A Remembrance of Vasyl Stus In Ukraiinsky Visnyk, No. 7–10, 1988, pp. 47-49

The material is Ivan Hel's memoir about Vasyl Stus, a Ukrainian poet of the 1960s, with whom he had a long-standing friendship. The author describes in detail their shared intellectual interests, meetings, and conversations, as well as their experience of living together in conditions of oppression. The text emphasizes that both of them highly valued and systematically studied the works of Dmytro Chyzhevskyi, Bohdan-Ihor Antonych, Oleg Olzhych, and other leading intellectuals.

The excerpt presented here is part of a letter from exile addressed to a foreign correspondent. Given the censorship restrictions and the need for cautious expression, the words “prison,” “camp,” and “cell” are deliberately avoided, and a number of aspects of life in captivity are conveyed in a veiled form. It is known that the letter was delivered to the addressee; there is no information about any previous publications of this text.