ABOUT «DARK PLACES» IN VASYLY STUS’S COLLECTION «THE CHEERFUL CEMETERY»

Abstract

The article examines apocryphal markers in Vasyl Stus’s poetry collection «The Cheerful Cemetery». First of all, it is about «dark places» and the noticeably complicated semantics of the non-referential lyrics of the intellectual poet. It is in the poet’s third chronological collection that the non-referential lyrics are formed into a clearly tangible system, shrouded in a frank and obvious apocryphal aura. And it is this aura that allows us to penetrate deeper into the text saturated with expressive images and understand that there is actually not the slightest gap between the lyrical subject of this poetry and man. The poet’s moral and ethical conceptualism is a solid ground, and at the same time a source for the creation of luxurious intellectual lyrics. Stus was not the first poet of the 20th century who refused to be understood by everyone after the first superficial reading, thus making another breakthrough for world poetry into relevant and mature lyrics, while improving the well-known and well-developed poetics of expressionism, which is based on opposition, paradox, and a renewed view of the world and man. To read such poets, literary researchers quite rightly seek other receptive ways, creating productive and innovative interpretative concepts. New proposals, often based on the sudden insights of the researcher himself, are a risky business and depend on his inner willingness to join the risks of the poet-innovator. However, without such risks, it is impossible to break through the dense and often unexpected images to the apocryphal sources of such lyrics. Stus is a poet «not for children», as Viktor Petrov might say. This is poetry with a vertical immersion in human suffering and, at the same time, in the secret luxuries of the life of a human creator. It is thanks to the understanding of the apocryphal nature of such lyrics that the true biography of the writer is revealed to the researcher, even without protocol verification.