beyond it. By the same token, speaking of Svidzinskyi, Stus suggests that the poet moves towards stala pevnist (‘permanent certainty’). In Palimpsests, Stus questions this constancy. While in his essays the poet’s self-constructions hint at the opposition between the self and the historical circumstances (in particular, the oppression of the Soviet regime), in Palimpsests Stus employs them to articulate becoming self, beyond any opposition. Stus’s samo-compounds bring to the fore the model of authenticity-as-difference. Shevelov rightly observes: ‘ioho poetychnyi zir zdatnyi bachyty formu shche ne oformlenoho, a ioho poetychne slovo v naikrashchykh poeziiakh “Palimpsestiv” spromozhne znaity movu dlia tsiiei formy samoho formuvannia’ (‘[Stus’s] poetical sight is capable of seeing the form of what has not yet become formed, and in the best poems in “Palimpsests” his poetical language [poetychne slovo] is capable of finding the language for this form of the very process of formation’).256 Stus’s self-constructions signify more than simple verbal labels attached to the self that would objectively and distinctively exist in the world. The poet’s innovative language lends coherence to the very process of becoming self, offering ‘the creation of identity rather than the expression of identity’ (emphasis in the original) and
256 ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 32.
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articulating ‘a self in flux and becoming, rather than a self that has submitted to law’.257 Stus’s self-constructions capture the fluidity of consciousness rather than the hardness of objects, overcoming the confines of representation and casting the task of poetry as making rather than naming.258 The language participates in the performance of the self instead of passively reflecting presence. Stus’s self-constructions become especially prominent within the body of his poetic texts, which enable the poetic performance of the self. Samopromynannia, which specifically enunciates the non-coincidence of the self, so pivotal for Stus, furnishes a representative example here. Samopromynannia consists of two parts: samo- (‘self’) and promynannia (‘missing’ in the sense of ‘going past’ or ‘passing by’). There is no stable identity that Stus’s lyrical subject can miss. Samo in this case rather refers to the potential of identity. Emblematic in this regard is the poem ‘Doroha samovtechi...’, where the poet employs the notion of samopromynannia:
Дорога самовтечі, непідвладна моїм бажанням, рине, як вода. І я спливаю не за течією, але всупір – неначе в горловину пролитих криків. Ніби повертаюсь до давнього народження (моє перейдене життя – то простір смерті). [...] Пролита цятка болю, я шукаю утраченої грудки самосну, іще не розпочатої. І марно: бо ж самопроминання – твій приділ
(The road of self-escaping, non-submissive / to my desires, is rushing like water. / And I am drifting not with the tide, / but against it, as if into the throat / of spilt cries. [I am] as if coming back / to my ancient birth (my / traversed life is the space of death). [...] Spilt speck of pain, I am searching for / the lost lump of self-dream, / yet unbegun. Although in vain: / for self-missing is your fate.) (DZ: 195)
Staging the typical clash of recollection and repetition, the poem situates Stus’s poetic self between ‘the lost lump of [unbegun] self-dream’ and samovtecha, between the return to the
257 Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 104, 5. 258 As Michael Inwood explains, commenting on Heidegger, ‘[w]hat started life as Plato’s idea has degenerated into our modern Vorstellung, representation. What began as the Greek phusis has ended up as “nature”’ (emphasis in the original). See A Heidegger Dictionary, p. 6.
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‘ancient birth’ and the existentialist vision of finite life as ‘the space of death’. Characteristically, Stus uses the pronoun ‘I’ only when he evokes the images of recollection. The two neologisms that bookend the above passage (samovtecha and samopromynannia), instead, undo the solidity of the subject. We encounter no ‘I’ in the first line. The poem immediately exposes us to the dynamic process within the self: doroha samovtechi. The abundance of water imagery reinforces the fluidity of the self. The notion of vtecha (‘escape’) in Stus’s samovtecha also connotes techiia (‘flow’).259 In his essay on Symonenko, we recall, Stus emphasises the stalist of the self that enables one to observe plyn (‘flowing’) around. In ‘The road of self-escaping...’, the plyn takes over any solid reference frame. Rather than being external to plyn, the self comes to become part of it. Stus’s early poem ‘The time of my childhood hopes...’, which I analysed earlier in this work, provides an illuminating counterpoint to ‘The road of self-escaping...’:
Минає час моїх дитячих вір. І я себе з тим часом проминаю. І вже не віднайдусь. І вже не знаю, А чи впізнав би на човні новім Свій давній берег.
(The time of my childhood hopes is passing. / And I am passing myself by with that time. / I won’t find myself anymore. And now I don’t know / Whether I would recognise my old shore / in the new boat. [...] / You are sailing alone, cast away from yourself.) (ZD: 79)
The theme of missing oneself already becomes apparent in this early text. Both poems contain water imagery. Yet while Stus’s 1964 text provides a shore of childhood faith, in ‘The road of self-escaping...’ the lyrical subject faces the present rather than the past and no longer has any set point of reference. If in the early poem he finds himself in a boat with the shore in sight, in the later poem the flow has primacy over the subject, overcoming his desires. The poetic patterns underlying the two texts seem to enact the presence and absence of the shore. ‘The time of my childhood hopes...’ is a sonnet. Its three quatrains follow the envelope rhyme scheme, whereby, as we recall, ‘the reader recognizes the return to the
259 Stus coins other neologisms that emphasise the fluidity of self-formation. Cf. his compound samostrumuvannia (‘self-streaming’), which similarly casts the self as a process: ‘Teper – antrakty – bez kintsia i kraiu. / Pylnui spokiine samostrumuvannia’ (Now – there are entr’actes – without end or stop. / Watch the quiet self-streaming’), in the poem ‘Zhyvy – i muchsia. Ale vse to hra...’ (‘Live and suffer. It’s all but a game...’, DZ: 280)
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original pattern after movement away in the interim.’260 Thus, the rhyme pattern underlying the poem hints to the return to the same.261 ‘The road of self-escaping...’, on the other hand, is written in blank verse with typical enjambments, dashes and brackets. Syntactically, the poem consists of numerous subordinate clauses. Stus, therefore, employs a broad repertoire of poetical obstacles, which embody the turbulent movement of vsupir, ‘against’ (the tide). Both texts are based on iambic pentameter, yet the blank verse of ‘The road of self- escaping...’ lends it fluidity (epitomised by Stus’s neologisms samovtecha and samopromynannia), while the classic form of ‘The time of my childhood hopes...’ creates a formal vessel, as it were, to contain the flux of self-formation. Furthermore, there is an important difference between Stus’s notion of samopromynannia and his line ‘I am missing myself with that time’. The latter represents a propositional statement. Through his self-constructions, in particular samopromynannia, Stus subverts this grammatical structure. The poet chooses to focus on the event rather than the actor. By removing the predicate and articulating a happening, Stus shows that there is as yet no ‘I’. Heidegger emphasises the intrinsic connection between the predicative sentence (subject-verb(-object)) and the reifying inclination of our thinking. The idea of thing as the assemblage of its core and traits corresponds in our language to a simple propositional statement where the subject stands for the core and the predicate for the core’s properties.262 In multiple poems in Palimpsests Stus overcomes such thingness of the self and articulates instead the making of the poetic subject. The following passage from ‘The path submerges...’, which I partially quoted earlier, similarly places the emphasis on becoming rather than on the subject (note that this poem also opens with the images of road and water):
260 S. F. Fogle and T.V.F. Brogan, ‘Envelope’, p. 436. 261 Achilli insightfully notes that ‘[t]he paradox of an “I” halfway between wholeness and splitting, which declares that it cannot find itself while managing to have a reflective look on its own search for itself, places [Mynaje čas mojich dytjačych vir] in a median position between a modernist integral subjectivity, despite its fragility, and its postmodern dissolution, which is announced here but not actually implemented’ See Achilli, La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus, p. 146. Indeed, there are elements in the poem that problematise the return. In the penultimate line, the speaker states: ‘Ty sam plyvesh, vidrynutyi vid sebe’ (‘You are sailing alone, cast away from yourself’). Yet the image of the shore, as well as the poetical form of the text suggest the possibility of return. 262 Heidegger argues that this misconception originates from the mistranslation of the respective concepts of the Ancient Greek philosophy in Latin thought: ‘Hupokeimenon becomes subiectum; hupostasis becomes substantia; sumbebekos becomes accidens. [...] Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding equally authentic experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation’ (emphasis in the original). See ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 15-86 (p. 23).
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О, ті нестерпні виходи за грань привсюдності! О ті наломи ляку, ота зухвала згага самовтеч, жага згоряння, спалення, авто дафе. Та паморозь терпінь і вічна недоконаність дерзання, рух руху руху. Те безмежжя сил, розбурханих од молодого болю, ті парури зусиль, та виднота себеявлення, та оглухла прірва обрушення і заступання за видиму смерть, аби тороси муки ліпили лона квітам.
(Oh, those unbearable journeys beyond the edge / of being here! Oh, those breakages of fright, / that daring thirst for self-escaping, / the desire for flaring, and for burning, and for auto- / dafe. That hoar frost of patience / and the eternal incompleteness of endeavour, / the movement of the movement of the movement. That boundlessness / of energy, provoked by youthful pain, / those veins of effort, that appearance / of self-emergence, and the deafened chasm / of falling and of stepping beyond / the visible death, so that the debris of torment / might give birth to flowers.) (P: 79)
The poet draws a whole catalogue of psychological processes and experiences. While they are subjective by their nature, they are not firmly attached to one particular subject here. Stus’s neologism sebeiavlennia provides an especially eloquent expression of the self-in-the- making. One might be tempted to write (as I was initially, following the immediate instinct) that the self is in the process of coming forth. Yet this ingrained subject-predicate grammatical structure would contradict the movement inherent to both the passage as a whole and the process of sebeiavlennia. Rather, we watch the performance of self-in-statu-nascendi. The above passage from ‘The path submerges...’ does not even contain any ‘you’. It is not the subject that makes, but rather the making precedes the subject. These processes, therefore, become impersonal. Only the numerous distal deictics (ti, ota, ta, te) ground us in the experience of subjectivity, opening it to any self that is willing to step into this fictional situation and to perform it in propria persona (I discuss this process of appropriation extensively in Chapter Four). The performative nature of Stus’s neologisms additionally stems from their ambiguity. What does exactly samovtecha mean, for instance, which Stus uses in both ‘The road of self- escaping...’ and ‘The path submerges...’? Is it running away from oneself? Or is it an
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authentic escape from the world? Or, perhaps, it is breaking free from selfhood as such? The grammatical make-up of the word complicates our understanding, enacting the unfixed nature of the self. We can only chase the tail of selfhood without ever pinning it down.263 Discussing the ambiguity of the neologism ‘shadowtackle’ of another prominent wordsmith Gerald Manley Hopkins, Soon Peng Su suggests that ‘[c]ommunication is effected when the reader actualizes what is potentially meaningful in a text by constructing meaning as he fills in the blanks or gaps’.264 In the same vein, Stus’s neologisms do not impose a meaning but rather expose the subject-making process, involving the reader in meaning-making. The necessity of ‘filling in the blanks’ only reflects the fundamental ‘filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’, which prioritises the exploration of absence over mirroring what is present.
Palimpsests, therefore, functions as a dynamic encounter between the two fundamental modalities of authenticity underlying Stus’s works: recollection and repetition. Within recollection, the poet’s lyrical subject seeks to recover his authentic essence through returning to illud tempus, as well as through his memory, and the Other. And yet he realises that ultimately he can only return not to selfsameness but to difference, which brings about the figures of repetition, desire and edge, and which, in particular, translates into Stus’s neologisms. The poet coins numerous self-constructions to stage the very coming-to-be of the self and to capture the intricacies of self-formation.
263 Cf. Inwood’s comment on Heidegger’s compound Seinkönnen: ‘Heidegger’s compounds are often intrinsically ambiguous in similar ways. His coinage Seinkönnen – common in [Being and Time], but rare afterwards – is from können, “can, to be able”, and sein, “to be”. But is sein to be read as a verbal infinitive, making Seinkönnen the “ability to be”? Or is it a nominalized infinitive, Sein, making it the “capacity for being”?’ See A Heidegger’s Dictionary, p. 9. 264 Soon Peng Su, Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry (New York: Longman, 1994), p. 100. Su suggests that Hopkins’s neologism ‘shadowtackle’ ‘may be seen to have a relation of material (“tackle made out of shadow”) or cause (“tackle caused by shadow”) (p. 100).
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CHAPTER 3. ONESELF AS ANOTHER: SELF-DOUBLING IN STUS’S WRITING
In this chapter, I focus on the functioning of self-doubling in Vasyl Stus’s prose and his magnum opus collection Palimpsests, as both a pivotal theme and a central element of Stus’s poetics in general. The self for Stus evolves as a non-coincidence, which unfolds on two principal levels: as existential becoming-the-authentic-self (akin to the Heideggerian always ‘not-yet’) and as a phenomenological relationship to itself. In the previous chapter, I focused on the existential aspect, discussing the dynamic interplay between ‘recollection’ and ‘repetition’ as two modalities of authenticity. In this part of my work, I will explore the phenomenological rupture within the self, foregrounding Paul Ricoeur’s ‘oneself-as-another’ model of selfhood. In other words, while so far I have explored the existential plane within the self, here I will show how Stus’s poetic subject moves between his selves, shifting between ‘I’ and ‘you’ and relating to himself in an othering manner. Rubchak and Hundorova have made valuable contributions to the study of self- doubling in Stus’s poetry. Rubchak was the first to focus on the dynamics of ‘self-dispersal’ and unification in the poet’s works, and to show compellingly how in Stus’s writing ‘samo- svidomist (i otzhe svidomist vlasnoi smerty) stala vyhnantsem iz ne-svidomoho svitu pryrody’ (‘self-consciousness (and thereby the consciousness of one’s mortality) became an outcast in the non-conscious world of nature’).265 Rubchak, therefore, regards the consciousness of the self in the context of finitude, casting ‘prirva rozluky lirychnoho heroia z samym soboiu’ (‘an abyss of the lyrical hero’s alienation from himself’) as specifically existentialist. Drawing upon Rubchak’s pioneering study, Hundorova observes that ‘rozsiiuvannia i dviinytstvo staiut u Stusa vyrazhenniam poetapnoho hlobalnoho vidchuzhennia, iakoho do takoi hlybyny [...] і poslidovnosti, mabut, ne znala ukrainska literatura’ (‘dispersal and doubling become in Stus’s case a reflection of a gradual and global alienation of the depth and consistency perhaps previously unheard-of in Ukrainian literature’).266 Unlike Rubchak, however, Hundorova regards self-consciousness primarily from the phenomenological perspective. She approaches the theme of alienation differently, as ‘vidchuzhennia poetovoho “dviinyka” (iak holosu iakyi opysuie svidomist subiekta) vid vnutrishnoho “ia” i fizychnoho “ia”’ (‘the alienation of the poet’s “double” (as the voice describing the subject’s consciousness) from the inner “I” and the physical “I”’) (p. 17).
265 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, p. 67. 266 Hundorova, ‘Zhertvoslovo’, p. 17.
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Hundorova lays the foundation for the phenomenological approach upon which I draw extensively in this chapter. The trope of observing oneself recurs in Stus’s writing. We recall the poet’s image of ‘a suffering Narcissus’ bound to see his reflection and yet to be in the state of ‘a constant crisis’ because of a desire that cannot be satisfied: ‘Zhyttia stalo hrikhovnym rozghliadanniam sebe, samoprotystoianniam, samospohliadanniam’ (‘Life has turned into sinful self-examination, self-opposition, self-observation’) (S IV: 348). The dual meaning of samoprotystoiannia (at once standing opposite to oneself and resisting/opposing oneself) aptly encapsulates this inevitable internal struggle. Stus uses a similar notion, ‘samovhliadannia chy sebevhliadannia’ (both words standing for ‘peering-into-one’s-self’), in a letter to his family dated 11-15 September 1975), where the poet discusses Rilke’s Duino Elegies:
Це думи людини, що живе пам’яттю про світ, пам’яттю, що наглухо відгородила його від світу. [...] поет заглядає в нічну криницю свого життя, ставши опроти неї. [...] Через цей бінокль своїх-мертвих-очей він дивиться в космічну порожняву, ‘бачачи’ світ (‘світ’ лише намальовано на лінзах пам’яті). І смисл цього вглядання (самовглядання чи себевглядання) – відчути поразку, оживити це відчуття віку. [...] саме існування – неокреслене. Це веде до роздвоєння й самooчужіння.
(These are the thoughts of a human being who lives by his memory of the world, by the memory that has hermetically separated him from the world. [...] the poet is peering into the night well of his life, standing opposite to it. [...] Through these binoculars of his-dead-eyes he contemplates the cosmic emptiness, ‘seeing’ the world (‘the world’ is only drawn on the lens of the memory). And the purpose of this peering-into (self-peering-into [samovhliadannia chy sebevhliadannia]) is to feel the failure, to enliven this feeling of the age. […] existence itself has become undefined. This leads to doubling and self-estrangement.) (emphasis mine) (S VI, 1: 163) 267
The intense inner life of the poetic subject takes over the seeming reality of the world, which Stus’s quotation marks unambiguously emphasise. It leads to the acute awareness of one’s own consciousness. Stus’s gloss in fact draws upon Rilke’s own words about Wendung nach innen (‘turning inside’) from his ‘Letters to a Young Poet’: ‘Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen
267 Bykhovskii’s 1972 book on Kierkegaard, which Stus read (see his letter dated February 1973 in S VI, 1: 16), also uses the notion of samonabliudenie (‘self-inspection’) in its discussion of Kierkegaard’s concept of Inderlighed (Innerlichkeit). See Bykhovskii, Kierkegor (Moskva: Mysl, 1972), p. 70.
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and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away.’268 While the two passages contain a number of similarities, Stus’s commentary is different in a significant way: for him, turning inwards leads not to the increased certainty of the self, but rather to its duplicity.269 Furthermore, ‘doubling and self-estrangement’ go hand in hand: the bifurcation of the self engenders self-alienation. Stus lucidly outlines the structure of selfhood in one of his last letters, in which he gives his son Dmytro advice on keeping a journal:
У ньому Ти ніби стаєш жити в двох особах: той – що живе, і той, що спостерігає за собою. Ніби існуєш у двох проекціях. Це ніби перше збагнення Вічності, таємниче циганське дзеркало, яке ворожить, нічого ясно не кажучи, а тільки натякаючи
(You start living as if in two persons in [your journal]: the one who lives and the one who observes himself. As if [you] exist in two projections. It is as if the first conceiving of Eternity, a mysterious gipsy mirror, which tells fortunes without saying anything clearly, only hinting)270
Stus outlines a tripartite scheme of selfhood, whereby the subject splits into (i) the observed self, as the self acting in the world; (ii) the observing self, which exists as the reflective self evaluating the observed self; and (iii) the supposed authentic self, in which all the fragmented aspects of ‘I’ are united in the ideal image of the self. The latter signifies the imagined unrealisable standard against which the observed self is measured. While the authentic self represents a supposed image, intimating the originary ontological lack, the observing self and the observed self dynamically co-exist in Stus’s verse. Stus thus offers a fundamentally phenomenological perspective, where the split into the observing and the observed enacts the consciousness of consciousness. Yet even this perspective does not exhaust Stus’s poetic thinking: it also involves the concerns of authenticity and the ethical, in tune with Ricoeur’s proposition that the ethical inheres the gap of selfhood. Stus’s discussion of the philosophy of Berdiaev provides an emblematic example here: ‘Stilky pidtverdzhen bezstoronnoi liudyny, shcho ty, Vasyl Stus, povodyshsia tak, iak i slid, shcho ty prahnesh robyty tak, iak slid. Bida tilky, shcho ne zavzhdy povodyshsia idealno, inkoly hrishysh’ (‘There are so many reassurances from an impartial person that you,
268 Rilke’s letter to Franz Xaver Kappus (17 February 1903). See Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, trans. by M.D. Herter Norton, rev. edn (New York: Norton & Company, 1962), p. 20. 269 Achilli contends compellingly: ‘Whereas Rilkean art, thanks to poetry and its saving potential, outlines the culmination of a process of rapprochement between the sphere of the subject and what lies outside of it, in Stusian work, on the contrary, a process of alienation unfolds’. See Achilli, La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus, p. 331. 270 See Stus’s letter to his family dated 15 January 1984 in S VI, 1: 452.
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Vasyl Stus, act as you ought to, that you strive to act in the right way. The only problem is that you do not always act ideally, that sometimes you sin’).271 Even in this early letter the split becomes evident: the poet addresses himself as ‘ty, Vasyl Stus’, which enacts the triad of selves outlined earlier. Stus’s image of the ‘mysterious mirror’ from the letter to his son points up the problematic nature of reflection. Far from being a mere mimetic act, it shocks the subject by disturbing his unity. The act of mirroring constitutes a polyptoton of a kind, as the self of the self, which is both intensifying and disuniting. For this reason, the subject cannot achieve clarity and is bound to experience only ‘hinting’ as an aberration from ‘Eternity’, which the poet conceives ethically. In his writing, Stus repeatedly returns to the notion of seeing oneself. Rubchak foregrounds ‘samorozdvoiennia abo tema dviinyka, iaka peresliduie Stusa vid samoho pochatku ioho tvorchoho shliakhu, i iaka inodi vyslovlena v obrazakh maizhe klinichnoi avtoskopii’ (‘self-doubling or the topos of the double, which haunts Stus from the very beginning of his artistic career, and which is expressed in the images of almost clinical autoscopy’).272 While Rubchak does not develop the theme of autoscopy further, his reference to this notion provides an important insight. Autoscopy, most broadly defined as ‘the experience of seeing one’s body in extrapersonal space’, 273 implies an act of self- observation, and the concept itself stems from the Greek words autos (‘self’) and skopos (‘watcher’), thus standing for ‘self-seeing’.274 Because autoscopy has a number of manifestations, the science of brain functions uses the umbrella term ‘autoscopic phenomena’. Such phenomena as out-of-body experience and autoscopic hallucination become especially relevant for my discussion of self-doubling in Stus’s poetry. The out-of- body experience implies disembodiment, whereby ‘the subject sees himself and the world from a location different from his physical body’,275 while in autoscopic hallucination (‘mirror hallucination’) people ‘experience seeing a double of themselves in extrapersonal
271 See Stus’s letter to Vasyl Holoborodko written between 1969 and 1970, in S VI, 2: 68. 272 ‘Peremoha’, p. 69. 273 Olaf Blanke, and others, ‘Out-of-body experience and autoscopy of neurological origin’, Brain, 127 (2004), 243-58 (p. 243). 274 Francesca Anzelotti, and others, ‘Autoscopic phenomena: case report and review of literature’, Behavioral and Brain Functions, 7:2 (2011),
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space without the experience of leaving one’s own body (no disembodiment)’.276 It is with the latter experience that the notion of a double or doppelgänger is most often associated. The German Romantic novelist Jean Paul originally defines the Doppelgänger in 1796 precisely as ‘Leute, die sich selber sehen’ (‘people who see themselves’).277 Even though these insights come from neuroscience, I invoke them here in an attempt to nuance the discussion of self-doubling in Stus’s prose and poetry. I argue that we cannot adequately explain this phenomenon in Stus’s writing by reference to literary theory alone. In my analysis of the interplay between the triad of selves (observing self, observed self, and authentic self), I will, therefore, refer to psychological and phenomenological aspects of autoscopy and depersonalisation. Autoscopic phenomena are also linked with the notion of depersonalisation, currently defined as a dissociative disorder characterised by ‘experiences of unreality, detachment, or being an outside observer with respect to one’s thoughts, feelings, sensations, body, or actions’.278 Stus explicitly uses this notion in Dichtenszeit:
Деперсоналізація душі: один, як перст, стою себе супроти. [...]
Постій. І упокорся. І дивись душею, вкрай ізвомпленою, далі – за всевельможність любої печалі, котра прошила груди геть наскрізь, неначе куля.
(The depersonalisation of the soul: / I’m standing all alone, like a finger, opposite myself. [...] Stand still. Surrender. And look, / through your extremely wounded soul – / further, beyond the grandeur of beloved / sorrow, which has pierced your chest / as if a bullet.) (DZ: 193)279
276 Olaf Blanke, and Christine Mohr, ‘Out-of-body experience, heautoscopy, and autoscopic hallucination of neurological origin: Implications for neurocognitive mechanisms of corporeal awareness and self- consciousness’, Brain Research Reviews, 50 (2005), 184-99 (p. 186). 277 Quoted and translated in Andrew J. Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 3. 278 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, 5th ed. (Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association, 2013), p. 302. For a comprehensive study of the history and nature of depersonalisation see Mauricio Sierra, Depersonalization: A New Look at a Neglected Syndrome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 279 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘Zaidu za krai terpinnia і zhdannia / i zazyraiu v sebe, mov kriz shparu’ (‘I will cross the edge of patience and waiting / and [will] peer into myself as if through a hole’) (DZ: 93).
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Stus’s poem formulates the notion of depersonalisation in terms that are strikingly similar to its current definition in psychiatry. In the next chapter, I will consider a potential intertextual link with T. S. Eliot’s modernist concept of depersonalisation and his ‘impersonal theory of poetry’. Here it is important to note that Stus expressly reveals this psychological process, which in fact underpins a great number of his poems. The subject is opposite himself and thus observes himself from a distance. Over the course of the poem we witness movement from ‘I’ to ‘you’, a typical shift in Stus’s poetry, as we shall see presently, which enacts the aforementioned samoprotystoiannia by positioning ‘you’ as the observed self. Stus’s comment on Rilke’s Duino Elegies, which I quoted earlier, similarly conforms to the notion of depersonalisation, emphasising the unreality of the ‘world’ (derealisation) and the estrangement from himself (depersonalisation proper). While depersonalisation might constitute a psychiatric disorder, it also performs other functions. For Merleau-Ponty it signifies more than merely a pathological state. In his phenomenological theory of perception, it secures the place ‘at the heart of consciousness’.280 Depersonalisation can also play an important protective role. Commenting on Stus’s work, Kotsiubynska observes in this regard:
‘опроти самого себе’. Це дає простір самоаналізу, самоусвідомлення [...] як формула самозбереження людини в екстремальній ситуації [...] Виборов таке відсторонення як захисний панцир, що амортизує удари долі, притуплює гостроту болю, сприймання переводиться в площину аналізу, мовби ти не дійова особа, а спостерігач.
(‘opposite oneself’. This provides space for self-inspection, self-awareness [...] as a formula of the self-preservation of a human being in an extreme situation [...] [Stus] earned such detachment as a protective shield that absorbs the shock of fate’s blows, dulls the sharpness of pain; perception is transposed into the plane of analysis, as if you are not an actor, but an observer.)281
Kotsiubynska’s perceptive characterisation conforms to the idea that depersonalisation can ‘prevent [an] overwhelming flooding of consciousness at the time of trauma’.282 Earlier I
280 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 158. 281 Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, ‘Epistoliarna spadshchyna Vasylia Stusa’, in S VI, 2: 218-40. 282 Julie P. Gentile, and others, ‘Stress and Trauma: Psychotherapy and Pharmacotherapy for Depersonalization/ Derealization Disorder’, Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience, 7-8 (2014), 37–41 (p. 38). Cf. Stus’s poem ‘Uzhe todi, koly pirnuvshy v lis...’ (‘Then, later, when you dived into the forest...’) (P: 84), where the poetic subject narrates his intense emotional experience (reflecting Stus’s short stay in Lviv and Lviv region in the early days of 1972 shortly before his arrest) by repeatedly referring to ‘you’, as if telling himself this story for the first time, this time as a narrator rather than a participant, that is from the ‘telling’ rather than ‘experiencing’ position, which I will touch upon shortly. See also ‘Bida tak tiazhko pyshe mnoiu...’: ‘Bida tak tiazhko pyshe mnoiu. / Tak tiazhko pyshe mnoiu bil. / V bezodni – ty’ (‘[The] calamity is writing with me so heavily. / So
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referred to Berehulak’s insight that repressing one’s memory serves as a response to external repressions (both historical and existential). In her analysis of ‘The depersonalisation of the soul...’ Berehulak suggests that ‘[p]oet sam vlashtovuie sobi depersonalizatsiiu dushi – spokiinyi akt, iakyi predstavliaetsia iomu iak odynokyi vykhid zi smertelnykh umov і nadaie iomu pevnu avtonomiiu’ (‘[t]he poet carries out his own depersonalisation of the soul, a calm act that he considers to be the only way out of his deadly conditions and that gives him some autonomy’).283 While I would refer to depersonalisation as a calming act underpinned by immense emotional energy rather than ‘a calm act’, it is true that through this act, or rather through this constant process, the poetic subject seeks to endure the trauma:284
Чи справді, обораний, ти геть відмежувався від спогадів [...]? Чи справді ти, обораний, утратив ту оболонку, що рабів з нас робить, ошуканих любов’ю і чуттям тієї приналежності до себе, що зрідка живить нас, а все мертвить?
(‘Is it true that / you, [who have been] ploughed around, completely separated yourself / from memories [...]? / Have you, [who have been] ploughed around, really lost / the shell that turns us into slaves, / [who are] deceived by love and the sense / of that belonging to [ourselves] / that only seldom gives us life, but mostly kills us?’)
‘I os vin, krai...’ (‘Here comes the edge...’) (DZ: 86-7)
We see a similar move in other poems marked by trauma. Consider, for example, these lines from Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’: ‘U menia segodnia mnogo dela: / Nado pamiat do kontsa ubit’ (‘I have a lot of work to do today; / I need to finish killing [my] memory’).285 In tune with depersonalisation, Akhmatova’s poetic subject similarly distances herself from her anguish: ‘Net, eto ne ia, eto kto-to drugoi stradaet. Ia by tak ne mogla’ (‘No, it is not me, it is
heavily is [the] pain writing with me. / You are in the abyss’, P: 311), where the speaker transposes his distress from ‘I’ into ‘you’ to externalise his experience. 283 Berehulak, ‘Rolia pamiati’, p. 61. 284 Dmytro Stus highlights ‘maizhe poslidovno vytrymana psykholohichna vidstoronenist lirychnoho heroia “Palimpsestiv” vid konkretnykh sytuatsii, iaki staly poshtovkhom do napysannia tvoru’ (‘almost invariably consistent psychological detachment of the lyrical hero of “Palimpsests” from the specific situations that prompted the writing of the [respective] poem ) (P: 662). 285 Anna Akhmatova, Rekviem: 1935-1940, 2nd edn (New York: Tovarishchestvo zarubezhnykh pisatelei, 1969), Part 7, ‘Prigovor’ (‘The Verdict’).
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someone else who is suffering. I wouldn’t be able to suffer like this’).286 Commenting on Akhmatova’s poem in one of his journal entries before the arrest, Stus effectively articulates the protective function of depersonalisation: ‘Chytav uchora Annu Akhmatovu, dyvuvavsia ii vysokomu [...] strazhdanniu, uspokoiennosti. Vona [...] vyvyshchuietsia nad [strazhdanniam], zalyshaiuchys [...] liudynoiu, viddanoiu krasi’ (‘I read Anna Akhmatova [‘Requiem’] yesterday, and was astonished by her high [...] suffering, her calm. She rises above [suffering], remaining [...] a human being dedicated to beauty’).287 ‘The depersonalisation of the soul...’ provides an example of such protection: the poetic subject encourages himself to look beyond his intense emotional experience and to stand at a remove from it. The use of the second person is important here. Joshua Parker describes how the narrative mechanism of self-address can help to work through moments of trauma: ‘a writer is in these cases able to put himself more “in the place” of the story’s “telling” position rather than in that of the “experiencing” position. By projecting the rejected self onto the text, an author is mercifully removed from the story-world and now instead controls it.’288 On the narrative level, Parker’s distinction between ‘telling’ (or, better still, ‘speaking’) and ‘experiencing’ positions correspond to the pairing of the observing self and the observed self. In this chapter, I am interested in the unique dynamic relationship between ‘I’ (the speaker) and ‘you’ (his lyrical double). Stus’s lyrical subject persistently challenges, questions, and probes ‘you’, which is evident, inter alia, in the constant shift of the narrative stance in Stus’s poetry. The constant interaction between ‘I’ and ‘you’ reveals the making of the subject. In his seminal book I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923), Martin Buber distinguishes between two fundamental pairs (‘the basic words’ in his terminology): ‘I-Thou’ (Ich-Du) and ‘I-It’ (Ich-Es). The basic word I-It abides in the realm of experience and certainty whereas I- You is in that of relations and uncertainty: ‘Whoever says You does not have something; he has nothing. But he stands in relation’.289 In a similar vein, in Palimpsests, the ‘you’ does not represent an ‘it’ to be owned. As the observed self, ‘you’ escapes the state of an object, which one can easily delineate or register. Instead, it marks an indispensable aspect of selfhood.
286 Ibid., Part 3, p. 11. 287 Stus’s journal entry dated 2 December 1970, in ‘Shchodennykovi zapysy 1970-71’, in IL Archive, F. 170, N 1202, pp. 1-89 (p. 1). 288 Joshua Parker, ‘In Their Own Words: On Writing in Second Person’, Connotations, 21.2-3 (2011/2012), 165-76 (p. 172). 289 Martin Buber, I and Thou (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 55.
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Even though Stus’s poetry focuses so much on the experiences of the self and may at first seem awash with soliloquy, I argue that it has a fundamentally dialogic nature. The vast majority of Stus’s poems contain apostrophes, whether addressing the Other or, primarily, the self. The poet’s lyrical voice perpetually moves towards ‘you’, leaving no doubts as to the centrality of lyric address in Palimpsests. As William Waters notes with respect to poetry, ‘what second-person lyrics in general help to show is this: self is not always a matter of “I”. Saying I – talking about oneself – is one enunciatory pose of the person, not personhood itself.’290 Like Buber, he argues that the you-form is ‘not “someone’s” encounter but encounter itself’.291 Bakhtin, in his theory of monologism and dialogism, emphasises similarly that ‘[i]stina [...] rozhdaetsia mezhdu ludmi, sovmestno ishchushchimi istinu, v protsesse ikh dialogicheskogo obshcheniia’ (‘the truth [...] is being born between people searching collectively for the truth in the process of their dialogic communication’).292 ‘The truth’ thus dwells in the ‘between’ of the act of communication rather than within its actors. While Bakhtin’s notion of dialogism famously concerns the novel (associating poetry with monologism instead), in particular the works of Dostoevsky, and despite the fact that Bakhtin refers to communication between different people, his concept of dialogism is highly relevant for the discussion of Stus’s writing. The ‘truth’ or, in this case, the ‘content’ of the subject is to be found neither within ‘I’ nor within ‘you’, but ‘between’ these two aspects of the self, in the realm of the relationship unfolding between them. Stus achieves self-doubling through self-address and a constant shifting between different poetic personas (or narrative positions in his prose), but also through focused attention to the self, all of which form Stus’s innovative model of lyric address.293 ‘You’, as the specular double of the speaker, unusually serves as the central persona in Palimpsests. Unlike such major poets of ‘you’ as Rilke,294 Eugenio Montale, John Ashbery, and Celan,295
290 William Waters, Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 94-5. 291 Ibid., p. 98. 292 Mikhail Bakhtin, Problemy poetiki Dostoevskogo, in Mikhail Bakhtin, Sobranie sochinenii, T.6 (Moskva: Russkiie slovari), 2002, p.124. 293 Cf. recent volumes exploring lyric address such as Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); and Cornelis van der Haven, and Jürgen Pieters, eds, Lyric Address in Dutch Literature, 1250-1800 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). Although illuminating, these works are emblematic of the general lacuna in the study of lyric self-address in poetry. William Waters’s incisive study Poetry’s Touch: On Lyric Address is a notable exception. Such status quo is largely dictated by the very poetry that scholars choose to study. The extensive use of self-address and the complex shifting between different poetic personas in Stus’s poetry provides a generous subject for enquiry. 294 For a discussion of an affinity between Stus’s and Rilke’s use of the second person see Burianyk, ‘Incarceration and Death’, pp. 134-5. 295 See Rossella Riccobono, ‘Deixis and the Dynamics of the Relationship between Text and Reader in the Poetry of Eugenio Montale’, Edinburgh Working Papers in Applied Linguistics, Number 7, ed. by Brian
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in Stus’s poetry, the poetic ‘you’ mostly operates not as the Other, but precisely as the specular double of the speaker, who is assessed, called upon, incited, challenged, and called into action. Perhaps it is precisely because ‘you’ is so ubiquitous in Stus’s poetry that Stus Studies have largely overlooked it. Yet for the poet the investigation of ‘you’ goes beyond being a mere technique. It has tangible consequences, foregrounding the metaphysical significance of the narrative perspective. Stus perceives self-address as a fundamental psychological modality underpinning the making of the self in his poetry.
3.1. Stus’s Prose as a Laboratory of Self-Doubling
Stus’s prose works have received little critical attention.296 Furthermore, no comprehensive study of the relationship between Stus’s poetry and his prose has yet been produced, as scholars commonly tend to choose an ‘either/or’ approach. While I cannot undertake such a comprehensive study here, I argue that an analysis of Stus’s prose casts important light on the interpretation of his verse, especially with respect to the problem of self-doubling. Stus’s prose serves as a laboratory of a kind: it showcases his first attempts to articulate the phenomenological split of the subject into ‘I’ and ‘you’ and the constant shifting between these perspectives, as well the image of the double. In this section, I will focus on two of Stus’s short stories to ground this exploration, ‘Podorozh do Shchastivska’ (‘A Trip to Shchastivsk’), and ‘Tak buvalo uzhe ne raz...’ (‘This Has Happened Before...’). Stus likely wrote most of his prose works in the mid- to late-1960s (the originals in the archives do not contain specific dates.) Mostly, they are experimental stories with strong autobiographical overtones. It immediately becomes clear that this prose was written by a poet: in all the stories external events are secondary, and their plots give only an illusion of narrative contours. We follow not so much the linear progression of the plot as the progression of the narrator’s consciousness. They provide an example par excellence of how
Parkinson and Keith Mitchell (Edinburgh: University of Edinburg, 1996), pp. 100-112; Bonnie Costello, ‘John Ashbery and the Idea of the Reader’, Contemporary Literature, 4 (1982), 493-514; Joanna Klink, ‘You. An Introduction to Paul Celan’, The Iowa Review, 1 (2000), 1-18. 296 Recent scholarship has started to explore Stus’s prose and his screenplays. See Olha Punina, ‘Khudozhnii potentsial stsenarnoho tekstu Vasylia Stusa’, Stusoznavchi zoshyty: Naukovyi almanakh, 2 (2016), 52-65; Serhii Tsikavyi, ‘Urbanistychnyi topos u prozi Vasylia Stusa’, Stusoznavchi zoshyty: Naukovyi almanakh, 1 (2016), 106-17; Serhii Tsikavyi, ‘Prostorovi parametry prozy Vasylia Stusa: Naratolohichne nablyzhennia’, Stusoznavchi zoshyty: Naukovyi almanakh, 3 (2017), 91-104; Tetiana Bielobrova, ‘Osoblyvosti prozovoho dorobku Vasylia Stusa’, Naukovi pratsi Kamianets-Podilskoho natsionalnoho universytetu imeni Ivana Ohiienka: Filolohichni nauky, 24 (2010), 148-54; Serhii Nesvit, ‘Retseptsiia mista u povisti V. Stusa “Podorozh do Shchastivska”’, Aktualni problemy slovianskoi filolohii: Linhvistyka i literaturoznavstvo, 23:2 (2010), 186- 94; Oleh Solovei, ‘Modusy khudozhnoi prozy Vasylia Stusa (Travmatychnyi dosvid ta etyka oporu literatury)’, Stusoznavchi zoshyty: Naukovyi almanakh, 1 (2016), 96-105.
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narrativity can ‘consist in the experiential depiction of human consciousness tout court’.297 The movement of consciousness manifests itself, inter alia, in the frequent and abrupt transitions between different psychological projections of the protagonist and the significance of ‘you’-perspective: ‘I zdaietsia, shcho spysh. І zdaietsia, shcho vdvokh – ty і ty. Odyn – toi, shcho ty, а druhyi – toi ty, shcho ne ty, shcho krashche b ne buv toboiu’ (‘And it seems that you are sleeping. And it seems that there are two of you – you and you. One is the one that is you, and the other one – the you that is not you, [the you] that would better not be you’) (‘A Trip to Shchastivsk’, S 4: 22). Such doubling permeates Stus’s prose and signals a crisis of the protagonist’s consciousness. The exploration of subjectivity in Stus’s prose is unconventional in the Soviet literary context. Stus was one of the first Soviet (Ukrainian) authors to probe the possibilities of the narration with shifting phenomenological perspectives, and to make this shifting the very focus of his work. The Soviet Ukrainian prose of the 1960s and 1970s (both official and underground) was much more modest in its stylistic and psychological innovation, even in its more experimental exemplars, such as the khymerna prosa (‘whimsical novel’) of the 1970s.298 However, the exploration of ‘you’ as the specular double of the self in prose fiction represented a relatively new tendency even beyond the Soviet context. Bruce Morrissette’s 1965 piece exemplifies this novelty:
Far from constituting a technical ‘trick’ [...] narrative ‘you,’ although of comparatively late development, appears as a mode of curiously varied psychological resonances, capable, in the proper hands, of producing effects in the fictional field that are unobtainable by other modes or persons. Narrative ‘you’ generates a complex series of perspectives whose multiple angles deserve to be explored.299
What largely inspired and provoked Morrissette’s piece among others was Michel Butor’s trailblazing novel La Modification, a major fictional milestone in the writing of ‘you’. La
297 Monika Fludernik, Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 22. 298 Pavlyshyn helpfully summarises the salient ‘components’ of khymerna proza: ‘a rural setting facilitating the presentation of Ukrainian ethnographic detail; historical reference, especially to the Cossack period; fantastic and supernatural motifs, most often from the repertoire of Ukrainian folklore; the admission of non-realistic notions of causality; eccentricity of style, often accompanied by waywardness and whimsy in narrative technique; erotic allusion; and humour’. See Marko Pavlyshyn, ‘The Soviet Ukrainian Whimsical Novel’, Journal of Ukrainian Studies, 1-2 (2000), 103-20 (p. 104). Pavlyshyn’s catalogue makes it clear that for its limited experimentation, the whimsical novel remained largely traditional, foregrounding the national folk culture and historical context. Pavlyshyn notes that while it ‘represented a departure from socialist realist tradition toward greater formal freedom’ (p.104), khymerna proza ‘remained subject to the requirements of a realist aesthetics’ (p. 105) and was mostly ‘ideologically as orthodox as [its] predecessors’ (p.106). 299 Bruce Morrissette, ‘Narrative “You” in Comparative Literature’, Comparative Literature Studies, 1-2 (1965), 1-24 (p. 2). Morrissette also refers to Sartre’s proposition that ‘every novelistic technique implies a metaphysical attitude on the part of the author’ (p. 1).
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Modification (variously translated into English as Second Thoughts or A Change of Heart) was published in 1957, just a few years before Stus wrote his prose works. What renders Butor’s novel a classic in the modern fiction of ‘you’ is its foregrounding of the second person, as the protagonist Léon Delmont is referred to only with vous (formal ‘you’) throughout the book.300 Butor’s thoughts on second-person narration supply an instrumental point of reference for analysing Stus’s prose. Butor insists that the choice of a narrative perspective and pronoun ‘n’est nullement indifférent’ (‘is not without implications’).301 He argues that ‘[c]haque fois que l’on voudra décrire un véritable progrès de la conscience, la naissance même du langage, c’est la deuxième personne qui sera la plus efficace’ ([e]ach time we would like to describe the true progress of consciousness, the very coming-to-be of the language, it is the second person that is most efficient’ (p. 286). The second-person narrative, then, allows an exploration of various facets of consciousness conceived as a continual process. In the first-person narration, suggests Butor, the character ‘conna[ît] entièrement sa propre histoire’ (‘knows [their] own entire story’) and thus ‘donn[e] son temoignage’ (‘gives testimony’) (p. 286). The ‘you’ narration is different in a significant way: the character does not have complete knowledge of their own story: ‘Il faut [...] que le personnage [...] ne puisse pas raconter sa propre histoire, que le langage lui soi interdit, et que l’on force cette interdiction, que l’on provoque cette accession’ (‘It is necessary [...] that the character [...] should not be able to tell [their] own story, that language is prohibited to [them], and that we force this prohibition, that we provoke this accession’) (p. 286). Narrating through ‘you’ concerns not (so much) the relaying of what has been seen and what is known, but rather the expression of the very becoming of the self. If Butor’s argumentation brings to mind the phenomenological method, it is because the writer himself emphasises ‘le caractère phénoménologiquement fondamental de la seconde personne’ (‘the phenomenologically fundamental character of the second person’) (p. 289). The ‘véritable progrès de la conscience’, described by Butor, is exactly what is at stake
300 It is unlikely that Stus was familiar with Butor’s works in the 1960s, although in his essay ‘On the Question of the Artistic Individuality...’, Stus refers to the ‘objectivisation’ of literature in the works of Alain Robbe- Grillet, another writer associated with the nouveau roman movement. In a letter to his parents dated 14 March 1975, Stus refers to the book: Leonid Eremeev, Frantsuzskii ‘novyi roman’ (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1974), where the author analyses, among others, some works by Michel Butor (S VI, 1: 130). I have not been able to find any other references to Butor prior to 1974 in Stus’s writing or archive materials. 301 Michel Butor, ‘L’usage des pronoms personnels dans le roman’, in Problemes de la personne. Colloque du Centre de Recherches de Psychologie Comparative, ed. by Ignace Meyerson (Paris: Mouton & Co., 1973), pp. 281-93 (p. 281). Cf. Parker, ‘In Their Own Words’: ‘[w]hat on the surface seems simply changing a pronoun is actually a complex reconfiguration of the writer’s relationship with her own experiencing self’ (p. 172).
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in Stus’s prose, and indeed in his poetry, where the second person furnishes a venue of relationship to oneself. Stus hardly left any theoretical reflections on the ‘you’ dynamics in his prose. Yet we find some elucidating passages in his early essays. In ‘On the Question of the Artistic Individuality...’, Stus argues:
Зазнаючи впливу суспільства, читача, життєвого і художнього матеріалу, [митець] відповідно реагує, поглиблюючи, розширюючи і навіть зміщуючи себе, свою окремо- індивідуальну авторську точку зору.
([The writer] provides an adequate response to the influence of society, the reader, the life and artistic material, by deepening, broadening and even displacing himself, his separate and individual authorial point of view.) (S IV: 212)
To demonstrate his point, Stus analyses a passage from Ernest Hemingway’s memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), which comments on the writer’s life in the 1920s in Paris. Incidentally, Hemingway is one of the first prose authors to experiment, if not systematically, with ‘you’-address.302 The passage that Stus cites starts with the second-person perspective (subsequently shifting to ‘I’): ‘Some days it went so well that you could make the country so that you could walk into it through the timber to come out into the clearing and work up onto the high ground and see the hills beyond the arm of the lake’.303 Stus’s comment comes next:
Таке розширення авторської індивідуальності виявляється в ‘співпереживанні’ автора і героя (дуже добре таке ‘співпереживання’ виявляється у внутрішніх монологах) [...] в необхідності чітко виділити той чи інший ‘емоційний’ план раніше пізнаного предмета
(Such extension of the authorial individuality manifests itself in ‘sympathy’ [spivperezhyvannia] of the author with the character (internal monologues are an especially apt manifestation of such ‘sympathy’) [...] in the necessity to separate [vydilyty] clearly an ‘emotional’ plane of the object [predmeta] experienced earlier) (S IV: 212)
Stus foregrounds the dynamic relationship between the author and the narrative ‘you’, which he describes as spivperezhyvannia (‘sympathy’) and the extension of the author. While he speaks of the tandem of the author and the character, the phenomenological split into the observing self (the author in this case) and the observed self (the ‘you’ of the character)
302 Cf. Morrissette, ‘Narrative “You”’: ‘The intrusion of second-person passages into so-called “normal” novelistic practice is well illustrated in the novels of Ernest Hemingway’ (p. 8). 303 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 1964, p. 91. Cf. Stus’s translation of this passage into Ukrainian from the Russian translation: ‘V inshi dni vse ishlo dobre i udavalos napysaty tak, shcho ty bachyv tsei krai, mih proity sosnovym lisom i prosikoiu, а zvidty pidniatysia na kruchu і ozyrnuty uzghiria za vyhnutoiu lukom liniieiu ozera’ (p. 212).
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occurs here. Spivperezhyvannia, then, mobilises a ‘oneself-as-another’ perspective. For Stus, the rationale for this extension consists in ‘the necessity to separate [vydilyty] clearly this or that “emotional” plane’. He focuses on the psychological implication of such a narrative approach allowing to capture and articulate the inner life of the character, in tune with Butor’s ‘la naissance même du langage’. Such narration represents not a technical experiment for Stus, but rather a way to investigate the self phenomenologically. Later, in 1975, Stus develops this idea and refers explicitly to the phenomenological aspect:
значно цікавіше, – ловити моментальні (краще процесуальні, піймані в роботі, в контакті) враження від світу, які глибші за узвичаєне сприймання, бачать більше і беруть глибше. Навіть з феноменологічного погляду – це план найцікавіший. І, може, в ньому – найбільші здобутки: Фолкнер, Хемінгуей, Камю ‘Чужого’.
([it is] much more interesting to capture fleeting (better processual, caught at work, in contact) impressions of the world, which are deeper than ordinary perception, which see more and get deeper. Even from the phenomenological perspective this is the most fascinating plane. And it is here, perhaps, that we find the greatest achievements: Faulkner, Hemingway, the Camus of [the period of] ‘Stranger’.) 304
Writing, therefore, should grasp not the world, but ‘impressions of the world’. Stus brings to the fore the relationship of the consciousness to itself rather than the relationship between consciousness and what is beyond the subject. The qualifiers that Stus employs highlight both process (protsesualni, v roboti) and relationship (v kontakti). ‘A Trip to Shchastivsk’ is Stus’s longest story. The trip of the protagonist Petro and his son to Petro’s parents’ house in Shchastivsk (a fictional name for Stus’s home city Donetsk) supplies the central external plot line of the text. At the very beginning of the story, the protagonist appears in the third person: ‘Prokynuvshys, Petro stav pryhliadatysia do sutini, prahnuchy zdohadatys, iakyi same chas’ (‘Having woken up, Petro started to look closely at the twilight, trying to guess what time it was’) (S IV: 6). However, from the description of Petro’s physical actions, the process of waking up, the reader is very soon transposed into the realm of Petro’s inner life via focalisation: ‘Do noho povernulosia vidchuttia zbihloho snu, riatovane od zabuttia samym zakarbovanym spohadom dytynstva’ (‘A sense of a bygone dream came back to him, a sense that was saved from oblivion only by an imprinted memory from childhood’) (S IV: 6).
304 See Stus’s letter to his parents dated 1 October 1975, in S VI, 1: 168.
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A shift to second-person narration accompanies this move from the objective to the subjective: ‘zghaduiuchy, ty napered uzhe znaiesh, shcho vse obmezhytsia tilky tym, shcho vynykne hostroprokholodne vidchuttia nebezpeky’ (‘recollecting [it], you already know in advance that there will be only a sharp and cold sense of danger’) (S IV: 6). The transition to Petro’s intense emotional interior occurs almost momentarily. Such shifting repeats itself throughout the rest of the story and in fact operates as its central stylistic tool. The reader has hardly any external point of reference. The plot has not yet provided us with any sufficient information to understand why the ‘you’ has a sense of danger. We plunge into the protagonist’s subjective experiences in medias res, which draws passages like this one close to the genre of the journal. The narrator seeks to comprehend and articulate the experiences of the protagonist (likely an aspect of the narrator himself) as they emerge. There is also a noticeable temporal shift in the narration: whereas the third-person’s detached perspective prompts the use of the past tense, the ‘you’ functions in the present. We come across a similar transition between persons and timeframes in another passage in the story. Whilst on the train, Petro addresses himself (or, less likely, the narrator addresses Petro): ‘tse ty, lezhachy na lavi platskartnoho vahona, shukaiesh samoho sebe – mizh velychchiu synovoho prykhysnyka i maloiu kuzkoiu, kotru vidnosyt, iak vitrom, elektryka i perehrita para’ (‘it is you who, lying on the bench of [the] couchette car, searches for yourself – somewhere between the greatness of your son’s guardian and a small bug, which is being carried away by wind, electricity and overheated steam’) (S IV: 8). Suddenly, the third- person perspective comes into play: ‘I koly naplyvalo tse vyhostrile pochuttia [...] vin chuv u hrudiakh toskne pokoliuvannia, niby v leheniakh ne stavalo kysniu ’ (‘And when this sharp feeling would take hold of him [...] he could feel a wistful tingling in his chest, as if there were not enough oxygen in his lungs’) (S IV: 8). The second-person view again brings about the present tense, whereas the ‘he’ is narrated from the position of the past. Furthermore, the narrator employs the third-person perspective when he describes the protagonist’s physical sensations, while the ‘you’-narration revolves around Petro’s psychological journey: ‘it is you who [...] searches for yourself’. We also notice that the narrator uses the demonstrative deictic tse in his attempt to define what unfolds within the protagonist’s consciousness and to pin down an otherwise nebulous stream of thought. The search for the self is not a known event in the past that the narrator recounts, but rather a happening in the present, which Petro himself only comes to experience. The
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verbal description of this happening provides a ‘narrative unity of self’.305 This process can be characterised as ‘the assertion of the writing subject as the place where the experience itself is constituted.’306 Furthermore, external alterations in the physical world often accompany (or even grow from) the internal changes, which is especially evident in Petro’s train journey (akin to Butor’s La Modification, where a train journey similarly forms the organising principle of the plot). By the same token, the movement of consciousness intensifies in the background of such transitions as a walk or a liminal state between sleep and being awake. Following the train trip, Petro comes back home to Shchastivsk, which conjures in him memories of childhood. Thinking of his own childhood, he doubles:
Дитинство і парубоцтво стали гіркнути, це Петро відчував і раніше, не сходячи з дива, як ступінь помінення старих почуттів точно визначає міру нашої зіпсутості. Десь тут показувала свій вид заздрість до самого себе. До себе давнього, як чужого, як конкурента, – але не в житті, а в чомусь іншому, чого Петро поки що не міг назвати поіменно.
(Childhood and adolescence started to become bitter, which Petro had already felt earlier, staying surprised at how the extent of the modification of old feelings accurately determines the degree of our perversion [zipsutosti]. Somewhere here the jealousy of oneself manifested itself. [Jealousy] [o]f the old self, as if of someone alien, of a competitor – however, not in life, but in something different, to which Petro could not yet give a name.) (S IV: 11)
Petro experiences a gap between his present ‘I’ and past ‘I’. The self of his childhood is not subsumed by the present self, but rather exists on a par with it and, thereby, turns into the protagonist’s double (‘someone alien [...] a competitor’), evoking the image of the doppelgänger. We have already seen this move in Stus’s poetry. In ‘I was wandering...’, we recall, the speaker searches for his past self (‘I was hoping to meet at least myself’), where the poet fashions the one who searches and the one sought after as two different people sharing the ‘now’. In both ‘A Trip to Shchastivsk’ and ‘I was wandering...’, the protagonist/speaker doubles upon return to his hometown, experiencing the anxiety of the uncanny that goes hand in hand with the ‘homely’ turning into the ‘unhomely’. A similar doubling occurs elsewhere in the story, in what on the surface appears to be a mundane situation of little significance. Petro’s son has a fever, and this relatively minor
305 See John. J. Davenport, Narrative Identity, Autonomy, and Morality: From Frankfurt and McIntyre to Kierkegaard (New York: Routledge, 2012). 306 David Herman, ‘Textual “You” and Double Deixis in Edna O’Brien’s “A Pagan Place”’, Style, 3 (1994), 378-410 (p. 405).
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event produces a strong emotional response in Petro, a response that seems to be disproportionate:
Ця черствість небезпечна, її треба зрізати, як будяки, інакше за цим чортополохом ти не впізнаєш самого себе. Твоє почуття вічної самотності переросте тебе самого, потім відокремиться, і ти станеш чужий – навіть для самого себе.
(This hardheartedness is dangerous, you need to cut it off, like wild grass, otherwise you won’t recognise yourself beyond these tall weeds. Your sense of eternal solitude will outgrow yourself, then it will separate itself, and then you will become alien – even to yourself.) (S IV: 19)
The distance from the past self in the childhood passage is here complemented by the distance from the future self, which Petro again describes as chuzhyi (‘alien’ or ‘another’). He refers specifically to the problem of recognition. The address to ‘you’, the protagonist’s double, embodies the inability to coincide with oneself, which alienates himself from himself. The existence in time causes a crisis, bringing about self-estrangement. The narrator describes the sense of alterity and otherness within the self even more pressingly later in the story, where the aspect of otherness in the protagonist appears expressly as the Other. Alone in Kyiv, while his son is in Shchastivsk and his wife is in hospital (another manifestation of a malaise, next to his son’s fever), Petro reads a piece by Albert Camus. The reading has a deep impact on him, and Petro leaves to go for a walk in a forest, where he loses the sense of wholeness:
Так блукаючи, Петро несподівано впіймав себе на відчутті, що в нього вступився хтось інший. [...] Чуєш, як повільно розмиваються межі твоєї заскорузлої індивідуальності- окремішності? Іще трохи – і ти втратиш самого себе [...] ти змалієш до ледь чутої цяточки безмежної матерії, коли, ставши нічим, ти почуєшся усім – і ставком, і дорогою, і лісом, і полем, і небом.
(Thus walking Petro suddenly found himself feeling that someone else had stepped into him. [...] Can you feel how the limits of your entrenched individuality-separateness slowly dissolve? Before long you will lose yourself [...] you will become as small as a hardly tangible speck of boundless matter, when, having become nothing, you will become everything – the lake, the road, the forest, the field, the sky.) (S IV: 25)307
307 This passage alludes to Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, to which Stus refers in his essay ‘On the Question...’, precisely in the context of the dynamic relationship with ‘you’.
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The inner epiphany appears with striking spontaneity and stands in significant contrast to the external plot of the story. The narrator moves from the third-person perspective to the second person as soon as Petro starts to feel the presence of a different self within him. The self- address again appears in the present and, furthermore, Petro formulates it not as an assertion, but rather as a question. The interrogative tonality emphasises the uncertain nature of the second-person perception and shows that neither the narrator nor the protagonist himself possess the ultimate knowledge of Petro’s psychological states (in tune with Butor’s insistence on not knowing one’s own ‘entire story’). His consciousness dwells in the making, which the ‘you’-address helps to express. A sense of someone else stepping into and existing in the self appears again in Stus’s story ‘Tak buvalo uzhe ne raz...’ (‘This Has Happened Before...’), where the perspective of the narrative ‘you’ is the first to appear in the text:
Так бувало уже не раз. Несподіване, майже непомітне, але повільне, воно приходило, заселяло кімнату і починало врочити. Приходило вранці, коли ти ще не оговтався від сну, а найчастіше – увечері. [...] Запаморочлива, тягуче-солодка, з гострими поколюваннями розсипаного, як товчене скло, болю втома, очі твої вже не бачать, вуха – не чують. Стан самогіпнозу, інакше не скажеш, інакше довелося б думати, що тобою порядкує хтось невидимий. Може, це й справедливіше: адже ти уникав себе, проминав, як це раптом відкрилося миттю ясновидіння, відпадав кавалками, як підгнила колода, і тому цей хтось уже перекинувся в тебе. Там його більше, ніж тут. Ти став кимось
(This has happened before and not once. Unexpected, almost inconspicuous, yet slow, it would come, settle in the room and start hypnotising [you]. It would come in the morning, when you had not yet come back to life after sleep, but most often – in the evening. [...] Mind-numbing, lingeringly sweet weariness with sharp tingling of pain, scattered like glass; your eyes can no longer see, your ears can no longer hear. A state of self-hypnosis, how else would you describe it; otherwise you would need to believe that someone invisible is in control of you. Perhaps this is more just: because you were avoiding yourself, missing [yourself], as all of a sudden clairvoyance opened up in a flash, [you] were collapsing into fragments, like a tainted log, and for this reason that someone [khtos] already moved into you. There is more of him there than here. You became someone) (emphasis mine) (S IV: 94-5)
As I pointed out earlier, the narrator or the lyrical subject of Stus’s oeuvres rarely acts as a witness to the external. If he is to bear testimony to something, it is to the unfolding of his own consciousness. This alterity to oneself leads to the doubling of the subject, where an irreversible gap emerges between the speaking ‘I’ (the observer) and the experiencing ‘I’ (the observed). The narrated self becomes distanced both from his own body (‘your eyes can no
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longer see, your ears can no longer hear’; ‘[you] were collapsing into fragments, like a tainted log’) and his own consciousness, vacating the self for khtos, the unknown Other. The sense of anxiety (immediately manifested in the unspecified and unattributable tse (‘it’)) takes over the narrator and permeates the whole narrative situation. We find no signs of the external world here. All action revolves around ‘consciousness tout court’, to use Fludernik’s phrase. The whole passage stages a number of displacements, all of which stem from the same fundamental source: ‘you were avoiding yourself, missing [yourself]’. At work here are also intertextual references to at once two authors: Skovoroda and Rilke. In discussing Skovoroda’s Platonic duality in Chapter Two, I quoted a passage in which Skovoroda’s narrator Druh describes how ‘[a]ll creation has now been divided into two parts [...] so that you do not mix darkness with light, or a lie with the truth’. What enables this division in Skovoroda’s piece is the new kind of seeing (‘Now raise your eyes, if they are enlightened with the spirit of the truth, and look at [the truth] [...] But gaze at yourself? How did you see yourself before?’)308 The new sight, for Skovoroda, enables one to tell the true from the false, and thus to become closer to the essence. The self-doubling in Stus’s passage is similarly brought about by the ‘clairvoyance [that] opened up in a flash’, preceded and enabled by the failure of the physical sight (‘your eyes can no longer see’). Yet, this clairvoyance does not bring relief, as the fragmentation of the self and the identitarian attack of the Other follow. Seeing clearly means seeing the self and, concomitantly, facing the disunity. The phrase ‘your eyes can no longer see, your ears can no longer hear’ echoes another passage from Skovoroda’s ‘The Narcissus’, which explicates the concept of the true man:
I just said that you only see your own tail, but know nothing about your head. So how can you know someone based on only his heel? But since you do not see your eye, except for its final member, so you have not seen the ear, or your tongue, or hand, or your feet, or any of your other members, your entire body except for its final member, which is called the heel or tail or shadow. How can you say that you have comprehended yourself? You have only lost yourself. You have no ears, no nostrils, no eyes, none of any of what you are, except for just your shadow (emphasis mine)309
308 Cf. Skovoroda’s original text: ‘Teper podnimi ochi tvoi, esli oni ozarenny dukhom istiny, i vzglian na ee. [...] No osmotris na samago sebe? Kak ty prezhde vidal sebe?’ (emphasis in the original). See ‘Narkiss’, p. 175. 309 ‘Ia vid govoril, chto khvost tolko svoi vidish, a golovy ne znaiesh. Tak mozhno li uznat cheloveka iz odnoi ego piaty? A kak oka tvoego ne vidish, krome posledniia ego chasti, tak ni ukha, ni tvoego iazyka, ni ruk, ni nog tvoikh nikogda ty ne vidal, ni vsekh tvoikh protchiikh chastei, tselago tvoego tela, krome posledniia ego chasti, nazyvaiemaia piata, khvost ili ten... Tak mozhesh li skazat, chto ty sebe uznal? Ty sam sebe poterial. Net u tebe ni ushei, ni nozdrei, ni ochei, ni vsego tebe, krome odnoi tvoei teni’ (p. 160.) I use Daniel Shubin’s translation,
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These alterations of the metaphorical body concern the pursuit of authenticity. The loss of the parts of the body and of the senses is bound up with the loss of the true man. We see a similar disintegration of the body in Stus’s text. Yet while for Skovoroda the above loss presupposes the possibility of finding what has been lost, Stus’s passage reveals fissures in the very unity of the self – what for Skovoroda ultimately remains intact, even though it can be found or lost. The opening line of Stus’s story, ‘this has happened before and not once’ highlights repetition, which additionally problematises Skovoroda’s Platonic sensibility. Another passage from ‘This Has Happened...’ contains intertextual links with Rilke:
Але бережись необачних рухів. Начувайся. Коли наступає ця мить тимчасового болісного прозріння, не пори гарячки. Спокійно відійди, ніби так-таки нічого й не сталося. Обдури його. Обдури так, ніби обдурюєш себе самого. А коли відійдеш на добрячу відстань – тікай. Стрімголов. Куди бачиш.
(But beware of hasty movements. Watch out. When this moment of a temporary painful epiphany comes, do not rush. Step away quietly, as if nothing has happened at all. Fool him. Fool him as if you fool yourself. And when you are at a sufficient distance – run. Headlong. Run away…) (S IV: 95)
Compare this extract from Rilke’s novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910, initially titled The Journal of My Other Self):
for now [the mirror] was the stronger one, and I was the mirror. I stared at this large, terrifying stranger in front of me, and felt appalled to be alone with him. But at the very moment I thought this, the worst thing happened: I lost all sense of myself, I simply ceased to exist. For one second, I felt an indescribable, piercing, futile longing for myself, then only he remained: there was nothing except him. I began to run, but now it was he that was running [emphasis in the original]310
The reflection of Rilke’s narrative ‘I’ in the mirror causes and reinforces his self-doubling. The reflection becomes the Other, which means that ‘he’ goes through the process of self- estrangement. The narrator introduces ‘he’ to speak of his specular self, and yet for himself he still preserves the role of an ‘I’ as a solid point of reference. Stus stretches the doubling further. His narrator perceives the alterity within the self primarily as ‘you’ and thereby
see Grigori Skovoroda, Skovoroda: The World Tried to Catch Me but Could Not, ed. and trans. by Daniel H. Shubin (2012), p. 122. 310 Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, trans. by Stephen Mitchell, intr. by William H. Gass (New York: Vintage, 1990), pp. 107-8.
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internalises this conflict, drawing upon his Baroque and modernist intertexts only to rework them significantly and to complicate their images by a phenomenological perspective.
3.2. Self-Doubling in Palimpsests
3.2.1. The Authentic Other
The image of the double is recurrent and even obsessive for Stus’s poetic subject.311 The poem ‘Meni zdaietsia...’ (‘It seems to me...’), one of the first texts in Joyful Cemetery, explicitly thematises the Authentic Other and reveals an intimate relationship between Stus’s prose and his poetry in exploring this theme:
Мені здається, що живу не я, а інший хтось живе за мене в світі в моїй подобі. Ні очей, ні вух, ні рук, ні ніг, ні рота. Очужілий в своєму тілі. І, кавалок болю, і, самозамкнений, у тьмущій тьмі завис. Ти, народившись, виголів лишень, а не приріс до тіла. Не дійшов своєї плоті. Тільки перехожий межисвітів, ворушишся на споді чужого існування.
(It seems to me that it is not I who lives / but someone else who lives for me in the world / in my image. / No eyes, nor ears, / nor hands, nor legs, nor mouth. Alienated / in [one’s] own body. And, a fragment of pain, / and, self-enclosed, hanging in the obscure darkness. / Having been born, you have only become flattened, / not having become attached to your body. [You] have not reached / your flesh. [You are] a mere traveller / of the between-worlds, you move at the bottom / of someone else’s existence.)
311 Stus articulates this irresolvable duplicity in his poem ‘Nemov rubin...’ (‘As if a ruby...’), where amidst a kaleidoscope of ‘samonablyzhen, upiznan і vrochen’ (‘self-approaching, recognition, and tantalising’) the poetic subject realises the impossibility of being one with oneself. He accepts this impossibility as his own choice: ‘liubo omyliatysia. I maty / za pobratyma svoho dviinyka’ (‘it is pleasant to err. And to have / the double as [your] brother’) (P: 213). Cf. the poem ‘Tam, de nadrichchia...’ (‘There, where [there is] the shore...’): ‘Mov braty siamski, / my zhyvemo iz nym – oba mertsi’ (‘As if Siamese twins, / we live together, both dead’) (DZ: 298). In the poem ‘Zablyzko druhyi...’ (‘Too close is the other one...’), the speaker expresses it perhaps most poignantly: ‘Zablyzko druhyi, shcho meni v ridniu / darovanyi od Boha! Trokhy b dali’ (‘Too close is the other one, granted to me by God / as my kin! If he were a little further!) (P: 305).
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Pylypiuk insightfully points out that the erasure of the body represents a known mystical trope. The scholar suggests that here Stus draws upon the following line from Skovoroda’s ‘The Narcissus’: ‘[you] do not have the man in whom are found the eyes and nostrils, hearing and other senses’.312 Skovoroda’s narrator Druh further states: ‘You are the dream of your true man. You are the vestment, whereas he is the body. You are the appearance, whereas he is the truth in you. You are nothing indeed, whereas he is the creature in you’.313 For Skovoroda, therefore, ‘the true man’ has a double location: external (‘he is the body’) and internal (‘he is the truth in you’). It is also notable how Skovoroda draws a distinction between the true self and the false self through the use of pronouns: whereas the ‘you’ of his interlocutor Luka fails to be authentic, ‘the true man’, the authentic image of the self, appears as ‘he’, as something external. ‘It seems to me...’ internalises this conflict, transposing ‘you’ within the self (‘you have not yet reached your flesh’, emphasis mine). In her interpretation, Pylypiuk emphasises the senses and the mystical element in Stus’s poem, arguing that ‘[t]he modern technique of internal focalization notwithstanding, the subject matter of the poem is regeneration’.314 While I do not question the validity of a mystical reading, I propose a different interpretation of this text, one that, at odds with Pylypiuk’s assertion, foregrounds the internal focalisation (the address to ‘you’) instead of bracketing it. Such focalisation reveals non-coincidence in both existential and phenomenological terms.315 In discussing Stus’s story ‘This Has Happened...’, I highlighted a different quote, which proves even more relevant for Stus’s poem. Indeed, Stus’s ‘[n]i ochei, ni vukh, / ni ruk, ni nih, ni rota’316 repeats almost verbatim Skovoroda’s ‘ni Ukha, ni tvoiego Iazyka, ni Ruk, ni Nog tvoikh’ (‘you have not seen the ear, or your tongue, or hand, or your feet’).317 Inshyi
312 Quoted and translated in Pylypiuk, ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’, p. 199. This is a partial citation of the one that Pylypiuk uses. Pylypiuk’s translation is based on George L. Kline’s. 313 Cf. the original text: ‘Ty sonie istinnago tvoego cheloveka. Ty riza, a on telo. Ty privideniie, a on v tebe istina. Ty-to nichto, a on v tebe sushchestvo’, in Skovoroda, ‘Narkiss’, p. 163. 314 Pylypiuk, ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’, p. 201. 315 Later in the essay Pylypiuk does contend that ‘[a]s in Skovoroda’s writings, regeneration in the poetry of Stus pertains strictly to the psychological life of the individual and his creative legacy’ (p. 208). 316 The trope of bodily erasure recurs in Stus’s poetry. Cf. the poem ‘Tsia piesa pochalasia vzhe davno...’ (‘This play started a long time ago...’) from Joyful Cemetery: ‘Hamletovi v ruky / popav lysh cherep – ni ochei, ni hub, / ni nosa ani vukh – zotliv het chysto, / os tak, iak my’ (‘It was only the skull / that Hamlet got into his hands – [there were] no eyes, nor lips / neither nose nor ears – he completely turned into dust / just like us’) (emphasis mine) (S I, 1: 167). 317 Incidentally, this passage also brings to mind Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko’s Gothic story ‘Mertvetskyi velykden’ (‘Dead Man’s Easter’, 1834): ‘buly i taki, shcho i ne mozhna ikh i piznaty, khto vin takyi і ie, bo ne bulo ni nosa, ni ochei, ni ukhiv, ni hubiv: tilky sami iamky u holovi’ (‘there were [those dead people] whom you would not be able to recognise, for they had no nose, eyes, ears, or lips: [they] only [had] holes in their heads’) (emphasis mine). See Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko, Zibrannia tvoriv u 7-my tomakh. Tom 3 (Kyiv: Naukova dumka, 1981), p. 92.
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khtos in ‘It seems to me...’ constitutes a reincarnation of khtos in ‘This Has Happened...’ In both cases, Skovoroda’s intertext suggests that the Other in Stus’s poems should be the Authentic Other. Yet it comes only as a substitute of the authentic self, because it serves only as a projection of the speaker himself. The body plays a significant dual role in Stus’s poem. The speaker perceives it at once existentially and phenomenologically. The body is not a given or easily owned. Instead, it is something to be earned. Becoming-one’s-own-body means becoming-one’s-true-self (‘[You] have not reached / your flesh’).318 In this sense, the body is not (so much) the physical embodiment of the self, but rather the body as the ‘true man’ in Skovorodian terms (‘You are the dream of your true man. You are the vestment, whereas he is the body.’). Yet, unlike Skovoroda, ‘It seems to me...’ also approaches the body phenomenologically. The position of the self shifts in the poem from being inside the body (‘v svoiemu tili’) to being in extracorporeal space (‘ne pryris do tila’). On the narrative level, this shift is reflected in the move from ‘I’ to ‘you’. In the opening of the poem, the focal perspective is that of the first person. The agent of experiencing and telling is prima facie the same. Along with the externalisation of the body, the experiencing (observed) self and the telling (observing) self part ways, as the ‘you’ perspective comes into play. However, the very opening of the poem already forewarns us about the split of the self. Even though we find ourselves in the realm of the first person, it emerges specifically as ne ia. The poetic subject undergoes the process of depersonalisation, becoming ‘alienated’. The first line in ‘It seems to me...’ echoes Stus’s response to Adelheim quoted in the previous chapter: ‘zhyvu ne ia, a – mnoiu. Zhyve pryroda – cherez mene’ (‘it is not I who lives, but rather I am being lived through. It is nature that lives, through me’, emphasis in the original). The poem repeats ‘zhyvu ne ia’ of Stus’s reply to the reviewer almost verbatim. We also find the same formulation in Stus’s 1984 letter: ‘ia vzhe zaspokoivsia v svoiemu stani, zvyk do rozluky, do tsykh umov, do tsoho zhyttia. Shche inakshe: niby ia vidvykaiu vid sebe – davnoho, niby zhyvu ne ia, a inshyi khtos – za mene zhyve mnoiu’ (‘I have already calmed down in my state, become used to the separation, to these conditions, to this life. To put it differently: it is as if I am becoming estranged from myself, my old self, as if it is not I who lives, but someone else, who lives instead of me through me’) (emphasis mine).319 In this unmistakeable experience of depersonalisation, the subject is removed from his own
318 Cf. Stus’s lines ‘U vlasne tilo uviity / dano lyshe nesamovytym’ (‘Only those who are frenzied / might be able to enter their own bodies’) (P: 100). 319 See Stus’s letter dated 6-10 May 1984, in S VI, 1: 465.
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experiences, as if observing himself from a distance, which leads to the perception of oneself as another. The detachment from oneself performs a dual function: it at once emphasises the non-coincidence with the authentic self (akin to Skovoroda’s ‘true man’) and puts the subject at a sustainable distance from his traumatic experience, indeed not unlike Akhmatova’s line quoted earlier ‘[i]t isn’t me, someone else is suffering’ (emphasis mine). Stus’s poem ‘Koly posne tvoie zdrevile tilo...’ (‘When your numb body falls asleep...’) develops the theme of otherness within the self:
Коли посне твоє здревіле тіло, скорившися утомі. Коли сон, зухвало подолавши всі заслони, огорне душу і сп’янить її розкошами недовідомих марень, тоді я одживляюся увесь. І справжній хтось, що довго так чаївся, щоб бути невпізнанному, нараз уступиться у мене безборонно
(When your numb body falls asleep, / having succumbed to exhaustion. When your sleep, / having daringly transgressed all the veils, / embraces [your] soul and intoxicates it / with the splendour of the unknown mirages, / then my whole self comes back to life. / And someone [who is] true, who has hidden for so long / to stay unrecognised, at once / will enter me, [who is] defenceless). (DZ: 241)
This text provides a notable instance for the study of autoscopic phenomena and their exploration in Stus’s poetry. While in ‘It seems to me...’ we move from ‘I’ to ‘you’, and, concurrently, from being in the body to being outside it, here the poet reverses the psychophysical trajectory. In the opening line, the speaking subject is detached from his own body, which he sees from a distance: it is not my body, but your body, an example par excellence of an ‘out of the body’ experience. Characteristically, this disembodiment occurs in the background of a change in the subject’s consciousness, as he falls asleep. We recall this move in Stus’s prose where self-alienation also occurs in a liminal state between reality and dreaming: ‘And it seems that you are sleeping. And it seems that there are two of you – you and you’ (‘A Trip to Shchastivsk’, S IV: 22).320 Merleau-Ponty notes in this respect that in autoscopy ‘before seeing himself, the subject always passes through a state akin to dreaming,
320 Similarly: ‘It would come in the morning, when you have not yet come back to life after sleep’ (‘This Has Happened...’) (S IV: 94).
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musing or disquiet [...] The patient has the feeling of being in the double outside himself’.321 ‘When your numb body...’ at once conforms to this logic and disrupts it. ‘A state of dreaming’ indeed leads to an autoscopic occurrence, yet at the same time it secures regained unity for the subject, as the illusory distance from the body creates a sense of pure whole consciousness (at play here is also the stabilising aspect of depersonalisation). However, the figure of spravzhnii khtos (‘someone true’) immediately upsets this exceptional unity. Similarly to inshyi khtos in ‘It seems to me...’ and khtos in ‘This Happened Before...’, it is an image of the Other as alterity within the subject. In his comprehensive study of the figure of Doppelgänger, Andrew Webber proposes several salient premises underlying this literary phenomenon, most of which we find in Stus’s Other, in particular in ‘When your numb body...’ Among the attributes that Webber discerns, the most relevant for my discussion here are: performance (‘[s]elfhood as a metaphysical given is abandoned here to a process of enactments of identity always mediated by the other self’), ‘power-play between ego and alter ego’ (‘power [...] is always caught in exchange, never to be simply possessed’), and Doppelgänger’s compulsive return (read by Webber as Freudian unheimlich, ‘both within its host texts and intertextuality from one to the other’).322 The image of the Other (khtos) entering the speaker indeed recurs in a number of Stus’s poems, some of which I discuss here. In the previous chapter, I showed the crucial significance of repetition on many levels in Palimpsests, as a semantic and stylistic manifestation of non-coincidence of the self and the constant process of the becoming of the self. By the same token, Stus repeatedly comes back to the image of the Other, since the complex structure of selfhood can only be enacted, not resolved. The aspects of performativity and power-play both foreground the dynamic relationship between different selves within the subject. As we shall see, while the Other appears as a separate entity (as ‘someone else’), it embodies, in fact, an externalisation of the subject. It is for this reason that he ‘has hidden for so long’, accompanying the subject. ‘When your numb body...’ confirms my earlier hypothesis that the poet conceives the image of khtos specifically as the Authentic Other, as in the text at hand the speaker expressly refers to spravzhnii khtos (‘someone true’). It is not the authentic self from the triad of selves that I outlined in the opening of this chapter. This supposed authentic nature provides only an illusory substitute for true authenticity and wholeness, which the subject cannot achieve because of the irrevocable split into the observing self and the observed self. True authenticity, which implies the unity of the
321 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 238. 322 Webber, Double Visions, p. 3-4.
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self, would mean the complete absence of the subject. Indeed, ‘When my numb body...’ subsequently stages an attempt at performing such absence. As the Other comes to inhabit the subject, the speaker enunciates, in an act of self-address: ‘I vzhe tebe nema. Lyshe volinnia, / podolannia – mov samopodolannia’ (‘And you are no longer there. Only willing, / overcoming [is] like self-overcoming’) (DZ: 241). Yet in further lines ‘you’ reappears: ‘ty znovu povertaieshsia do sebe, / ale – samoutrachenyi navik’ (‘you are returning to yourself again, / yet – [as] forever lost’) (DZ: 242). The latter couplet constitutes the coda of the poem, which effectively brings us back to its beginning; in trying to regain his wholeness, the subject realises yet again that the wholeness has been lost. The ‘you’ goes under the surface and then resurfaces again a number of times. The poem ’Shchos ustupylosia u mene...’ (‘Something has stepped into me...’) represents another variation on the theme of the Other, subtly and helpfully exposing the very process of depersonalisation:
Щось уступилося у мене: раптом між співами тюремних горобців і гуркотом тролейбусів відчув я, неначе хтось висвистує мою мелодію журливу – тьмавим альтом. І я потерп. І моторошний день за цим журливим свистом ослонився. Це – ти. Це – там десь ти. Коли триваєш на відстані од себе – то, напевне, хтось непомітно в тебе увійшов і причаївся.
(Something has stepped into me: suddenly, / amidst the singing of prison sparrows / and the clattering of trolleybuses I could feel / as if someone whistled my / sorrowful tune, in a dim alto. / And I froze. And the eerie day / came to veil itself at this sorrowful whistle. / This is – you. This is – somewhere there, you. When you last / at a distance from yourself – then, perhaps, / someone has stealthily entered you / and now is lurking.) (DZ: 110)
Unlike ‘It seems to me...’ and ‘When your numb body...’ just discussed, this text incorporates environment in its concrete features. The poetic subject is aware of his senses, primarily hearing: he perceives several different tunes reaching him in the cell. For as long as he is alert to changes in the physical world, it is ia that serves as the most appropriate narrative centre. The opening of the poem returns us to the motif of the Other entering the subject, which
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unfolds gradually in the poem. To begin with, it is shchos that starts to occupy him, which cataphorically refers to the ‘sorrowful tune’ of khtos. The Other enters the stage in line four. His tune, we find out, is at the same time ‘my’ tune, the melody of the speaker. The poem stages a peculiar doppelgänger situation. Sound provides a marker of identity, and by appropriating the subject’s tune, the Other appropriates part of his identity too. Unlike the classic doppelgänger scenario, the speaker hears rather than sees his double (a case of self- hearing, then, rather than autoscopy proper). Here, we find ourselves in the realm of the uncanny in the Freudian sense, quite literally, as the adjective motoroshnyi may be translated precisely as ‘uncanny’. Hearing himself provokes anxiety and stupor in the speaker: ‘and I froze’ shares a sense of numbness, which, incidentally, constitutes one of the symptoms of depersonalisation, one that we have also seen in ‘When your numb body...’, as the title itself makes clear. A feeling of uncanniness arises in the speaker as he recognises himself in the Other, at once familiar and eerily different. Line eight makes another significant shift in the poem, both illuminating and startling. While we were made to believe that khtos was an altogether separate entity (after all, along with the speaker we could clearly hear the whistling melody of khtos, as a distinct physical occurrence), we were in delusion, as it transpires that the Other is the ‘you’, the observed self. We, as readers, come to realise that the Other was already part of the poetic subject, when he exclaimed ‘This is – you’, as if this recognition was as much a surprise for him as it was for us. The subject is present, then, in two different locations, which, if another metaphor from the field of physics may be forgiven, is not unlike quantum simultaneity.323 The Other dwells simultaneously outside the subject and within him. Neuroscience refers to this phenomenon as bilocation, ‘the impression of being at two locations at the same time’.324 To understand how such striking co-occurrence of selves becomes possible, we should take note of the temporal shifts in the poem. Whereas the first seven lines dwell in the past (ustupylosia, vidchuv, poterp, oslonyvsia), in lines eight and nine events unfold in the present (tryvaiesh) only to revert to the past again (uviishov, prychaivsia). In analysing Stus’s prose, I posited that the ‘you’-address reveals, to use Butor’s apt formulation again, ‘the very coming- to-be of the language’. For this reason, ‘you’ has a fundamental connection with the present, because it is not closed (it is not an object) but, instead, infinitely open-ended as long as the
323 This metaphor is not too far from the context of Stus’s writing, in fact. In one of the variant lines for his poem ‘Na vitri palaia osyka...’ (‘The aspen tree is blazing in the wind...’), we find an explicit reference to quanta: ‘mov kvanty’ (‘as if quanta’). See P: 535. Stus’s great interest in physics can be found both in his poetry (in the previous chapter, I discussed his direct reference to gravity, for instance) and in his letters, where the poet frequently discusses at length various physical phenomena. 324 Anzelotti, ‘Autoscopic phenomena’, p. 7.
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subject exists. ‘Something has stepped...’ conforms to this tendency, as the speaker articulates the very unfolding of the observed self: ‘tryvaiesh / na vidstani od sebe’ (‘[you are] lasting / at a distance from yourself’, emphasis mine), specifically in the now. The past in the poem requires further nuanced consideration. The past of the beginning and that of the end of the passage are different. The initial past is recent, it recounts an event that has just happened: ‘Something [has just] stepped into me’. The subsequent qualifier ‘suddenly’ only adds to this sense of eventness. The past at the end of the passage, on the other hand, appears to be more static, as something that happened in a less recent past and that has been there for a while. Prychaivsia echoes dovho tak chaivsia from ‘When your numb body...’, where the adverb dovho similarly emphasises a significant length of time. This length is commensurate with the subject’s lifetime, since the double is always there as a specular projection of the subject. In this regard, Freud, in discussing the relationship between the double and the uncanny, concludes that ‘[t]he quality of uncanniness can only come from the circumstance of the “double” being a creation dating back to a very early mental stage’ (ultimately developed in Lacan’s concept of the mirror stage).325 Merleau-Ponty sheds light on this fundamental characteristic of depersonalisation in his phenomenological study of the human perception. For him, our perception has an intrinsically ambiguous character, rendering the subject ‘both personal and impersonal (or, rather, prepersonal) particular and anonymous at once’ (emphasis in the original).326 Merleau-Ponty posits that ‘if I wanted to express perceptual perception with precision, I would have to say that one perceives in me, and not that I perceive’.327 He further explicates this idea by stating that ‘my personal existence must be the taking up of a pre-personal tradition. There is, then, another subject beneath me, for whom a world exists before I am there, and who marks out my place in that world’. The affinities between Stus’s poems that revolve around the Other and Merleau-Ponty’s image of the ambiguous subject are indeed striking. The description ‘one perceives in me, and not that I perceive’ connotes Stus’s formulation ‘it is not I who lives, but I am being lived through’, while the idea ‘another subject beneath me’ [...] mark[ing] out my place in that world’ brings to mind Stus’s line from ‘Otse tvoie narodzhennia nove...’ (‘This is your new birth...’), another of Stus’s doppelgänger poems:
325 Freud, ‘The “Uncanny”’, p. 236. 326 Dylan Trigg, ‘On the role of depersonalization in Merleau-Ponty’, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 16 (2017), 275-89 (p. 285). 327 Ibid. In citing Merleau-Ponty, I am guided here by Trigg’s insightful study of the dynamics of depersonalisation in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception.
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я відчув, що хтось живе в моєму тілі. [...] Це він для тебе обживав ці мури, іще тебе не знаючи?
(I came to feel that someone lives / in my body. [...] / Is it he who has been residing among these walls, / not knowing you yet?) (DZ: 9)
Furthermore, in ‘Something has stepped...’ we find a related reference to the pre-existing subject: ‘zbahny sebe / pered narodzhenniam Khrystovym’ (‘come to know yourself / [of the time] before [the birth of] Christ’).328 In Chapter One, I highlighted the dual nature of sin in Stus’s poetry, whereby sin is simultaneously personal and universal (or anonymous, if we are to follow Merleau-Ponty’s terminology): ‘Since [the time of] our birth we take / the original sin / into our souls’, and yet ‘the misdeeds of the past souls, / perhaps since as early as the Neolithic, / have entered [our] heart’ (ZD: 71). Stus himself discusses the co-existence of these two layers of subjectivity in his early essay ‘On the Question...’ This essay forms part of Stus’s doctoral research, which focuses on ‘emotionality’ (emotsiinist) in literary works (both its sources and the effects on the reader). As draft materials for Stus’s doctoral thesis clearly show, he maintained extensive interest not only in literary theory, but also, and perhaps primarily, in psychology.329 In ‘On the Question...’, Stus refers to the evolutionary psychology of the Soviet scholars S. L. Rubinstein and O. N. Leontiev and foregrounds ‘bahatosharovist liudskoi psykhichnoi orhanizatsii’ (‘the multi-layered nature of human psychological organisation’) (S IV: 213). He draws three types of such layers: the attributes ‘zberezheni vikamy i tysiacholittiamy’ (‘preserved through centuries and millennia’); those formed within ‘istorychni suspilni orhanizmy (natsiia, klas)’ (‘historical and social organisms (nation, class))’; and the individual psychological traits, which are tied to the subject’s individual life (S IV: 213). While Stus follows here the model firmly and consciously coloured by Marxism, the theoretisation of such layers effectively brings about an understanding akin to Merleau- Ponty’s juxtaposition of the personal and the anonymous. Stus discusses how the ‘psykhichni vidchuttia’ (‘psychological feelings’) from different historical periods ‘znykaiuchy iz aktyvnoi liudskoi pamiati, vidkhodiat do inshykh stupeniv emotsiinoi pamiati’ (‘disappearing
328 Cf. ‘As if a ruby...’, where the poet describes the speaker’s double as ‘tvii suvoryi ianhol, / narodzhenyi do tvoho zhyvottia’ (‘your stern angel / [who had been] born before your life [began]’) (P: 213). 329 ‘Materialy do dysertatsiinoi roboty’, in IL Archive, F. 170, NN 1177-89.
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from the active human memory, go to other layers of emotional memory’) (S IV: 213). In this paradigm, not only are emotions born in the person, but the person is born into the emotions that pre-exist us. Stus’s repeated references to the pre-historic period (Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Neolithic) indeed cohere in this approach, as does his image of the self ‘before Christ’. As a final note in the analysis of ‘Something has stepped...’, I would also like to consider the process of depersonalisation in the poem, which is not unrelated to the ambiguity advanced by Merleau-Ponty. The externalisation of the subject’s emotional plane makes it possible for him to be at once ‘I’, ‘you’ and khtos. The narrated self is twice removed from the speaker, first as ‘you’, and eventually as khtos. In a similar way, in Stus’s poem the tune, which is not a mere physical fact but also a vehicle of emotion (presented specifically as a sorrowful melody), comes not from within the speaker but rather from outside him, from ‘someone else’. The speaker finds himself at a distance from himself. We encounter a similar image that reinforces this sense of detachment in Stus’s poem ‘Tse tuha...’ (‘This is the longing...’), where ‘moia daleka tuha [...] [v]yie zdaleka, / shchob ia sebe na vidstani pochuv’ (‘my remote longing [...] howls from afar / so that I could hear myself at a distance’) (P: 282). Such externalisation absorbs the shock of the intense emotional experience of the poetic subject.330 In seeking authenticity (as unattainable self-identity), Stus’s poetic subject simultaneously goes through subtle phenomenological processes. The consciousness of consciousness and the ambiguity of the body (as both subjective and impersonally present in the world) inevitably lead to a series of self-doublings and preclude the desired totality of being. The richness of phenomenological exploration in Stus’s poetry exposes a complex structure of selfhood. In this structure different selves co-exist in a breathtakingly dynamic fashion, which shows the capacity of poetry to articulate the drama of subjectivity.
3.2.2. The Poetics of You
Stus places ‘you’ at the very centre of his poetical attention. He does not take its existence as a self-evident axiom; the poet searches for it, probes it, questions it. Palimpsests offers largely non-narrative poetry. Seldom does it tell a story. Mostly, it furnishes a venue for
330 Cf. these lines from Akhmatova’s ‘Requiem’ that similarly invoke sound: ‘Prislushyvaias k svoemu / Uzhe kak by chuzhomu bredu’ (‘Carefully listening to my own delirium / which seems to be someone else’s’, emphasis mine). See ‘Requiem’, Part 9, p. 17.
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investigation, evaluation, resolution. By the same token, ‘you’ rarely functions in a narrative fashion. Rather, it constitutes the subject of the collection: both as its central voice- perspective, and as a plane of inquiry. The ‘you’ of the collection dwells in the making. In the triad ‘observing self – observed self – (supposed) authentic self’ the poetic ‘you’ acts as the observed self. The poetic subject enacts the ‘self-observation’ introduced earlier. He fails to coincide with the authentic image of the self. As Parker helpfully notes, ‘[the self of the second person], like its experiences, is unstable. What is inscribed in second person, then, is the author’s relationship to this self, a relationship often in flux.’331 Stus’s speaker is desperate to identify the ‘you’. He repeatedly makes attempts at giving definitions. We remember the subtle definition from ‘Streams’, which I analysed in the previous chapter: ‘You are a not-yet-man [...] You are a variant. / [You are] an untimely guest.’ Elsewhere, the speaker states:
Ти – рура, обабоки утята. Ні кінця, ні краю власного тобі не знати
(You are a tube, / truncated on both sides. You can know / neither your end, nor your limit)
‘Des ia spynyvsia v samovyzhydanni...’ (‘I stopped somewhere in self-awaiting...’) (DZ: 141) 332
Yet any definition provides only a temporary position (indeed, a variant), from which the poetic subject departs as soon as he has announced it. Furthermore, the very nature of such definitions precludes them from providing any clarity. Instead, they point to the open-ended nature of the self, as the images of a tube without limits and dotted lines aptly epitomise. Stus’s subject repeatedly asks: khto ty? (or khto iesy), ‘who are you?’ (‘who art thou?’). This question goes to the heart of the difference that Ricoeur draws between sameness and selfhood. The latter, contends Ricoeur, consists precisely in the question ‘who are you?’ in contrast to ‘what are you?’.333 Walt Whitman, another prominent poet of the self, can serve as an illuminating counterpoint here. In his Song of Myself, Whitman’s speaker asks: ‘How is it I extract strength from the beef I eat? / What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?’ (emphasis mine).334 The speaker characteristically links the ‘what’ of his question with
331 ‘In Their Own Words’, p. 171. 332 Cf. Stus’s line ‘Ty – punktyr smertei dushi zhyvoi’ (‘You are a dotted line of the deaths of the living soul’), in ‘Zhdannia vytratne...’ (‘Waiting is wasteful...’, P: 176). 333 Oneself as Another, p. 118. 334 Walt Whitman, Song of Myself: With a Complete Commentary, intr. and com. by Ed Folsom and Christopher Merrill (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2016), p. 66.
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biological nature (‘strength from the beef I eat’). Furthermore, the ‘you’ in Whitman’s lines is that of the reader, i.e. of the Other, and not of the poetic subject himself, as its specular double, which is the case for Stus. A great number of poems in Palimpsests also stage the mapping and locating of ‘you’:
Куди ти йдеш? Кажи – куди ти йдеш? [...] Де ти єси? Кажи – де ти єси? Де ти, кажи, єси? Єси, чи, може, лиш був – колись
(Where are you heading? Say – where are you heading? [...] / Where art thou? Say – where art thou? / Where, say, art thou? Thou art or, perhaps, / you only were – once in the past)
‘I will close my eyes...’ (DZ: 168) 335
Poems like this and their overwhelming presence in Stus’s work lay bare the prominence of the poetic subject’s repeated attempts (akin to Freud’s ‘compulsive return’) to define and locate the self, which occur across the whole collection rather than within a single poem. The poet radically takes ‘you’ out of the worldly realm:
Потрібно власну межу віднайти, аби відгородитися від світу на простір смерті, і самоутрати, і власної покути. Ось ти – тут, і тут, і тільки тут, і ти – і тільки [...] Отак шукати треба. Це – знайти, аби вернути необхідну певність, що все скінчиться разом. Задаремні бо всі уламки, всі шматки і частки, що здалини до тебе засвітили
335 There are numerous examples of the attempts to locate ‘you’ in Palimpsests: ‘Ty shche zhyvyi, ta na samomu spodi / pryhashenoho popelu’ (‘You are still alive, but [you are] at the very bottom / of the burnt down ashes’) (DZ: 342); ‘V bezodni – ty’ (‘You are in the abyss’) (P: 311); ‘Ty – hen na belebni. Ty hen za hranniu / utrachenoi zopalu bidy’ (‘You are over there at the verge. You are beyond the edge / of the lost misfortune’) (P: 314); ‘De ty – zbahnuv? Ta zh na samomu spodi / i navit nyzhche’ (‘Where are you? Have you realised [it]? You are at the very bottom, / and even lower [than that]’) (DZ: 318); ‘Shche bidkaieshsia vlasnoiu mezheiu? / I – zadarma. Bo ty iesy – za neiu’ (‘You are still complaining about your edge? / It is in vain. For thou art beyond it’) (DZ: 301); ‘Khoch de ty? Khto ty? Shcho ty? Sam ne znaiesh / і v sta vidbytkah obraz piznaiesh?’ (‘But where are you? Who are you? What are you? You yourself don’t know / and [you] come to comprehend [your] image in the hundred imprints?’) (DZ: 334); ‘Spravdi – tut? Ty spravdi – tut? Napevne, / ty taky ne tut. Taky ne tut. / De zh ty ie? A de zh ty ie? A de zh ty?’ (‘Really – here? You are really here? No, / you must be elsewhere. Elsewhere. / Where are you then? Where are you? Where?’) (S I, 1: 193).
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(You have to rediscover your own limit / to delineate yourself from the world / by the space of death, and self-loss, / and your own repentance. Here you are – here, / and only here, and only you, and you – and only [...] Thus you must search. That is to find, / in order to return the necessary certainty / that everything will end at once. Because futile are all the fragments, all the fractions and pieces, / which have shone to you from afar)
(‘There is something to comprehend...’) (DZ: 316)
The ‘you’ is necessary for approaching the state of wholeness. The speaking subject takes a step away from himself and observes himself from a distance in order to try and reach the authentic self. Finding implies ‘the necessary certainty’, which provides the poetic self with wholeness that heals the disunity of ‘all the fragments, all the fractions and pieces’. ‘There is something to comprehend...’ makes conspicuous the difference between Stus’s prose and his poetry. The poetry contains nothing material to latch on to. All knowledge, all space and time are condensed to the self in hic et nunc: ‘Here you are – here, / and only here, and only you, and you – and only’. The speaker seeks to clearly delineate ‘you’, to pin it down within the psychological and cognitive proximity, yet ‘hereness’ proves problematic. Indeed, ‘you’ is not an object to be placed here or there, but rather a relationship of the self to itself, and thus it is always in-between. Implicit in the compulsive attempt to chart clearly the ‘you’ is the desire of oneness, where the subject would be whole and present here and now, without temporal and psychological fragmentation. Yet the subject resists such reification. The very repetition of tut, ty, and tilky, with its assonance, alliteration, and consonance, undoes the unity of ‘you’ and blends all these elements into a nebulous entity without a place or centre. Paradoxically, these deictics also ground the text and relate it to the poetic subject. I will discuss the dynamics of deixis in Stus’s poetry at length in the next chapter, but it is worth noting here that deictics are dual in their nature: they exist in the text but also refer to the world beyond it. The French linguist Émile Benveniste explains that they function as ‘empty signs’ to be filled with specific meaning each time they are uttered.336 Saying ‘you’, then, does not exhaust but rather postpones the meaning of (each time particular) ‘you’, thus deferring instead of referring. Stus was aware of this tension between the textual and the real: ‘movne “ia” – tse fiksovane dlia sotsialnykh potreb vydnokolo zhyttieisnuvannia […] tse vzhe podvoiena forma, forma formy […] I cherez tse movne “ia” – vzhe ne totozhne vydnokolovi indyvidualnoho zhyttieisnuvannia’ (‘the linguistic “I” is the horizon of existence
336 Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, 2 vols, trans. by Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FA: University of Miami Press, 1971), p. 227.
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[zhyttieisnuvannia] that is fixed for social needs […] it is a doubled form, the form of form [...] The linguistic “I”, thereby, ceases to be identical with the horizon of individual existence’).337 From this viewpoint, there is little difference between Stus’s lines ‘To vse ne tak. Bo ty ne ty, / I ne zhyvyi’ (‘Nothing is right. For you are not you, / And [you are] not alive’) (S I, 1: 188)) and ‘Bo ty – tse ty, tse ty і ty’ (‘For you – it is you, it is you and you’) (P: 232) or ‘Spasybi, koly ty ie ty, / shcho ty – tse ty і ty’ (‘Thank you when you are you, / that you are you and you’) (ZD: 53).338 A helpful counterpoint here is the description of movement in Ted Hughes’s famous poem ‘Wodwo’: ‘I go / to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees’.339 Stus’s ‘you and you’ performs the same function as Hughes’s ‘past these trees and past these trees’, where the sameness of the word (‘these [...] and these’) does not secure the same meaning. Just as the two uses of ‘these’ in Hughes’s ‘Wodwo’ refer to different trees, the numerous ‘you’s in Stus’s poetry refer to different signifieds, each time filling the ‘you’ at hand with a different sense. In the unpublished poem ‘Otsi smereky, shcho stoiat mov trumny...’ (‘These spruces that stand like coffins...’) Stus additionally exploits the physical characteristics of the textual space in hunting ‘you’: 340
цей ліс – напередодні дальніх гір – то все омана, за якою справжній ти схований. А де?
(this forest – before remote mountains – / is but an illusion, behind which the true / you are hidden. But where?) (emphasis in the original)
The material environment around the subject does not provide a stable point of reference. Nature succumbs to the plane of the self: it is the forest that is delusive, while the only presence that is ‘true’ is ‘you’. In the original manuscript Stus physically underlines the pronoun ty:
337 See Stus’s letter to his wife dated 22-30 September 1976, in S VI, 1: 238. 338 Cf. passage from Stus’s prose quoted earlier: ‘And it seems that you are sleeping. And it seems that there are two of you – you and you. One is the one that is you, and the other one – the you that is not you, [the you] that would better not be you’. 339 Quoted in Elena Semino, ‘Deixis and Fictional Minds’, Style, 3 (2011), 418-40 (p. 428). 340 For the manuscript of this poem dated 20 December 1971 (shortly before Stus’s arrest in January 1972), see ‘Bloknot z poeziiamy (1971)’, in IL Archive, F. 170, N 933, pp. 1-52 (p. 1).
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Underscoring the word has two important effects. First, it foregrounds the centrality of ‘you’, regardless of, if not in spite of, anything outside it. Second, and more importantly, the poet arguably pursues the effect similar to the one sought through the condensed accumulation of deictics in ‘There is something to comprehend...’ (‘Here you are – here, / and only here, and only you, and you – and only’): he tries to map the ‘you’ by visually marking and even delineating it (the subsequent dash only adds to this visual border). However, the poet immediately undermines such an emphasis, twice. First, the ‘you’, however ‘true’ it is, appears as hidden. In tune with the originary lack, it is simultaneously present and absent. Furthermore, what seems to be an assertive statement is immediately followed by the question again probing the locus of the self: ‘A de?’ (‘But where?’)
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The complex exploration of selfhood in Palimpsests problematises the model of authenticity within which scholars tend to place Stus’s poetry. We recall Adelheim’s insistence on the dialectical method and the ‘mastery of contradictions’. Palimpsests offers a model of authenticity that surpasses dialectics of the kind Adelheim proposes, and this model does not presuppose a resolution. In her otherwise insightful analysis of Dichtenszeit, Marharyta Iehorchenko summarises a common notion that ‘khocha poet vidpoviv na vlasni pytannia shche u t.zv. “rannikh zbirkakh”, prote ostatochnu vidpovid znaishov lyshe za chasu tvorchosty’ (‘even though the poet answered his own questions in the so-called “early collections”, it is only in [A Time of Creativity] that he found the ultimate answer’).341 For Iehorchenko, the poet’s ‘answer’ is to be found in the following frequently quoted lines containing self-imperatives: ‘Ni. Vystoiaty. Vystoiaty. Ni – stoiaty’ (‘No. [You ought] to withstand. To withstand. No – [you ought] to stand’). The scholar further posits that ‘realnyi svit usuvaie tsiu “problemu” [rozdvoienosty], а tomu uviaznennia staie dlia Stusa nainadiinishym shliakhom do samototozhnosty’ (‘the “real world” eliminates this “problem” [of duplicity] and for this reason imprisonment becomes for Stus the most reliable path to self-identity’). However, while Iehorchenko’s proposition might hold true for Stus the dissident, it requires a more nuanced discussion with respect to Stus’s poetic subject. Palimpsests calls into question the possibility of the ‘ultimate answer’ and the achievement of self-identity. Becoming in Stus’s poetry poses a problem rather than providing a solution. The very nature of this problem is such that no answer is possible in principle, and it is for this reason that the poetic subject repeatedly works through the same set of themes revolving around the becoming of the self. In the plane of existential repetition, no prior experience or knowledge can fix such problems as self-as-possibility, anxiety, existential anticipation, or death, to name but a few. It is elucidating to look more closely at the poem ‘U tsiomu poli...’ (‘In this field...’), to which Iehorchenko refers in her analysis. Stus’s text invites us to be careful about not confining his poetry to anticolonial discourse. Stus’s poetic subject indeed commands himself: vystoiaty (‘to withstand’). Shevelov similarly draws attention to this moral principle (also expressed in another poem) and compares it to Martin Luther’s maxim Hier stehe ich,
341 Marharyta Iehorchenko, ‘Chas tvorchosty Vasylia Stusa’, Suchasnist, 2 (2004), 131-46 (p. 137).
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ich kann nicht anders (‘Here I stand, I can do no other’).342 Yet a closer look at the text where Stus’s command is embedded begs a more subtle approach. ‘In this field...’ initially constituted part of Joyful Cemetery, and Stus later included it in Palimpsests in a slightly modified version. I quote the following lines from the original poem:
У цьому полі, синьому, як льон, де тільки ти і ні душі навколо, уздрів і скляк: блукало в тому полі сто тіней. В полі, синьому, як льон. А в цьому полі, синьому, як льон, судилося тобі самому бути, аби спізнати долі, як покути, у цьому полі, синьому, як льон. Сто чорних тіней довжаться, ростуть і вже, як ліс соснової малечі, устріч рушають. Вдатися до втечі? Стежину власну, ніби дріт, згорнуть? Ні. Вистояти. Вистояти. Ні – стояти. Тільки тут. У цьому полі, що наче льон. І власної неволі спізнати тут, на рідній чужині. У цьому полі, синьому, як льон, супроти тебе – сто тебе супроти
(In this field, [which is] as blue as flax, / where there is only you and not a single soul around, / [You] were stupefied by what [you] saw: in that field a hundred shadows / were wandering. In the field as blue as flax. / And in this field, as blue as flax, / you have been destined to be alone, / for you to face your fate in redemption, / in this field, as blue as flax. / A hundred black shadows are growing / and, like a forest of pine trees, / [they] move towards you. To escape? / To fold your own path like wire? / No. [You ought] to withstand. To withstand. No – / [you ought] to stand. Only here. In this field, / which is like flax. And to face / your own captivity, here, in a foreign land. / In this field, as blue as flax, / there are a hundred you against you) (S I, 1: 184)
Far from having ‘the ultimate answer’, the poetic subject is fundamentally fragmented, which manifests itself in a number of ways. The poet undoes the unity of the subject on the level of the narrative perspective. The poem differs from ich stehe evoked by Shevelov in that there is no ich, no ‘I’. Instead, we encounter ‘you’ as the specular double of the poetic self. His turn
342 Shevelov, ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 24.
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inwards leads to self-doubling. The poem’s final lines also emphasise doubling by drawing apart the body and the mind of the lyrical subject: ‘Zdychaviv dukh і ne vpiznaie tila / u tsomu poli, synomy, iak lon’ (‘[Your] spirit has become wild, and it will not recognise the body / in this field, as blue as flax’) (S I, 1: 184). The poet further aggravates this disunity by the reccurent image of the hundred selves: ‘there are a hundred you against [or opposite] you’. The maxim vystoiaty primarily signals the speaker’s decision to face his hundred shadows, that is his resolution to embrace his own non-self-coincidence. Furthermore, in another version of the poem, the line ‘aby spiznaty doli, iak pokuty’ reads as ‘sudylosia sebe samoho chuty’ (‘you have been destined to listen to yourself’), which only emphasises the distance within the self (Pa: 221). In the poem ‘Zmahai, znemozhenyi zhyttiam...’ (‘Carry on, despite your exhaustion with life...’), Stus conjures up a similar image of the field:
А голоси протобажань [...] покрають серце без ножа i мовчки одiйдуть, лишивши, як загуслий бiль, укритий смерком гай, де тiнi товпляться в тобi, [...] Ти ж тiнi тiнi тiнь.
(And the voices of proto-desires / [...] will wound your heart without a knife, / and will depart quietly / leaving a grove, like thickened pain, covered in nightfall, / where there are shadows crowding in you [...] You are but a shadow of a shadow of a shadow) (emphasis mine) (S I, 1: 171)
Dichtenszeit, therefore, does not bring Stus’s poetic subject any closer to self-identity. The model of authenticity that Stus’s poetry offers goes beyond resistance to the political regime or the mass society. Stus’s vision of authenticity consists not as much in freedom from as in freedom for (as the burden of freedom to find one’s authenticity in the very making of the self).
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CHAPTER 4. THE MAKING OF THE READER
In the previous chapter, I showed at length how central second-person address is for Stus, and how it reflects a deep exploration of the poetic subject’s consciousness. In this final part of my work, I will focus on another ‘you’, which is no less important than that of the empirical poetic addressee in Palimpsests: it is the unannounced ‘you’ of the reader.343 While the ‘you’- address provides a powerful tool of self-exploration for Stus’s poetic subject, it cannot escape the slippage between the spoken ‘you’ and the unspoken ‘you’ residing at the very heart of lyric address. William Waters helpfully explains that ‘[i]n an account of reading lyric, there will be places where the participant roles of speaker, intended hearer, and bystander melt together or away’.344 The increasing attention to the reception of literary works rather than their inception has been a relatively recent development in literary scholarship.345 Reader-response criticism, which emerged in the second half of the twentieth century, emphasised that the role of the reader is no less significant in the life of the literary text than that of the author or that of the text itself. Su helpfully summarises different approaches in reader-response theory, noting that what unites ‘Iser’s phenomenological criticism, Culler’s structural poetics, Fish’s affective stylistics, Holland’s transactive criticism [...] is the view that the reader plays an active role in formulating the meaning of the text.’346 The relationship between the text and the reader is a central concern of Stus’s doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Dzherela emotsiinosti khudozhnoho tvoru’ (‘Sources of the Emotionality of the Literary Work’).347 For the poet, the literary text constitutes ‘a monologised conversation’
343 Partially drawing upon Monika Fludernik’s exploration of the involvement of the reader in the functioning of the text, Pylypiuk notes: ‘The pronoun of address (you) is “perhaps the major deictic set-up of the Other” and a modern technique for internal focalization. It is also a strategy that enforces on the reader participation in the speaker’s internal speech’ (emphasis in the original). See, ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism and the Great Narcissus’, pp. 191-2. 344 Waters, Poetry’s Touch, p. 51. Waters adds: ‘It is futile to try to enumerate the imaginative positionings a reader can take up with respect to poem’s elements’ (p. 162). 345 Terry Eagleton draws a convenient, albeit intentionally simplified, scheme, whereby ‘[o]ne might very roughly periodize the history of modern literary theory in three stages: a preoccupation with the author (Romanticism and the nineteenth century); an exclusive concern with the text (New Criticism); and a marked shift of attention to the reader over recent years.’ See Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1996), p. 64. 346 Su, Lexical Ambiguity, p. 92. Most recently, Peter Robinson suggests, ‘occasioned communication has contributed to current debates about poetry’s addressing its culture with transitivity and commitment beyond the fictive through the necessary somatic response to poetry in the reader’s body and nervous system.’ See Peter Robinson, ‘Reader’, in Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, p. 1145. 347 Stus’s draft materials for his doctoral dissertation can be found in IL Archive, F. 170, NN 1177-89. For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to the file entitled ‘Nacherky do dysertatsiinoi roboty (teoretychnoho rozdilu pro emotsiinist khudozhnoho tvoru) [1964-1965]’ (‘Drafts for the dissertation (for the theoretical chapter on the emotionality of the literary work) [1964-1965]’), in F. 170, N 1180, in particular pp. 4-5.
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(p. 4), whereby the intimate process of writing and the reader’s individual perception of the text converge towards a conversation in the process of reading. The reader complements the text through his/her interpretation.348 Rather than being self-enclosed or tied down to the author, the literary text is open to a variety of potential readings. For this reason, Stus suggests that an ‘interlocutory character’ (p. 4) represents one of the fundamental attributes of the literary text. He further asserts that ‘[a]kt khudozhnoho movlennia vzhe za samoiu svoieiu pryrodoiu – tse suspilnyi akt’ (‘the act of literary discourse is by its very nature a social act’) (p. 4). In this scenario, the reader plays the role not of a passive recipient of the text, but rather that of a proactive co-creator of meaning. Even more, the reader ‘navit i sebe chastkovo vidchuvaie avtorom (adzhe vin taky tvoryt, tochnishe – dovytvoriuie khudozhnii tekst)’ (‘the reader feels that he is partially the author himself (for he does indeed create or rather complete the creation of the text)’) (p. 4). The reader can act as a co-author of the text, by writing him/herself into its fictional tissue:
зміст сприйнятого твору значно багатший, конкретніший за ‘зміст’ твору. Твір – завжди в якійсь мірі тільки каркас, що має в собі формо-змістову єдність, який визначає дальший процес формо-змістової конкретизації, залишаючи, при всьому тому, значний простір для читацької самоініціативи. Отже, твір існує фактично в двох своїх подобах: твір автора і твір читача. Ми ж, забуваючи про це, починаємо персоніфікувати сам твір, відкриваючи в ньому ті властивості, яких твір не має.
(the content of the perceived text is much richer and much more specific than the ‘content’ of the text. The text is always a frame, in a sense; it has the unity of content and form, and it determines the further process of content-and-form concretisation, while leaving significant space for the reader’s own initiative. The text, then, effectively exists in two incarnations: as the text of the author, and as the text of the reader. We tend to forget about this, however, and to start to personify the text, discovering some elements in it that it does not have.) (p. 5)
Stus emphasises the balance between what Su defines as ‘the constitutive role of the text’ and ‘the reader who sifts the linguistic clues contained in a poem, while, at the same time, supplementing from his own experience, in order to arrive at plausible interpretations’.349 Stus’s ideas resonate with this chapter’s focus on the potential effect that the text has on the reader. The literary-critical debate on readerly reception occupied Stus. He was well aware of
348 ‘Materialy do dysertatsiinoi roboty’, pp. 4-5. 349 Su, Lexical Ambiguity, pp. 92-3.
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the potential of texts to have multiple meanings, even if a direct relationship with the reader is not a cultivated part of his poetics. In this chapter, I will look at the stylistic elements that the poet uses to create an opportunity for the reader to engage actively with the text. While the reader can play an active role in the construction of all literary texts, there are texts that, through their poetics, compel the involvement of the reader to a more tangible degree.350 Stus’s poems, I argue, are among them. Discussion of the making of the poetic subject in Palimpsests would be incomplete without an examination of how Stus’s poetry invites the reader to partake in this process. Indeed, Stus’s writing presents a paradox: his radical introspection universalises his poetry. Through a number of stylistic choices, Stus makes his texts open and available for a psychological journey of the reader. In what follows, I will examine two major elements of Stus’s poetics that enable such universalisation: decontextualisation, and the extensive use of deixis (including imperatives). Reading poetry enacts the experience of repetition-as- difference par excellence. Derrida foregrounds iterability as ‘the essential condition of writing’.351 A significant consequence of ‘[t]he iterability of writing’, argues Derrida, is that it ‘makes [writing] readable independently of both the context of its production and the intention of its author’.352 In contrast to the Romantic view of the reader as someone who overhears rather than hears or, let alone, writes himself/herself into the text, ‘poststructuralist critics [...] assert a difference in kind between the empirical addressee of a letter and the fictive addressee of a poem, showing how poems containing apostrophes evoke absences’.353 In poetry, therefore, the role of the reader becomes especially prominent in view of the inevitably intersubjective nature of lyric address.
4.1. Stus’s Readers and Decontextualisation
Who were Stus’s contemporary readers? In numerous memoirs, such as those of Vasyl Ovsiienko and Mikhail Heifets, we find recollections about Stus reading his poetry to fellow
350 Cf., for example, Roland Barthes’s distinction between ‘readerly’ and ‘writerly’ texts. Barthes postulates: ‘Why is the writerly our value? Because the goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text.’ See Roland Barthes, S/Z (London: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p. 4. 351 See Jacques Derrida, Signature, Event, Context (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988). Quoted in Krystyna Mazur, Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery (London: Routledge, 2005), p. 5. 352 Ibid. 353 Robinson, ‘Reader’, pp. 1145-6.
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prisoners.354 We also find some of Stus’s poems copied in his letters. Yet beyond such moments, Stus’s circuit of communication with the reader was minimal. As explored in the first chapter, Stus’s works had very limited reception because of the obstacles to publication. Only two of his collections were published during his lifetime, both beyond Ukraine. Stus himself had no involvement with either publication. In the same way, at home his poems circulated variously in samvydav (the Ukrainian equivalent of samizdat).355 While incarcerated as a consequence of his uncompromising stance, he was forced to endure long periods of solitary confinement with no access to others. Gulag guards repeatedly confiscated his poems and claimed to have destroyed them. In very practical terms, then, Stus had little guarantee that anyone would read his poetry.356 Stus does not specifically address the reader in his writing, in the way, for example, Walt Whitman famously does in his poetry: ‘Whoever you are, now I place my hand upon you, that you be my poem’ (‘To You’).357 The hermetic nature of Stus’s texts appears to be the polar opposite of Whitman’s direct conversation with the reader. The positioning of Stus’s poems vis-à-vis their audience rather seems to be in tune with Stus’s own reflections on such communication in the poetry of Svidzinskyi:
Ці вірші існують так, як існує дерево, камінь, вода. Вони сповнені самих себе і ніби сотворені виключно для автора. Читаючи Свідзінського, можна піддатися враженню, що ці вірші існуватимуть і без читача: можете їх читати, можете – не читати, їм то чи не байдужісінько – адже вони стали часткою речового, предметного світу. В системі його поетичного обширу читач виглядає як persona non grata.
354 Cf. Vasyl Stus: Poet i Hromadianyn. Knyha spohadiv ta rozdumiv, ed. by Vasyl Ovsiienko (Kyiv: Klio, 2013). See, in particular, Vasyl Ovsiienko’s ‘Svitlo liudei’ (pp. 308-64) and Kheifets’s ‘V ukrainskii poezii teper bilshoho nema...’ (pp. 554-600). 355 Orysia Maria Kulick notes: ‘All roads in the archives of Ukrainian dissidents seem to lead to Vasyl Stus, indicating that he was a central figure to the movement even though his works were very much out of public view. Vasyl Stus figures prominently in samizdat materials circulating among dissidents during the 1960s and 1970s, as his poetry challenged state-sanctioned socialist realism in form, content, and style’. See Orysia Maria Kulick, Vasyl Stus Collection (2018), in COURAGE Registry,
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(These poems exist like a tree, or a stone, or water. They are self-sufficient and as if made purely for the author. In reading Svidzinskyi, one might get the impression that these poems will exist without a reader: you can read them or leave them, they won’t mind, because they have become part of the material, objective world. Within Svidzinskyi’s poetical horizon, the reader looks like a persona non grata.) (S IV: 348)
Stus’s characterisation largely represents the Romantic vision of the reader’s marginal role. The poet further celebrates the self-sufficiency of poetry, which does not succumb to collectivist rhetoric or force a conversation with socialist society. Stus’s material conditions and the seemingly self-enclosed style of his poetry have encouraged scholars to look at his works in a similar way, assuming the absence of the reader. Indeed, if scholars consider his poetry dialogic at all, they commonly do so with a view to his intertextuality.358 Yet, as I contend, his poetry also engages in a dialogue with the ‘you’ that encounters it. Stus’s radical decontextualisation, helps to make this dialogue possible. Geoffrey Leech contends that poetry, in general, ‘is virtually free from the contextual constraints which determine other uses of language, and so the poet is able – in fact, compelled, – to make imaginative use of implications of context to create situations within his poems’ (emphasis in the original).359 Stus makes full use of decontextualisation: he constantly removes context as an anchorage in specific time and space. The period of Dichtenszeit offers the strongest correlation between Stus’s empirical circumstances and his poetic writing due to the availability of two sources: his interrogation reports and his poems from the time, which are dated, unlike the vast majority of Stus’s poetry written after 1972. A comprehensive comparative analysis juxtaposing such sources is beyond the remit and space limitations of my thesis, but suffice it to mention ‘A star was shining...’, one of his first poems in captivity, to which I referred earlier. Dated 18 January 1972, this poem stands in contrast to Stus’s interrogations captured by the reports dated 13, 16, and 17 January, consisting of questions such as: ‘Was it you who wrote the poetry collection Winter Trees? Can you explain how this collection was published abroad?’, ‘Do you think that the process of Stalinisation is currently underway?’, to give but a few examples.360 ‘A star was shining...’ heralds Stus’s notable neologism samosoboiunapovnennia, emphasising the becoming of the self: ‘bo zhyty – to ne ie dolannia mezh, / a navykannia i
358 See, for example, Vira Prosalova, ‘Dialoh u poetychnomu myslenni Vasylia Stusa’, Aktualni problemy ukrainskoi literatury i folkloru, 21-22 (2014), 105-11. 359 Geoffrey N. Leech, A Linguistic Guide to English Poetry (London: Longman, 1969), p. 87. 360 ‘Protokoly dopytu pidozriuvanoho’ (13, 16, 17, 19.01.1972), in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, T. 1, pp. [113-27].
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samosoboiu- / napovnennia’ (‘because living is not overcoming limits, / but adjusting [to oneself] and filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’’, emphasis mine) (DZ: 7). The poet completely detaches his poem from the external world: the only images that relate to physical space are a window (in itself an opening and outlet beyond the immediate), a star (endowed with existential meaning), and dalekyi vsesvit (‘the distant universe’). Dismantling the ‘here’, the poem also undoes the ‘now’, transgressing the present and extending it to the scale of infinity: ‘skalok boliu, / shcho vichnistiu protiatyi, mov ohnem’ (‘a splinter of pain, / which has been pierced by eternity as if by fire’). Samosoboiunapovnennia prioritises the plane of emotions, inner experiences, and consciousness. In a 1977 letter, Stus notes that those of his poems that are ‘vilni od vsiliakykh zlob dennykh’ (‘devoid of any everyday concerns’) are ‘naidorozhchi virshi’ (‘the most precious poems’) for him.361 Abstraction represents a prominent and conscious aesthetic strategy cultivated in Palimpsests. In a 1976 letter to his wife, Stus highlights the increasing abstraction in his writing:
Це мій індивідуальний космос, у якому я чуюся мандрівником: земля даленіє, розмиваються обриси – і залишається мерехтіння, тільки музика спогадів. Отож, не дивуй, коли вірші [...] стають абстрактніші й здематеріалізовані.
(It is my individual cosmos where I feel like a traveller: the earth drifts away, the contours become blurred – only shimmering and the music of memories remain. So do not be surprised when my poetry […] becomes more abstract and dematerialised.)362
The poet’s description is reminiscent of his above-mentioned discussion of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, in which he suggests that Rilke ‘lives by his memory about the world’ and that in his elegies ‘existence itself has become undefined’ (S VI, 1: 163). In the same letter, as we recall, Stus puts the world in quotation marks, both questioning its objective existence and emphasising its derivative nature. It is worth noting here that the world is not entirely irrelevant for Stus’s poetic subject, even when he radically affirms that ‘there is no world. I exist on my own’. Even numerically, the image of svit is omnipresent in Palimpsests, by far outnumbering the poet’s other recurrent images (in the Magadan version of the collection, for instance, Stus uses the image of svit more than 60 times). Such frequency of reference shows that Stus’s speaker experiences the constant contact and conflict with ‘the world’, with what is beyond the self. Yet while the speaker repeatedly uses the signifier svit, the exact content of the signified remains up for grabs for the reader.
361 See Stus’s letter to Oleh Orach dated 24 June 1977, in S VI, 2: 110. 362 See a letter dated 22-30 September 1976, in S VI, 1: 238.
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What is at stake for Stus is the movement of becoming rather than the self-sufficiency of objects or the tangibility of the material. Dematerialisation is prominently at work in Stus’s poetry, which differs significantly from the ‘poetry of things’.363 Consider this illustrative example: Розбратані протипотоки ’дне одного наздоганяють, годують себе проминанням заказаних долею стріч. У штольнях ночей вертикальних іде схарапуджене дляння всебезруху (краяться плавно зусилля тягучих волань).
(Disunited counter-currents / are chasing one another, / feeding themselves with missing / of the meetings denied by the fate. / In the adits of vertical nights / underway is the stirred lasting / of ever-no- movement (the endeavours / of viscous cries are gently collapsing)
‘Na vitri palaie osyka...’ (‘The aspen tree is blazing in the wind...’) (P: 140)
This passage foregrounds pure movement. Stus’s neologism vsebezrukh (which I, for the lack of a better word, translate as ‘ever-no-movement’) brings to mind his polyptoton rukh rukh rukhu in ‘The road submerges...’. While bez signifies negation, it primarily means the lack of and, therefore, the desire for movement, which rukh rukhu rukhu similarly conveys. The poem stages the very process of dliannia, inviting us to strain our imagination in an attempt to picture the abstract flow of currents moving simultaneously towards and away from one another and re-enacting the gesture of missing in its most refined form. By the same token, the space is present here only on the broadest scale, as the horizontal (the currents) and vertical (the ‘vertical nights’) axes. Stus brings the external world into the realm of the self, creating his trademark metaphors that seamlessly fuse the material with the abstract:
Квадратура таємних бід і ромби самоти, і прямокутники старих напастей, і лінії спадні усевпокори, і вертикальний понадзірний щем.
363 Cf. N.M. Willard, ‘A Poetry of Things: Williams, Rilke, Ponge’, Comparative Literature, 4 (1965), 311-324. Willard suggests that the poets of things ‘are united by a desire to create a poetry based on the careful examination of concrete things as the way to attain poetic truth’ (p. 311).
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(The quadrature / of mysterious tribulations and the rhombuses of solitude, / and the rectangles of the old misfortunes, / and the descending lines of all-obedience, / and the vertical wrench that reaches beyond the stars.)364
‘Mov mertvi dereva...’, (‘Like dead trees...’) (P: 248)
Here poetry intersects with visual art. Indeed, these lines epitomise the abstract expressionism of Stus’s poetry, evoking Kazimir Malevych’s/Malevich’s suprematism. Malevych defines his style of geometric shapes and colour as ‘the rediscovery of pure art which, in the course of time, had become obscured by the accumulation of “things”’.365 Stus similarly removes the superfluous layers of ‘things’ and cuts to the most fundamental geometric and emotional categories. This passage also exemplifies Stus’s signature polysyndetic lists. While Rubchak describes them as ‘maizhe barokkovi abo, mozhlyvo, vitmenivski “katalohy”’ (‘almost Baroque or, perhaps, Whitmanesque “catalogues”’),366 Stus’s lists differ from both of these references, as their accumulation is not purely stylistic or metonymic, but, above all, psychological. It is in this regard that Stus’s decontextualisation has significant bearing on the relationship between his texts and the reader. Instead of grounding the reader in the specific, Stus’s poetry renders the psychological experience translatable and open for the Other. The reader can recognise himself/herself in the text, stimulated to fill the abstract emotional images (such as the rhombuses of solitude) with his/her own content. In the previous chapter, I mentioned that Stus’s notion of the ‘depersonalisation of the soul’ might also allude to T. S. Eliot’s modernist concept of depersonalisation.367 In his seminal essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), Eliot puts forward his ‘Impersonal theory of poetry’, opposing the Romantic focus on the figure of the author and effectively calling for the death of the author avant la lettre. For Eliot, ‘[p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’.368 What is central, then, is the emotion itself, rather than the
364 Cf. Stus’s poem ‘Tsupkykh ne rozderesh obiim...’ (‘[You] won’t break the tight embrace...’, 1966) from Winter Trees: ‘Kvadratnyi bil. / Krutyi okruh zhaloby’ (‘Square pain. / A round circle of lament’) (ZD: 109). 365 Kasimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1959), p. 74. 366 Rubchak, ‘Peremoha’, p. 61. 367 Stus was familiar with Eliot’s works. Moreover, in Stus’s case file we find Eliot’s name on the poet’s list of the writers that ‘mozhe, na 95% vyznachyly naivlasnishyi napriam moiei poezii’ (‘determined the most individual direction of my poetry by, probably, 95%’). See Stus’s ‘Zaiava Holovi Spilky pysmennykiv Ukrainy’ (‘Letter to the Head of the Union of Writers of Ukraine’) (2.02.1972) Iurii Smolych, in SBU Archive, Kryminalna sprava, T. 6, pp. 1-4 [18-19]. 368 Eliot, The Sacred Wood, p. 52-3.
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emotion of the particular individual (‘[t]he emotion of art is impersonal’, p. 53).369 Similarly, in Stus’s poem ‘The depersonalisation of the soul...’, we recall, the poetic subject commands himself to look ‘further, beyond [...] the sorrow, which has pierced the chest’, thus transgressing individual pain. Stus repeatedly returns to the idea of impersonality in his writing. However, unlike Eliot, he approaches it not only aesthetically but also ethically. In discussing Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (in particular, part 1, sonnet III), the poet remarks: ‘Iunak spivaie plottiu, na ii motyv (naibilsha vada moiei personalnoi poezii) – a tse, za Rilke, ne te. Bo spivets – impersonalnyi, tse holos svitu cherez noho’ (‘The young man is singing with his flesh, following its motif (which is the biggest flaw of my personal poetry) – and, according to Rilke, this is not [what the poet needs]. Because the singer is impersonal, it is the voice of the world through him’.370 In the same discussion, Stus makes a move from a purely aesthetic understanding of Rilke’s lines to an interpretation that foregrounds the ethical component. Stus compares Rilke’s impersonal ‘spiv-buttia’ (‘singing-being’) to ‘kantivska kosmohonichna etyka’ (‘the cosmogony of singing-being, similar to the Kantian cosmogenic ethics’), thus evoking the impersonality of Kantian categorical imperative: ‘Act only on that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’.371 Poetically, Stus concisely articulates this ethical impersonality speaking of ‘[t]sia samookupatsiia dushi, / otsia obluda liudianosti’ (‘this self-occupation of the soul, / this delusion of humanness’).372 The ‘self-occupation of the soul’ means the occupation of the soul by the self. The poet perceives the soul here as a universal ethical ideal surpassing a particular ‘I’.
369 Eliot applies this approach even before putting it forward in the essay, in his poem ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ (1915). See Nicholas B. Mayer, ‘Catalyzing Prufrock’, Journal of Modern Literature, 3 (2011), 182-98. Mayer argues that ‘the concepts of depersonalization and the mind’s “operation” upon experience as developed in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” are concepts I think Eliot began to explore poetically in “Prufrock” when he came up with the image of “a patient etherised upon a table” awaiting operation. [...] The patient – Prufrock’s self as object – meanwhile, is “the man, the personality” from which the poet is trying to escape’ (p. 189). Indeed, in Eliot’s poem the poetic subject finds himself at a distance from his own emotions: ‘But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen’. We find a similar image in Stus’s poem ‘Iak vikna v pozaprostir, pozachas...’ (‘Like windows to beyond-space and beyond-time...’): ‘Polysky vohniv / vraz vysvitliat na sharomu ekrani / toi sarkofah terpin’ (‘flashes of fire / will suddenly illuminate the sarcophagus of endurance / on the grey screen’) (P: 96). Stus refers explicitly to Eliot’s Prufrock poem in his letter dated 10 May 1975. See S VI, 1: 140. 370 See Stus’s letter to his wife dated 10 November 1975, in S VI, 1: 178. 371 Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 84. Note that Kant’s categorical imperative similarly presupposes the duplicity of the self: the ‘I’ of action, and the ‘I’ that correlates the actual action with the universal law (the human duty). See Roger Scruton, Kant (London: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 58. 372 See the poem ‘O Bozhe, tyshi dai...’ (‘Oh God, grant me silence...’) (DZ: 204).
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Decontextualisation and depersonalisation, Stus’s conscious aesthetic and ethical strategies, both vacate a central place for the reader in his poetry. The poet seeks to undo the personal self by removing its concrete circumstances and exposing the very psychological journey of the subject. These strategies render Stus’s poetical space open and inhabitable.
4.2. Deixis: ‘You Are Here’
Mykhailo Zhylin points out that Stus makes extensive use of demonstrative pronouns. While ‘[u] budennomu movlenni [...] krim deiktychnoi, zhodnoi inshoi funktsii ne vykonuiut’ (‘in everyday speech [...] [they] do not perform any function other than a deictic one’), notes the critic, in the poetic language they contribute to ‘[t]ykha ekstatychnist osiahnennia istyny [...] i ii asketychna hermetyzatsiia zadlia vtaiemnychennia skarbu vynaidenoi istyny’ (‘the quiet ecstatic feeling [arising] from the coming to know of the truth [...] and its ascetic hermetisation in order to turn the discovered truth into a mystery’).373 Zhylin rightly emphasises the syntactic and emotional effect of deictic constructions in Stus’s poetry. Indeed, as we shall see, these constructions frequently facilitate Stus’s psychological lists like the ones in ‘Like dead trees...’, which I analysed earlier. Yet what Zhylin mentions in passing as a mere ‘deictic function’ is, in fact, key to the functioning of such lists and, crucially, to the relationship that Stus’s text establishes with the reader. Zhylin’s reference to istyna (‘the truth’) is symptomatic of the search for an ultimate meaning common in Stus Studies. For Zhylin, it appears to be possible to find the truth, and Stus’s hermetic poetry turns the promise of such truth into a mystery. Shevelov similarly pays attention to Stus’s use of deixis, and, in doing so, brings the reader into the picture:
Для герметичних поезій Стуса характеристичний початок займенником: ‘Ти тінь, ти притінь...’, ‘Будинок той, котрого жаль будив [...]’, ‘Той спогад: вечір, вітер...’. Це не випадково. Займенник звичайно відсилає до вже сказаного, названого, обом учасникам розмови відомого. Вживши на початку займенника, автор, певна річ, обманює читача. Читач не брав участи в тому діялозі, не був у тому будинку, не несе в душі того спогаду. Але це омана, за яку можна бути вдячним. Автор бо вбирає читача в те, про що пише, робить його співучасником авторського світобачення й настрою. Ще одна причина, щоб не намагатися ‘розгадувати’ ці вірші. Нащо ж такі намагання, коли читач не поза віршем, а в ньому? Щоб
373 Mykhailo Zhylin, ‘Ekstaz i askeza: do pytannia pro filosofichnist poezii Vasylia Stusa’, Aktualni problemy ukrainskoi literatury i folkloru, 21-2 (2004), 167-182 (p. 179).
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навчитися плавати, треба на секунду віддатися воді [...] Так і з герметичними віршами. В них треба ввійти.
(It is typical for Stus’s hermetic poems to begin with pronouns: ‘You are a shadow, you are a delicate shadow...’, ‘The house that was awaken by the pity [...]’, ‘That memory: [the] evening, [the] wind...’ This is no coincidence. Pronouns normally refer to something that has already been said, named, that is known to both participants of the conversation. By using a pronoun at the beginning, the author deceives the reader, of course. The reader did not participate in that dialogue, he was not present in that house, he does not carry that memory in his soul. Indeed, the author includes [vbyraie] the reader in what he writes about, [he] makes the reader a participant in the worldview and mood of the author. It is yet another reason not to try to ‘decipher’ these poems. Why do we need this deciphering if the reader is not beyond the poem, but inside it? To learn to swim one has to give oneself up to the water for a moment [...] The same holds true for hermetic poems. One needs to enter them.)374
Shevelov points out the ‘assumed knowledge on the part of the reader’ inherent to the functioning of deixis in fictional discourse.375 He rightly prioritises the openness of Stus’s text over the task of ‘deciphering’ and emphasises the role of the reader in the operation of poems. Shevelov confines his discussion to the beginning of Stus’s poems and does not develop his salient insights further. While Stus’s use of deictics in the opening of his texts plays an important role in immediately mobilising the reader, his use of deixis is by no means limited to the first line. Like Zhylin, moreover, Shevelov highlights primarily demonstrative deictics, only cursorily referring to the person deixis ty, and avoiding examination of spatial, temporal or other types of deictics. The very notion of ‘deixis’ stems from the Greek word for showing or pointing. An indispensable element of all natural languages, deixis verbalises a reference to a context. According to John Lyons’s classic definition, deixis signifies ‘the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance’.376 What it means in practice is that such deictic words as ‘here’, ‘then’, ‘she’, ‘this’, to give but a few examples, acquire specific meaning referring to a specific context. ‘The canonical situation of utterance’ for deixis, Lyons notes, is a face-to-face conversation, where the interlocutors are present in the same place at the same time’.377 In this scenario, when one of the speakers says,
374 Shevelov, ‘Trunok i trutyzna’, p. 49. 375 Keith Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, Language and Literature, 1 (1992), 121-34 (p. 126). 376 John Lyons, Semantics, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), vol. 2, p. 637. 377 Ibid.
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for example, ‘I will be back here in five minutes’, the other participants of the conversation can rather precisely ‘locate and identify’ what the deictics ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘in five minutes’ mean. Deixis, then, is ‘the encoding’, Keith Green explains, ‘of the spatio-temporal context and the subjective experience of the encoder in an utterance’.378 Deixis is also used beyond the canonical face-to-face situation, however. In this case, the potential for ‘ambiguity and indeterminacy’ arises, for instance, when utterances ‘are written rather than spoken’, and ‘if the participants in the language-event [...] are widely separated in space and time’.379 Karl Bühler designates the non-coincidence of encoding space and time and receiving space and time as ‘deixis at phantasma’.380 (Written) poetry represents an exception par excellence to the canonical scenario. Lyons approaches communication from the linguistic point of view, thinking primarily about accuracy and mutual understanding. However, in poetry these criteria are not key, as Keats’s notion of ‘negative capability’, for example, makes clear. Waters argues similarly that ‘[i]n literary writing, ambiguity is likely to be meaningful’.381 Performativity, for example, also plays an important role. In the poetic plane, different interpretations of ‘here’ or ‘you’ do not obstruct communication, but rather ignite different ways to maintain it. Indeed, deixis functions distinctly in poetic discourse. Elena Semino explains that in poetry ‘the use of deictic expressions does not rely on the addressee’s awareness of the speaker’s position and perspective, but rather provides clues for the construction of a subjective position within an imagined situational context.’382 The poetical text, then, establishes a fictional context and casts the subject as a linguistic construct,383 creating a common frame of reference for both the writer and the reader. Deixis in fictional discourse implies both presence and absence. Green helpfully notes that it ‘is partly tied to context [...] but it also partly creates that context’.384 By the same token, reference becomes displaced. Drawing upon Michel Collot’s notion of ‘pure reference’, Hugh Hochman speaks of ‘pure referentiality without determinate referent’, and suggests that ‘poetry gives up efficient
378 Keith Green, ‘Deixis: A Revaluation of Concepts and Categories’, in New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative Literature, ed. by Keith Green (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 11-26 (p. 11). 379 Lyons, Semantics, p. 638. 380 Karl Bühler, ‘The Deictic Field of Language and Deictic Words’, in Speech, Place, and Action: Studies in Deixis and Related Topics, ed. by Robert J. Jarvella and Wolfgang Klein (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1982), pp. 9-30. 381 Waters, Poetry’s Touch, p. 91. Cf. Su, Lexical Ambiguity. 382 Elena Semino, ‘Deixis and Fictional Minds’, Style, 3 (2011), 418-40 (p. 423). 383 Vimala Herman, ‘Subject Construction as Stylistic Strategy in Gerard Manley Hopkins’, in Language, Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse Stylistics, ed. by Ronald Carter and Paul Simpson (London: Unwin, 1989), pp. 212-33. 384 Green, ‘Deixis: A Revaluation’, p. 17.
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reference to assume ultimate reference’.385 Such changes in context and reference are likely to have an impact on the reader, who acquires an active role in the process of interpretation. While on the one hand, as Green notes, deixis is used ‘to orientate the reader to an assumed context’, on the other, the reader, as the decoder, ‘has to create a cognitive space in which the deictic elements and terms can be realised indexically’.386 Deixis furnishes a strong argument for the separation of the real-life author and the poetic subject.387 ‘Here’, for example, marks an inevitable gap between the experience of the author and the experience of the reader, and enables a variety of potential ways of reading. From this perspective, we might question the idea that, as Eleonora Solovei puts it, ‘sohodni ie nebezpeka, shcho deiaki riadky poeta bude roztyrazhovano tsytuvanniam do vtraty nymy pervisnoho zmistu – і vse zh vony isnuiut tak, iak napysalysia doleiu, kroviu, zhyttiam’ (‘there is a danger that some of Stus’s lines will be repeatedly quoted to the point where they will lose their original meaning – and yet they exist the way they were written by fate, blood, and life’).388 Deixis calls the idea of pervisnyi zmist (‘the original meaning’) into question. By absolutising the figure of the author, we risk neglecting the experience of the reader galvanised, in particular, by deixis. The space of poetry differs from the space of the author. Once expressed, the authorial experience becomes a fictional situation, and the reader gains access to the discourse rather than to real life itself.389 We, as readers, cannot re-enact the experiences of the author (if even Stus’s own poetic subject and narrator do not succeed in returning to the same). The difference between ‘art and the event’, to use Eliot’s phrase,
385 Hugh Hochman, ‘Where Poetry Points: Deixis and Poetry’s “You” in Éluard and Desnos’, French Studies, 2 (2005), 173-88 (p. 174). 386 Green, ‘Deixis and the Poetic Persona’, pp. 125-6, 127-8. Peter Robinson rightly asks: ‘Could readers not activate an affiliation between the intimate address to a once-living person and the living person who is, at that moment, reading the poem? Such an account argues for imaginative links among interlocutors, dedicatees, addressees, and the poem’s anonymous reader. This reader is not left to overhear the articulation of those relationships but invited into them by means of the poem’s formal features, as an equally occasioning figure of the poem’s written speech.’ See ‘Reader’, p. 1145. 387 Cf. Semino’s comment: ‘The construction of a fictional speaking subject whose existence is limited to the conceptual space projected by the text can [...] be seen as one of the features that characterise the poetic use of deixis’. See Elena Semino, ‘Deixis and the Dynamics of Poetic Voice’, in New Essays in Deixis: Discourse, Narrative Literature, ed. by Keith Green (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1995), pp. 143-60 (p. 146). 388 Solovei, Ukrainska filosofska liryka, p. 289. Cf. Rossella Riccobono’s proposition: ‘Traditionally the speaking voices or personae of texts around which deictic systems revolve, cannot be identified with real-life authors, but are linguistic constructs (Herman 1989) deriving from the relationship that a reader established with a text when interpreting it.’ See Rossella Riccobono, ‘Deixis and the Dynamics’, p. 104. 389 In his thoughtful analysis of Stus’s translation of Kipling’s poem ‘If’, Roman Veretelnyk refers to Fish’s theory of affective stylistics, although he applies it to the works of Kipling rather than those of Stus. Yet ‘Fish’s radical notion of the reading process as a never-ending “event” instead of a closed system of static meaning or even multiple meanings’, pointed out by Veretelnyk, lends itself even more readily to Stus’s own poetry, which creates the appropriate stylistic and conceptual frame for staging ‘a never ending “event”’. See Roman Veretelnyk, ‘Found in Translation: Vasyl Stus and Rudyard Kipling’s “If”’, Kyiv-Mohyla Humanities Journal, 3 (2016), 161-186 (pp. 168-9).
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translates into the possibility of different readings of the same text. Su further helpfully distinguishes between the correctness and validity of interpretation, arguing that ‘whereas “correct” interpretation frequently suggests a fixed, given meaning, “valid” interpretation [...] evokes a range of possible meanings’.390 Stus’s poem ‘Idu za krai...’ (‘I am going beyond the edge...’) furnishes an emblematic example of the prominent use of deixis in the poet’s works. I underline all instances of deixis in the passage below:
1 Іду за край. Оце долання кола, оця вперед занесена ступа, оця ява, ця порожнеча гола, і ця вода, солона, як ропа, 5 і ця безвихідь першого початку, які страшні ви! Швидше поминай цей край вагань і не лишай про згадку ні вогню, ні золи. Іду за край. Як леопарди крізь вогненні кільця 10 проносять порив сторопілих душ, отак і ти ув око смерті цілься і відродися в смерті. І не руш старого розпачу. Почнися далі, ген за шелом’янем, на рубежі
([I] am going beyond the edge. This overcoming of the circle, / this foot stretched out forward, / this appearance, this bare emptiness, / and this water, as salty as brine, / and this desperation of the first beginning, / how frightful you all are! Haste to get through / this land of doubt and leave for memory / neither fire nor ashes. [I am] going beyond the edge. / Just like leopards carrying the impulse of petrified souls / through the fiery rings, / you should aim at death’s eye / and have a new birth in death. Don’t move / the old despair. Begin yourself further, / beyond the horizon, at the edge) (DZ: 162)
Engaging a whole range of deictics (personal, spatial, and temporal), Stus’s poem creates an open fictional space, inviting the reader to play an active role in meaning-making. The anaphora of lines 1-5, consisting of a series of proximal demonstratives (otse, otsia, tsia, tsei), exemplify ‘empathetic deixis’, whereby ‘the speaking voice establishes a closer emotional relationship with what is being described’.391 The proximal deictics produce a paradoxical effect. Conceived empirically in extreme intimacy and solitude, and referring to
390 Su, Lexical Ambiguity in Poetry, p. 103. 391 Riccobono, p. 103.
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what is immediately present for the poet, they set up a discursive context that incorporates the reader, and where we are invited to appropriate this intimacy. Waters provides an elucidating comment on this process of appropriation: ‘The poem seeks a reader’s presence; that is, it wants the reader who will make its “this” her own [...] if “this” is the very place the poem means, then no other place could be meant: the poem can have, in his sense, only one target, and it has found it in you’.392 Typically of Stus’s poetry, the concepts attached to these deictics are intangible, which invites the reader to expend imaginative energy and relate to them as personally as if we ourselves were the author, in propria persona, in tune with Shevelov’s proposition that ‘the reader is not beyond the poem, but inside it’. The poem, therefore, exposes us to the kind of absence that encourages our creativity. As readers, we face ‘deixis at phantasma’, where deictics can be ‘seen and heard’, as Bühler suggests, ‘[n]ot with the outward eye, ear, etc., but with what, in contrast, is conventionally called the “inner” or the “mind’s” eye or ear’.393 The use of person deixis in the poem, the ubiquitous ‘I’ and ‘you’ of Stus’s poetry, also has a significant effect on the reader. In his seminal study of subjectivity in language, Emile Benveniste highlights the unique nature of the pronouns ‘I’ and ‘you’. He postulates that they ‘are distinguished from all other designations a language articulates in that they do not refer to a concept or to an individual’.394 Their fundamental attribute is that they exist only in a specific ‘instance of discourse’ (p. 226) as ‘unique but mobile sign[s]’ (p. 220). In other words, posits Benveniste, they are ‘“empty” forms which each speaker, in the exercise of discourse, appropriates to himself’ (p. 227).395 Benveniste’s postulations elucidate the functioning of ‘I’ and ‘you’ in the poetic text, where the reader similarly appropriates the position of these pronouns. Hochman describes this process as ‘the displacement of voice’. The opening staccato sentence ‘I go beyond...’ in Stus’s poem, reiterated later in the text, establishes an ‘I’ (implied in the verb idu) that is open for the appropriation by the reader. Each time, a unique ‘I’ utters these words and, thereby, re-enacts the action that they
392 Waters, Poetry’s Touch, pp. 141-2. 393 Bühler, ‘The Deictic Field’, p. 22. 394 Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, p. 226. They signify neither a concept like, for example, the general concept of ‘tree’, Benveniste clarifies, nor a particular person, since they cannot ‘refer indifferently to any individual whatsoever and still at the same time identify him in his individuality’ (p. 226). ‘I’ (the same applies, mutatis mutandis, to ‘you’), then, can only be defined as ‘the person who is uttering the present instance of the discourse containing “I”’, concludes Benveniste. 395 Heidegger similarly contends, coming from the philosophical existentialist perspective, that ‘[t]hat Being which is an issue for this entity in its very Being, is in each case mine. Thus Dasein is never to be taken ontologically as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand. [...] Because Dasein has in each case mineness [Jemeinigkeit], one must always use a personal pronoun when one addresses it: “I am”, “you are”.’ (emphasis in the original). See Being and Time, pp. 67-8.
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enunciate. The absence of ia at the beginning of the sentence lends it a sense of urgency; the poem opens with a verb and, thus, with an action. Furthermore, idu grounds us in the immediate present: we are embarked, already en route. The abrupt ending of the opening sentence further emphasises this sense of movement, enacting the krai. By moving to the next sentence, we also perform the movement of transgression. Krai itself is a spatial deictic (just like shelomian and rubizh at the end of the passage). As any deictic, it originates from the so- called ‘zero point’ or origo, that is the subject of utterance. With the shifting of the origo (from the writer to the reader) comes the shifting of krai, and it is our own spatial (and mental) context that we inscribe into the fictional space. Stus himself gives a good example of a displacement of voice in a 1981 letter: analysing Marina Tsvetaeva’s ‘Poema kontsa’ (‘Poem of the End’, 1924), he remarks: ‘Meni – naikrashche – final: Oznob. My – muzhestvenny budem? Tse ia v zhytti ne raz povtoriuvav – iak zaklynannia, khovaiuchy pytalnyi ton poemy’ (‘What I like the most is the finale: “(Shivering). Will we have the courage?” I have repeated this to myself many times in my life – as a conjuration, hiding the interrogative tonality of the poem’).396 Stus emphasises the performative nature of these lines, appropriating the poem’s my and inhabiting it. Not only the pronouns themselves but also the shifting between them plays an important role in ‘I am going...’. While we enter the poetic space as ‘I’, the ‘you’-perspective gradually emerges in the poem: indirectly in line six through the imperative pomynai and directly in line 11. In line eight the poet yet again switches back to ‘I’ only to revert to ‘you’ in lines 11-15. This shifting can have an important effect on the reader. By making such an abrupt transition from one person-perspective to the other, the poet not only captures the movement of consciousness, but also galvanises the reader.397 Such transitions embody the inherent performativity of Stus’s text. In his analysis of the image of the Doppelgänger, Andrew Webber, we recall, describes such performativity as ‘a process of enactments of identity always mediated by the other self’.398 Lyons insightfully foregrounds the intrinsically performative nature of personal pronouns: ‘The Latin word “persona” (meaning “mask”)’, he explains, ‘was used to translate the Greek word for “dramatic character” or “role”, and the
396 See Stus’s letter dated 10 August 1981, in S VI, 1: 380. 397 Cf. Peter Robinson’s remark: ‘One widespread theory of modernist and experimental writing has it that, though not addressing the reader, nevertheless, its disturbances of syntax, or unexpected diction, are political engagements with consciousness and result in a “making of the reader”.’ See ‘Reader’, p. 1145. 398 Webber, Double Visions, p. 3.
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use of this term by grammarians derives from their metaphorical conception of a language event as a drama.’399 ‘I am going...’ offers a number of such roles. Not only do we appropriate the poem’s ‘I’, but we find ourselves in several simultaneous dramas, where ‘I’ and ‘you’ might be those of the poetic subject, or those of the reader, or where ‘I’ belongs to the poetic subject, whereas ‘you’ to the reader. Indeed, ‘you’ can also function in the context of lyric address. Consider line 11: ‘you should aim at death’s eye’. We are both present in the text and addressed. In his Meridian speech, Paul Celan highlights this fundamental dialogism of poetry, stating that ‘[t]he poem intends another, needs this other, needs an opposite. It goes toward it, bespeaks it.’400 A signature element of Stus’s model of lyric address is the constant use of the imperative, which also represents a form of deixis. ‘I am going...’ contains six such instances: pomynai, ne lyshai, tsilsia, vidrodysia, ne rush, pochnysia. In Stus’s poetry, the use of the imperative performs a number of functions related to the articulation of becoming and the very making of the poetic subject. Indeed, the imperative reveals the gap between the present and the potential. The imperative, a manifestation of always ‘not yet’, represents a quintessential gesture of desire, as it always signifies an attempt to fill an absence. It also enacts desire in a different way, given that there are two types of imperatives in Stus’s text: prohibition and command. While the former makes the poetic subject delineate himself from his past, the latter encourages him to create a different kind of future. Thereby, the poetic subject finds himself on the edge between the not-yet abandoned past and not-yet realised future. We come across a familiar image here: ‘you should aim at death’s eye / and have a new birth in death’, which connotes Stus’s poem ‘As if a diver bird...’, where the subject ‘was aiming straight at death, / but missed it’. Furthermore, the imperative is fundamentally bound up with the ethical. Even grammatically, most moral principles come precisely in the form of imperatives, from the Ten Commandments to Kant’s categorical imperative. The imperative, then, provides a tool of moral perfection. While the imperatives contribute to the making of the poetic subject, they also have the potential of affecting the reader. Imperatives, just like other deictics (including questions, which also abound in Palimpsests), presuppose the existence of the Other. They assume and,
399 Lyons, Semantics, p. 638. Cf. Bühler’s similar remark: ‘the words I and you refer to the role holders in the on-going speech drama, in the speech action. In prosopon, the Greeks had an excellent name for it, and the Romans meant nothing by persona but the role in the speech act’ (emphasis in the original). See ‘The Deictic Field’, p. 19. 400 Cf. Hochman’s comment that ‘[t]he tu is open to its own iterability and welcomes as addressee of the poem any reader who comes along to find it’. See ‘Where Poetry Points’, p. 180.
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in fact, implicitly demand an answer. Analysing the use of the imperative in the poetry of Rilke, Waters posits that ‘the willingness to be hailed, to become you, is an act of taking on responsibility and of responsiveness’ (emphasis in the original).401 The imperative mobilises the reader and calls us into action. The poem is happening now, here, to you. We are answerable to it. Indeed, Stus’s text is usually not descriptive but prescriptive, which invites the reader’s self-reflexivity and fosters awareness of our own subjectivity. It does not merely imitate the world, but changes and challenges the subject.
God’s Voice as Ethical Calling
The dynamic relationship that Stus’s texts can create with the reader also stems from the very nature of self-address that Stus employs. The poet’s works touch upon the fundamental structure of consciousness, where the acting self dwells in a relationship with the voice of the Other as the voice of conscience. Indeed, a number of Stus’s poems explicitly stage another voice – the voice of authority, which most often takes the shape of God. Consider Stus’s emblematic poem ‘Samotno snovyhaie holos...’ (‘A voice is wandering lonely...’): 402
О, чий то голос сновигає у синіх нетрях вечорів? Ти чуєш? Серце промовляє – до тебе Бог заговорив. І мовив Бог: моєї влади ти поцурався задарма. [...] нема такого обширу на світі, щоб став подобою небес. Я слав на тебе лихоліття, щоб до життя ти був воскрес, аби збагнув, що над покари немає більшої цноти. Ти бачиш – побратимів мари? То весь – мов на екрані – ти!
401 William Waters, ‘Rilke’s Imperatives’, Poetics Today, 4 (2004), 711-30 (p. 723). 402 Stus establishes a link between the voice and God in a number of other poems. Cf. ‘Zazyraiu v zavtra...’ (‘I am peering into tomorrow...’, S I, 1: 196), ‘Velmozhnyi son mene opav...’ (‘A generous dream has overtaken me...’, P: 232), and ‘Tsei bereh zustrichei...’ (‘This shore of encounters...’, P: 94).
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(Whose voice is wandering / in the blue slums of nights? / Can you hear? The heart speaks – / God has spoken to you. / And God said: you should not have / rejected my power. [...] there is no / such expanse in the world / that could become an image of heaven. / I have sent hardships upon you / for you to rise to life / for you to realise that there is no greater innocence / than retribution. / Can you see the stretchers of your brethren? / It is – as if on the screen – you!) (P: 227)
God appears here as an altogether external actor – a separate ‘voice’.403 Yet we might recall the psychological journey in Stus’s poem ‘Something has stepped into me...’, where ‘someone [who] whistled my / sorrowful tune’ eventually proves to be a projection of the speaker. In ‘A voice is wandering...’, Stus uses a similar technique. Rather than internalising God, which might seem to be the case at first, Stus’s lyrical subject externalises his own reflective consciousness, assigning it to the figure of God.404 The lines ‘The heart speaks – / God has spoken to you’ suggest that God is tantamount to the speaker’s heart, that is to his innermost self. Stus’s poem taps into the discussion of the role of the reader. To whom does the voice that asks the question ty chuiesh? (‘can you hear?’) belong? Is it the speaker asking himself? Or God asking him before God’s voice appears in the text? Or is it some kind of a messenger sent by God? And no less importantly: what is our position vis-à-vis this question? Can our role be limited to that of someone overhearing, if the poem asks directly whether the ‘you’ can hear? As the contours of the ‘you’ become blurry, we, as readers, might find it almost impossible to ignore this question, hearing, rather than overhearing, both the question and the very voice that asks it. Stus’s poem ‘Can you hear the voices?..’ complements ‘A voice is wandering...’:
Ти чуєш голоси? Не спи – кричить усе єство, лише поріг переступи – і ночі торжество. [...] Ти тут гори і тут і тлій, хай попіл попелищ крізь сто смертей провадить твій дух [...] Дарма, ти чуєш голоси? Мовляє Пан-Господь:
403 Cf. Rilke’s poem from The Book of Hours, which might have served as an intertext for Stus’s poems engaging the voice of God: ‘God speaks to each of us as he makes us, / then walks with us silently out of the night. / These are the words we dimly hear: / You, sent out beyond your recall, / go to the limits of your longing. / Embody me. / Flare up like a flame / and make big shadows I can move in. / Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. / Just keep going. No feeling is final. / Don’t let yourself lose me. / Nearby is the country they call life. / You will know it by its seriousness. / Give me your hand.’ See Book of Hours: Love Poems to God, I 59. 404 Bedryk points out ‘pevna “pryvatnist”, nekhrystyianskist Stusovoho Boha’ (‘a certain “private character”, non-Christian nature of Stus’s God’). See Problema spryimannia, p. 32.
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не жди поразки, ні яси, сам душу з світу зводь. І розпізнай межи страждань і дух і плоть і рвань, глаголом Господа постань – мудрот, щедрот, карань.
(Can you hear the voices? Don’t sleep – all being is screaming, / just step over the doorstep and [you will see] the triumph of the night. [...] / You burn here and smoulder here, let the ashes of the ruins / lead your spirit through a hundred deaths [...] / It is in vain, can you hear the voices? The Lord utters: / wait for neither defeat nor salute, bring your soul to an end yourself. / And amidst torments recognise spirit and flesh and rags, / appear with the word of the Lord – with wisdom, generosity, retribution.) (S III, 2)
The poem immediately implicates us, by posing a familiar question: can you hear? This time, however, the speaker refers to more than one voice, leaving us puzzled as to their source. The initial question of the poem is followed by the imperative: ‘don’t sleep’, it is happening, and ‘you’ (we) are bound to witness what is unfolding. The powerful repetition of deictics ty tut produces a double effect. On the one hand, it seeks to ground the shadow of ‘you’ here. On the other hand, when the invocation goes past the empirical addressee, it arrives at the reader, the unspoken ‘you’, involving us in performing the role of ‘you’ and becoming aware of our own presence, that we are here too. The linguistic magic of deixis invites us to enter the poem’s discursive event and to partake in it. In the final quatrain of the poem, the voice of God appears again, issuing commands to the addressee. However, is the voice that addresses ‘you’ the same in all four lines of the quatrain? In the last line, the poet refers to the Lord, yet he does so in a rather detached way. Would God refer to himself? The syntax of the passage maintains this inconsistency, splitting the quatrain into two separate sentences. Are there two voices, that of God and that of the speaker, even within the space of four lines? Similarly, in ‘A voice is wandering...’ it is unclear to whom the words ‘God has spoken to you’ belong. The voice of God is not easily distinguishable from the speaker’s voice.405 God in Stus’s texts arguably embodies the ethical element. As Ricoeur compellingly argues, the ethical problematic inevitably emerges in the rift of our reflective self-consciousness, between sameness and selfhood. It is also instrumental to recall here Heidegger’s proposition that ‘[t]he call of conscience has the character of an appeal [Anruf] to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self; and this is done by way of summoning [aufrufen]
405 Stus’s poem ‘I penzel holosu...’ (‘The brush of voice...’. P: 137) stages the merging of the voices of God and the speaker even more conspicuously. In light of the previous texts, the image of ‘the brush of voice’ likely connotes the figure of God. Yet God is not present here explicitly, which leaves us wondering who uses the imperative: ‘Lyshy svitam / bezsyle spromahannia nadletity / do vichnosti’ (‘Leave to the worlds / the feeble striving to fly up / to eternity’) later in the poem (P: 137).
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it to its ownmost Being-guilty’ (emphasis in the original).406 The metaphor of voice and address to you, as self-address or God’s address, in Stus’s poetry enacts such a ‘call of conscience’. Characteristically, Stus evokes karannia (‘punishment’ or ‘retribution’) in ‘Can you hear the voices?..’ and states that ‘there is no greater innocence / than retribution’ in ‘A voice is wandering...’, thus engaging the sense of guilt.407 Earlier I argued that the task of redemption, repeatedly enunciated by Stus’s speaker, concerns the existential sinfulness of the subject. In the same vein, the retribution that the poet mentions has an existential rather than purely religious nature. It relates to the fundamental ‘Being-guilty’ of the human condition due to the impossibility of reaching the totality of the self and thus of fully ‘fill[ing] (one)self with [the] self’. Therefore, the reason why the lyric address in Stus’s poetry has the potential to touch us so intimately, consists largely in re-enacting (or percolating through) our internal dialogue with our own God as our other voice.
‘You Are Here’
In the previous chapter, I showed how Stus’s speaker constantly seeks to identify, define and locate his ‘you’: ‘Here you are – here, / and only here, and only you, and you – and only’.408 The performative nature of deictics is highlighted by the fact that Stus uses the same apostrophe in other poems, speaking to other addressees. Elsewhere, Stus’s subject addresses his beloved: ‘Ty tut. Ty tut. Vsia bila, iak svicha – / tak polokhko i tonko palakhkochesh’ (‘You are here. You are here. [You are] all white like a candle – / you are flickering so vulnerably and so delicately’) (P: 31). In the poem ‘Sto chornykh psiv prohavkalo...’ (‘A hundred black dogs have barked...’), Stus’s speaker articulates a moment of recognition, which he frames as a dialogue: ‘Tse ty? Tse ty – tonkyi i chulyi. / Tse ty? Tse ia, tvii bludnyi syn’ (‘Is it you? It’s you – [you are] so delicate and sensitive / Is it you? It’s me, your prodigal son’) (P: 353). Stus wrote this text upon his short visit to Donetsk, closely overseen by KGB officers, to bid a final farewell to his dying father. In the quoted lines, the ‘I’ is that of Stus’s lyrical subject appearing in this text as a son. Yet what is the ‘you’ of the first address? Whom does the lyrical voice describe as ‘delicate and sensitive’? We are left with
406 Being and Time, p. 314. 407 Stus describes his lyrical subject as ‘nehidnyi dobroi pokary’ (‘unworthy of kind retribution’) (DZ: 174). 408 Cf. the poem ‘Can you hear the voices?..’, in which the speaker states in an act of self-address: ‘Ty tut, ty tut, ty tilky tut – chystopys і arkhiv’ (‘You are here, you are here, you are only here – [like] a clean manuscript and archive’) (S III, 2).
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ambiguity that only highlights the power of ‘you’-address.409 ‘I’ and ‘you’ thus serve as shifting signifiers. In the poem ‘Nasnylosia, shcho ia na tim dvori...’ (‘I had a dream that I was in that courtyard...’), Stus’s speaker intimates the presence of another ‘you’:
– Ти хто? – питаю з острахом – ти хто? І згадую. І сам відповідаю: – Це ти, це, мабуть, ти, котра мені повинна появити царство тіней, щоб я себе на тому тлі чіткому зустрів віч-на-віч.
(– Who are you? – I ask with caution – who are you? / And then it comes back to me. And I myself give the answer: / – It’s you, maybe, it is you, the one who must / show me the kingdom of shadows / so that at that clear background I can meet / myself face-to-face) (P: 153)
This poem aptly exemplifies Stus’s typical transformations of a concrete situation into an abstract picture, where only contours of the initial stimulus are left.410 Dmytro Stus clarifies the historical context giving rise to Stus’s text: ‘tse pysano pro Mordovsku zonu ZHKH- 385/3 [ЖХ-385/3], de tilky koliuchyi drit ta poorani kontrolni smuhy viddilialy cholovichyi ta zhinochyi polittabory’ (‘This is written about the Mordovian camp ZHKH-385/3, where only barbed wire and ploughed security ditches separated men’s and women’s political camps’) (P: 693). While Stus builds his poem on a real event, a moment of seeing a female fellow prisoner, the discursive reality that he articulates departs from the initial real-life impulse behind it. The certainty of memory is shattered. ‘Ty khto’ reveals the speaker’s confusion about the identity of the ‘you’, reinforced by the repetition of the question. While the speaker seems to recognise the female figure, this recognition comes only later and remains tentative (‘maybe’). The speaker answers his own question. The ‘you’ not only does not have her own voice, but also appears exactly as a shadow, escaping the possibility of
409 In the poem dedicated to Stus’s close friend and Soviet Ukrainian artist Alla Horska (1929-1970), the speaker carries out a subtle identification of the ‘you’, upon which only the dedication casts light: ‘Tse son, iava chy maiachnia? / Tse ty. Tse ty. Tse spravdi ty – / proishla velmozhnoiu khodoiu’ (‘Is it a dream, or an apparition, or delirium? / This is you. This is you. This is really you – / you marched nobly’). See the poem ‘Zakhodyt chorne sontse dnia...’ (‘The black sun of the day is setting...’, P: 118). 410 Dmytro Stus points out ‘zahalna avtorska tendentsiia rukhu tekstu: vid konkretnoi buttievoi sytuatsii – do dukhovnoho uzahalnennia’ (‘the general tendency of the movement of [Stus’s] text: from a specific real situation to spiritual generalisation’, or even universalisation, we could add) (P: 691). We also recall Dmytro Stus’s proposition about the ‘almost invariably consistent psychological detachment of the lyrical hero of “Palimpsests” from the specific situations that prompted the writing of the [respective] poem) (P: 662), to which I referred in the previous chapter.
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being assigned a complete identity. The various uses of tse ty highlight the shifting nature of the pronouns, and the ambivalence of pointing inherent to deixis. In the act of reading, we repeat the gesture of pointing rather than the actuality of the historical ‘you’ that was initially addressed. However, rather than imposing disappointment (note the origin of the word: ‘deprive of appointment’, where the notion of ‘point’ in turn evokes a sharp end or precise position),411 the changing position of the addressee opens an opportunity for the reader’s engagement. Hochman insightfully notes that ‘with the semiotic demise of the explicit addressee the poem has as an illocutionary effect the designation or resurrection of an addressee in the reader and the successful completion of its circuit of exchange.’412 Hochman makes this comment in analysing comparable lines of the French surrealist poet Robert Desnos (from his poem ‘A la faveur de la nuit’, ‘Under Cover of Night’, 1926): ‘Se glisser dans ton ombre à la faveur de la nuit. / Suivre tes pas, ton ombre à la fenêtre. / Cette ombre à la fenêtre c’est toi, ce n’est pas une autre, c’est toi’ (‘Glide into your shadow under cover of night / Follow your footsteps, your shadow at the window. / That shadow at the window is you, no one but you)’.413 ‘Tse ty’ of Stus’s poem, just like Desnos’s ‘c’est toi’ (notably, both addressed to a shadow), becomes ‘an ode to the favours of figurative obscurity’ (p. 180). Pointing to a shadow recurs in Stus’s poetry. Consider this opening passage from Stus’s poem entitled exactly that, ‘Ty tin’ (‘You are a shadow...’):414
Ти тінь. Ти притінь. Образ – на воді. Моїх жалоб і дум моїх безсонних: я стежу за годинником – і стрілку все переводжу на тамтешній лад.
(You are a shadow. You are a delicate shadow. [You are] an image – on the water. / Of my grief and my sleepless thoughts: / I watch the clock – and keep adjusting / the hour hand to the time zone there) (P: 342)
411 The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, ed. by T. F. Hoad (Oxford University Press, 1996). 412 Hochman, ‘Where Poetry Points’, p. 180. 413 I use Tony Kline’s translation from ‘Selected French Poems: From the early to mid-20th century’,
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The feminine nouns tin and prytin imply a female addressee, likely referring to the lyrical subject’s beloved. The image on the water reinforces the elusive nature of the ‘you’. Elsewhere, the poet conjures up a similarly subtle image of ‘vidbytok na vodi tremkii’ (an ‘imprint on quivering water’).415 The time difference poignantly embodies the distance between the subject and the addressee. Adjusting the clock only creates an illusion of proximity, without being capable of overcoming the distance. The disrupted cadence (moving between different forms of blank verse, free verse, and rhyme) and the torn syntax of the poem enact this separation; the cited passage is followed by an ellipsis and an unusual form of enjambment, where the poet repeatedly breaks not only the line but also the word at the end of the line, sometimes even not finishing it: ‘Ta chorna-chorna lodiia hoida / ietsia, vkolysuie i vrochyt’ (‘That black-black boat is undu / lating, lulling and hypnotising’), ‘Kroky, kroky, kro- / mov po dushi’ (‘Steps, steps, ste- / as if upon the soul’),416 to give but a few examples (P: 342). While I noted earlier that the ‘you’ of the opening stanza probably refers to the speaker’s (female) beloved, as we move through the poem, we start to question this first impression. Along with the unstable syntactic structure, the following lines further undo our initial expectations: ‘Ide na mylytsiakh Oksana / zolotokosa i vsmikha- / vsmikha- vsmikhaietsia do tebe’ (‘Oksana walks on crutches, / golden-haired, and smi- / smi- smiles at you’) (P: 342). The hermetic figure of Oksana seems at odds with my speculative assumption about the ‘you’. The subsequent lines only strengthen this doubt: ‘Ia tam – na cholopku / zhyttia svoho i muky [...] / Kokhanyi ne polonyt / u lodiiu dolon’ (‘I am there – at the summit / of my life and suffering [...] My beloved [man] does not hold [me] captive / in the boat of his palms) (P: 343). While the poem starts with the address to ‘you’, an ‘I’ emerges amidst the shifting landscape of Stus’s text. The reference to kokhanyi suggests that this ‘I’, and, potentially, the speaker of the poem all along, in fact belongs to the woman that is separated from her husband, calling into question my first reading. The ‘you’, then, appears to be that of the male addressee instead. In the same vein, the lyrical voice asks later on: ‘I tysha dookruzh, / mov sudnyi den nadkhodyt, / zoria zoriu narodyt, / a de zh toi lado-muzh?’ (‘It is so quiet around / as if the Judgement Day is coming, / a star gives birth to a star, / but where is that dear husband?’) (P: 343). This realisation of the addressee’s newly found identity invites a revisiting of the beginning of the poem: ‘You are a shadow. You are a delicate
415 See the poem ‘O ne zovy mene...’ (‘Oh don’t call me...’, DZ: 274). 416 In this passage, the truncated word kro- connotes the word krov, meaning ‘blood’.
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shadow. [You are] an image – on the water.’ The roles, therefore, might be reversed: despite being grammatically feminine, the shadow might belong to the male addressee apostrophised by the female speaker. This reading places us on the other side of the border between him and her: in this scenario, it is the female speaker who adjusts the hour hand on the clock. And yet even this updated approach does not secure ultimate certainty. The question ‘where is that dear husband?’ reveals a detached perspective, quite at odds with the active use of lyric address in the rest of the poem. Such a third-person reference indicates that it might not, after all, be the female voice that speaks directly but rather the male voice emulating the voice of his beloved woman.417 Furthermore, Stus likely uses the different poetic patterns to produce different poetic voices: the blank verse of the initial stanza stands in contrast to the rhymed iambic trimeter of the subsequent passage quoted earlier (‘I am there – at the summit / of my life and suffering’). We cannot exclude the possibility of two different speakers at different points of the poem. Ultimately, it is indeed difficult to assign lines like these to a specific speaker with complete confidence: ‘Pirny / u vsezadumu i zbavliai bezchassia’ (‘Plunge / into eternal thought and last in timelessness’) (P: 342). Is it a wife addressing her imprisoned husband, or the other way round?418 Or is it, perhaps, a self-address of Stus’s alter ego? This uncertainty indeed resembles trying to catch a shadow, especially if it moves with us. Yet what matters for the poet is the very process of searching, not the result. The reader becomes ‘the producer of the text’, to use Barthes’s formulation, moving between the different aspects of selfhood, switching between and performing various roles, and being invited into the text to fill the gaps with his/her own interpretation.
Within and Without History
Finally, the porous line between the spoken ‘you’ and the unspoken ‘you’, and the possibility of the reader’s involvement become conspicuous in Stus’s historical poems. In Chapter One, I analysed Stus’s cycle ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’ in depth to demonstrate how the poet
417 The chiastic gender relationship is not unusual for Stus. Cf. Kolodkevych’s perceptive reading of Stus’s poem ‘You are here. You are here. [You are] all white, like a candle...’ (P: 31), where Orpheus and Eurydice exchange their roles, and it is Eurydice whom the speaker begs not to turn back, in contrast to the original Greek narrative. Building upon such a reversal of the story, Kolodkevych foregrounds the femininity of Stus’s prima facie male speaker. See Variatyvnist, pp. 83-6. 418 For yet another example of the ambivalence of the speaker-addressee roles see Pylypiuk’s analysis of Stus’s poem ‘Oh do not call me...’, where, argues the scholar, ‘[i]t is altogether ambiguous whether the [addressee] is an apparition or a mirror reflection of the speaker’. See ‘Vasyl’ Stus, Mysticism, and the Great Narcissus’, p. 191). It is in this poem that Stus evokes the image of an ‘imprint on quivering water’, which I pointed out earlier.
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circumvents historical time and goes beyond the specific experience of Kostomarov.419 The undoing of clock time also has an effect on the relationship that this text can potentially create with the reader, detaching experiences from the historical subject. As Waters suggests, ‘[i]n poems addressing historical figures, [...] history contained and “done with” may turn, by the poet’s address, into something still open or not yet done.’420 The opening stanza of Stus’s cycle immediately introduces ‘you’ into the picture:
За роком рік росте твоя тюрма, за роком рік підмур’я в землю грузне, і за твоїм жалінням заскорузлим, за безголів’ям – просвітку нема.
(Year after year your prison grows, / year after year the basement becomes bogged down into the ground / and there is no way out of your worn-out pitying / nor out of [your] predicament) (ZD: 73)
Commenting on the cycle, Prosalova argues that:
Завдяки іншому, експлікованому в циклі за допомогою займенників ‘ти’, ‘твій’, усвідомлюється, як ‘за роком рік росте твоя тюрма’, що відокремить тебе від світу. Самоусвідомлення відбувалося, отож, шляхом осмислення життєвої долі попередника і художньої верифікації своєї позиції автором, який, вступивши в діалог, акцентував те, що було йому близьким. З ліричним героєм він спілкувався на ‘ти’ – як із товаришем і однодумцем.
(Thanks to the Other, [who is] explicated in the cycle by the pronouns ‘you’ and ‘your’, [one] realises how ‘year after year your prison grows’, which will separate you from the world. Coming to know oneself happens, therefore, through the comprehension of the plight of the predecessor and the artistic verification of the personal position of the author, who, having entered in dialogue [with Kostomarov], highlighted what was relatable for him. He addressed the lyrical hero with ‘you’ – like a comrade and a like-minded person).421
‘Kostomarov in Saratov’, the scholar suggests, instantiates the correlation of Stus’s own experiences with a historical figure, where Kostomarov inhabits the text as the Other. For Prosalova, the cycle stages a kind of a dialogue between Stus and Kostomarov. Yet the framework of lyric address allows us to see additional levels of conversation enabled by the
419 Cf. also Stus’s historical cycle ‘Treny M. H. Chernyshevskoho’ (‘M. H. Chernyshevskyi’s Laments’, P: 89- 92), which similarly contains what Achilli aptly describes as ‘[t]he identification between humanity, the lyrical self of the Rollengedicht and the subject of Stus’s poetry’. See La lirica di Vasyl’ Stus, p. 318. 420 Waters, Poetry’s Touch, p. 52. 421 Prosalova, ‘Mykola Kostomarov u poetychnii refleksii Vasylia Stusa’, p. 149.
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poem. Addressing ‘you’ as the Other, as the critic proposes, provides only ‘one enunciatory pose’, to use Waters’s phrase. The poem opens the possibility of regarding ‘you’ as the pronoun of self-address. Furthermore, we can read this self-address as simultaneously that of Kostomarov and of Stus’s own alter ego, and even as the reader’s performance of the cycle’s apostrophes as his/her own self-address. From this perspective, it appears doubtful whether in his cycle Stus seeks to condemn ‘stan depresii, iakyi [Kostomarov] dovho ne mih podolaty. Tsei stan u Vasylia Stus ne lyshe ne vyklykav zakhoplennia, a i distav nyshchivny otsinku (“zhalinnia zaskoruzle”)’ (‘the state of depression, which [Kostomarov] could not overcome for a long time. Not only was Vasyl Stus not in awe of this state, but he also severely criticised it (“worn-out pitying”)’).422 The psychological situation that Stus describes here is likely no less his own than Kostomarov’s. We find a similar passage in Stus’s poem that contains no references to a historical figure and instead appears to concern Stus’s poetic self:
Не потурай жалям. Бо то дарма – своїм жалям намарне потурати. Уже таким тебе зродила мати, аби назнати, що то є – тюрма.423
(Do not dwell in your pity. For it is futile – / it is in vain to dwell in your pity. / That is why you were born, / to learn about what prison is like) (DZ: 130)
Stus’s lyrical subject faces the same challenge.424 The decontextualised environment makes the identity of ‘you’ inhabitable. The poem establishes this openness not only by using the pronoun and the imperatives, but also by subsequently raising the direct question about the identity of the ‘you’: ‘Shchob ty zbahnuv nareshti, khto iesy / i zadlia choho ty iesy u sviti’ (‘For you to come to realise at last who thou art / and what thou art for in the world’) (DZ: 130). Stus, therefore, appears not so much to identify with Kostomarov as to project his own psychological processes onto this historical figure, simultaneously offering such an opportunity for the reader. The poem ‘Zyma 1830 roku’ (‘Winter of 1830’) further elucidates the blurring of the boundary between the ‘you’ of a historical figure, the ‘you’ of the lyrical subject’s self-
422 Ibid., pp. 150-1. 423 Cf. these lines in ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’: ‘I ne treba / zhalkykh zhalin’ (‘No need for / painful pity’); and ‘Tiurma ne doroste do neba: / shche zemliu istyme tiurma’ (‘The prison won’t grow to reach the sky: / the prison will eat the earth’) (ZD: 78). 424 Cf. Stus’s lines: ‘Neduha, nesyla – khovaty tsei zhal / odvertoho sertsia’ (‘[You have] no energy nor strength to hide this pity / of [your] sincere heart’). See the poem ‘Neduha, nesyla...’ (‘[You have] no energy...’, P: 216).
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address, and the ‘you’ of the reader. Similarly to ‘Kostomarov in Saratov’, its title refers to specific historical circumstances, which Stus, however, begins to efface at the very beginning of the poem:
Куди не глянь – ані душі навколо, і тільки сніг, і сніг, і сніг, і сніг. Коли б ти міг, коли б не серце кволе, та так між кучугурами і зліг
(Wherever you look – there is not a soul around, / only snow, and snow, and snow, and snow. / If you could, if your heart weren’t frail, / you would collapse amidst the snowdrfits) (DZ: 128)
The poet conjures up an empty landscape, devoid of human presence and filled with ‘snow, and snow, and snow, and snow’ instead, thus unsettling the spatial anchor of the poem. To what historical figure does the poem refer: is it Taras Shevchenko? Or, perhaps, Goethe, whom Stus translated whilst working on Dichtenszeit? Both of these writers were important for Stus, and both were still alive in the winter of 1830. Or is it someone else? The poem hints at someone, but resists an easy identification of the addressee. However, as I have been arguing, the ambiguity of the ‘you’ is pregnant with meaning for the poet. The performative aspect is no less important than the communicative function here. Indeed, we do not lose much by not knowing the specific historical context that inspired the poem when we read the following lines in ‘Winter of 1830’:
Це окрай твого існування. Край твоєї віри, мов поріг шалений над безгомінням вічного добра самоутрати. Лиш від себе збоку ти подивляєш пустку порожнеч
(This is the edge of your existence. The edge / of your faith, [it is] like a frenzied threshold / over the voicelessness of the eternal kindness / of self-loss. Only aside from yourself / do you watch the void of emptiness) (DZ: 128)
We do not have time to think about the addressee. We face the fact: ‘this is the edge’. The alternation of short sentences and run-on lines does not allow us to settle gently into the poem. To the background of ‘voicelessness’ and ‘the void of emptiness’, the reader is engaged in searching, necessitated by the fact of ‘self-loss’.
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Analysing Constantine Cavafy’s poem on Caesar (‘Ides of March’, 1911), Waters postulates:
It is unexpected that there can be such proximity or even overlap between self-address—where the lyric you never leaves an individual consciousness—and a mode of poetic retrospection calling upon a celebrated historical figure. But it is not hard for the reader imaginatively to share in Caesar’s plight and to hear the words of this poem (to feel addressed by them) all the more acutely because knowing that this is the message that passed Caesar by. Inhabiting Caesar becomes, in Cavafy’s poem, a way of expanding the figure's possibilities, at least for the one long, temporally dislocated moment of the poem’s counsel425
Stus’s poem similarly invites us to inhabit its addressed ‘you’, ‘sharing the plight’ of the supposed historical figure, which in fact represents the existential plight. We will eventually find out that the winter described by the poet at the beginning of the poem characteristically turns from a metonymy into metaphor, from the snow and snowdrifts of 1830 to ‘svitova khurdyha’ (‘the world blizzard’, DZ: 129),426 which surpasses temporal and spatial limits. Stus does not approach his historical subjects narratively, seeking to represent an event in a descriptive mode. Neither does he approach the figures from the detached third-person perspective. Rather, they appear as ‘I’ or ‘you’, which brings about the sense of immediacy and intimacy and involves the reader in the event stemming from the fictive context established by the poet. Furthermore, Stus dwells in the present, staging the poem as an event that unfolds thanks to our participation. Just as through his neologisms Stus does not merely put a label on an identity of the self that already exists firmly in the world, through the use of the present tense, questions, imperatives, and other deictics, Stus’s texts invite us to participate in the event. The poet establishes ‘a discursive reality, [where] reception is continuous with the addressivity of each poem.’427 Stus’s historical poems connote the Roman rhetorical exercise of suasoria, ‘deliberative speech’, where ‘[t]he speaker [the Roman student] has to set himself there, to urge action on the great man’, like ‘Hannibal at the Alps or Alexander at the Ocean’.428 In this exercise, ‘the speaker is essentially composing a fantasy that is almost dream-like in its insertion of the self as a speaker and agent in the grand past’ (p. 301). In his historical poems, Stus similarly
425 Waters, Poetry’s Touch, p. 55. 426 The word khurdyha happens to have an additional meaning of ‘prison’. 427 Hochman, ‘Where Poetry Points’, p. 177. 428 W. Martin Bloomer, ‘Roman Declamation: The Elder Seneca and Quintilian’, in A Companion to Roman Rhetoric, ed. by William Dominik and Jon Hall (Oxford, Malden, Carlton: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), pp. 297-306 (p. 301). In referring to suasoria I draw upon Waters’ reference to this rhetorical exercise. Waters further notes with respect to suasoria that it allows us to ‘reexperience the open choices’. See Poetry’s Touch, p. 54.
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‘urges action’, opening the past as a possibility. Yet unlike suasoria they transcend ‘the great man’. Consider these opening lines of ‘Shevchenko. Doroha do Orska’ (‘Shevchenko. Road to Orsk’):
І закривавились твої сліди по сніжних кучугурах. Скільки ока – все далина: порожня і глибока. А ти – іди. А ти – іди. А – йди.429
(Your footsteps on the snowdrifts / became stained with blood. As far as you can see – / there is only empty and deep distance. / But you [ought to] – go. And you [ought to] – go. And [you ought to] – go.) (DZ: 156)
Stus’s poem performs the situation rather than describing it. It is not fixed and resolved, but is instead open for movement. The imperative, as I mentioned earlier, fundamentally signifies a gap (between the present and the hoped-for future, the actual and the desired) and a desire to overcome this gap. The imperative of going and the image of road reinforce this sense. Stus’s poem thus serves not as a dusty portrait, but rather as the making of experience. Stus’s historical poem ‘Kampanella’ (‘Campanella’) arguably comes the closest to taking on board the historical circumstances of its historical subject. The beginning of the poem describes the interior of the prisoner’s cell: ‘Kamera tvoia – v chotyry mury / prostoru. Vikontse. I lantsi’ (‘Your cell [consists of] the space between / the four walls. A little window. And the chains’) (P: 310). Yet in the course of the text, Stus gradually opens the limits of space and concomitantly the limits of the poem and subjectivity. The confines of the cell turn into ‘bezobriina nichna pustelia – / vse apokryfichne zhytiie’ (‘all your apocryphal hagiography [is] like a night desert without horizon’) (P: 310). Stus undoes both spatial boundaries (taking away the horizon) and temporal limits, by using sacred language (the Old Church Slavonic zhytiie). The poet revisits the past not only by using the imperatives – ‘[b]ozhevilliam prykhystys od liuti, / od tortury – smertiu prykhystys’ (‘[c]over yourself from rage with madness, / and from torture cover yourself with death’, P: 310) – but also by asking a number of questions, which bookend the poem: ‘Shcho ty mriiesh, stradnuky neshchasnyi? / Shcho ty mriiesh – sontsem svitovym? [...] Liudy – budut? Chy buly – kolys?’ (‘Are you dreaming, unhappy martyr? Are you dreaming about the world of the sun? [...] Will human
429 The reference to ‘snizhni kuchuhury’ (‘snowdrifts’) suggests that in ‘Winter of 1830’ Stus might refer to Shevchenko, after all. Cf. the lines cited earlier: ‘If you could, if your heart weren’t frail, / you would collapse amidst the snowdrifts’.
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beings ever come? Have they ever been?’) (P: 310). Can we ignore these questions? Can we afford not to search for answers to them?
Instead of seeking to recover pervisnyi zmist or ‘the mystery of the hidden truth’ in Stus’s poetry, we might, therefore, choose to be open to Stus’s poetry, just as it remains open to us. Instead of regarding Stus as ‘poet obranoi menshosti’ (‘a poet of the chosen minority’),430 we might accept the invitation inherent in Stus’s verse to inhabit it and to come to know not so much Stus as ourselves.431 Nahnybida, we remember, asks in his review: ‘when were these poems written? For whom were they written?’ While the reviewer demands of the poet to speak to a specific time, place, and audience, grounded in a specific material reality, Stus’s poetry overcomes this reality and speaks, instead, to ‘you’. For this reason, it is as relevant as ever, for us, for me, and for you, reader.
430 Bedryk, Problema spryimannia, p. 31. 431 Cf. Ricoeur’s apt postulation: ‘In proposing to relate symbolic language to self-understanding, I think I fulfill the deepest wish of hermeneutics. The purpose of all interpretation is to conquer a remoteness, a distance between the past cultural epoch to which the text belongs and the interpreter himself. By overcoming this distance, by making himself contemporary with the text, the exegete can appropriate its meaning to himself: foreign, he makes it familiar, that is, he makes it his own. It is thus the growth of his own understanding of himself that he pursues through his understanding of others. Every hermeneutics is thus, explicitly or implicitly, self-understanding by means of understanding others.’ See Paul Ricœur, ‘Existence and Hermeneutics’, in The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur: An Anthology of His Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 101, 106.
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CONCLUSION
The subject matter of Stus’s poetry is the subject himself. In my thesis, I have sought to provide a new reading of Palimpsests, which brings to the fore the investigation of selfhood in the poet’s works. Stus offers an unconventional vision of the self, casting it primarily as non-coincidence. ‘Thou art a fragment of wholeness’, Stus’s speaker states in an act of self- address, and this statement encapsulates the two major ruptures that underpin Stus’s verse. First, there is the existential rupture of never hitting the mark of one’s authenticity. The self always dwells behind itself, as it never fully is what it can become. Palimpsests captures the very movement of becoming, where two fundamental modalities of authenticity are at work, which are epitomised by Kierkegaard’s notions of recollection and repetition. Stus’s poetic subject seeks to restore wholeness and return to his own authentic image, yet in this endeavour he faces his own fragmentation and the impossibility of dovetailing with oneself. All that is left at his disposal is the inexhaustible series of repetitions, not as the reiteration of the same, but rather as the repetition of difference. Stus’s image of ‘self-returning to crossroads’ succinctly expresses this tension, where the origin itself signifies a lack of being, which ignites desire. In articulating a new concept of the self, the poet pushes the frontiers of language. Among the new words that Stus coins especially prominent are his ‘self-constructions’, such as his notable neologism samosoboiunapovnennia, ‘filling-(one)self-with-[the]-self’. Innovative compounds of this kind do not simply put a label on what already exists objectively in the world. Instead, they partake in the process of self-formation, not mimetically representing a solid subject but performing its very coming-to-be. Shevelov rightly remarks that Stus’s poetical language ‘is capable of finding the language for [...] the very process of formation’. Second, Stus’s texts foreground the rupture of self-reflexivity. They reveal the dynamics of the consciousness of consciousness, where the subject appears as ‘a suffering Narcissus’, at once the observer and the observed. In both Stus’s prose and poetry, the phenomenological perspective takes centre stage, as Stus’s narrator and poetic subject split into ‘I’ and ‘you’, the specular double of the self. The constant shifting between these subjectivities not only enacts the self-doubling that permeates Palimpsests, but also provides an innovative avenue for lyric address as such. In articulating these two ruptures, Stus’s verse exposes the very formation of the poetic subject. Yet this investigation of the self reaches beyond Stus’s text and, I argue, invites the
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reader to participate in the making of the text and of the self. We become part of this drama and in ‘moments of wonder’ (William Waters) we might feel that we ourselves are the author. While the involvement of the reader may not be Stus’s deliberate aesthetic strategy, the poet’s texts, through their distinctive poetics, invite (at times, urge) our participation. By way of conscious decontextualisation, Stus’s poetry renders the poetic space open and inhabitable for the Other. It expresses the pure working of selfhood, thus universalising the radical introspection of the poetic subject. Furthermore, Stus’s extensive use of deixis, such as his signature self-imperatives, and the innumerable instances of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘this’, and ‘here’, create vast potential for communication with the reader, enabling us to be at once bystanders, addressees, and speakers. Stus’s poetry, in short, exists after Stus, and with us. There are a great number of prominent areas of enquiry that still await takers in Stus Studies. One of them is Stus’s use of the image of the mirror (svichado), a productive theme for exploration in Stus’s verse, especially in the context of self-doubling. While the poet’s works are characterised by many forms of mirroring, svichado provides for the poet a venue of at once the reconstitution of the self, self-discovery, and self-fragmentation. Svichado denotes both a mirror and a chandelier. It illuminates by reflecting. A discussion of this recurrent topos will certainly enrich the study of self-doubling in Palimpsests. Another prominent theme is Stus’s abstract expressionism, which I touched upon in my discussion of decontextualisation, but did not have the space to develop fully. Stus’s metaphor melting together the tangible and the intangible, his profound exploration of emotions, and the prominent use of abstraction would furnish ample material for a separate study. After all, in his own doctoral thesis, Stus investigates the sources of emotionality and expressivity in literary works. While a great number of scholars have studied Stus’s philosophy, not much has been said about the psychological dimension of his writing. Yet Stus himself in his interrogation reports emphasises that ‘psychologism is crucial’ for him. The phenomenology of depersonalisation, which I have examined at considerable length in this thesis, is an especially rich topic for further study. While the discussion of Stus’s (post)modernism has proven to be a popular strand in Stus criticism, it appears to me that the exploration of the connection between Stus’s poetry and the Baroque would be no less productive. Natalia Pylypiuk ushered in this theme by discussing Stus’s intertextual links with Skovoroda. In Stus’s letters, we find multiple references to other Baroque figures, such as John Donne and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. There is intriguing promise in the study of Stus’s original recasting of the varied poetics of the Baroque and (post)modernism. Scholars will undoubtedly continue to find ever-new
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instances of intertextuality and discovering additional palimpsest layers in the poet’s works. Of great importance here will be a further thorough exploration of Stus archives. Finally, it is important to consider Stus within a broader frame of Gulag literature (while not confining his poetry solely to it). It is a sore lacuna in the study of Soviet (dissident) poetry that the name of Stus is not to be found in any major study of Gulag art. Such a state of affairs tells us a lot about the postcolonial dynamics in the study of the Soviet cultural heritage, and further highlights the importance of researching Stus’s works. Stus Studies have undoubtedly become a field of their own, which is evident, for example, from the four issues of the almanac Stusoznavchi zoshyty (‘Stus Studies Notebooks’), launched in 2016.432 Recent scholarship especially has approached Stus’s poetry in the nuanced way that it deserves, exploring the underlying dynamics of Stus’s text, his multifaceted poetics, and his unique worldview. At the same time, the figure of Stus is as relevant as ever in the public consciousness in Ukraine, with the first feature film based on Stus’s life and work released in all Ukrainian cinemas in 2019. Clashing perceptions of Stus and of his heritage are inevitable, and they will, hopefully, lead to a better understanding of both Stus the dissident and Stus the poet. As Stus remains virtually unknown beyond the Ukrainian context, especially as a poet, I hope to render Stus’s works a subject of thorough discussion in international scholarship, and to open them up to new audiences both within academia and beyond.
432 Some of the editors and contributors of Stusoznavchi zoshyty are part of the Donetsk National University, which relocated to Vinnytsia, the city near which Stus was born, following the beginning of the armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. The University itself received Stus’s name in 2016 in light of the large-scale public campaign supporting the renaming of the University after the poet, its alumnus.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY WORKS
Stus, Vasyl, ‘Vystup Vasylia Stusa’, Suchasnist, 9 (1991), 41-3 —— Doroha boliu, ed. by Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska (Kyiv: Radianskyi pysmennyk, 1990) —— Fenomen doby (Skhodzhennia na Holhofu slavy) (Kyiv: Klio, 2015) —— Palimpsesty: Virshi 1971-1979 rokiv, ed. by Nadia Svitlychna (New York: Suchasnist, 1986) —— Svicha v svichadi: Poezii, ed. by Marco Carynnyk and Wolfram Burghardt (New York: Suchasnist, 1977) —— Tvory: u chotyrokh tomakh (shesty knyhakh). Z dodatkovymy 5 i 6 (u dvokh knyhakh) tomamy (Lviv: Prosvita, 1994-1999) —— Zibrannia tvoriv: u dvanadtsiaty tomakh (Kyiv: Fakt, 2007-2009) —— Zibrannia tvoriv: u dvanadtsiaty tomakh. Tom 5. Palimpsesty (Naipovnishyi nezavershenyi korpus) (Kyiv: Fakt, 2009) —— Zymovi dereva (Brussels: Literatura i mystetstvo, 1970) —— ‘Sered hromu i tyshi’, Suchasnist, 1 (1995), 138-48
Petryk, V. [Stus, Vasyl], ‘Velykyi z naibilshykh’, Dnipro, 7 (1967), 101-3
Archive materials
Viddil rukopysiv i tekstolohii Instytutu literatury im. T. H. Shevchenka NAN Ukrainy (Department of Manuscripts and Textual Studies of T. H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv) (‘IL Archive’):
Stus, Vasyl, ‘Bloknot z poeziiamy (1971)’, F. 170, N 933, pp. 1-52 —— ‘Materialy do dysertatsiinoi roboty’, F. 170, NN 1177-89 —— ‘Pidhotovchi materialy do statti “Znykome roztsvitannia”’, F. 170, N 1146, pp. 1-9 —— ‘Shchodennykovi zapysy’, F. 170, N 1200, pp. 1-79 —— ‘Shchodennykovi zapysy 1970-71’, F. 170, N 1202, pp. 1-89
Haluzevyi derzhavnyi arkhiv Sluzhby bezpeky Ukrainy (Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine, Kyiv) (‘SBU Archive’):
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Kryminalna sprava Stusa Vasylia Semenovycha, N 67298FP [ФП], sprava 47, v 12 tomakh:
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