This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of Vasyl Stus’s concept of poetic creativity. Said concept is not a ready construct or author’s declaration; it is reconstructed in this dissertation, reproduced on the basis of the widest collection of Stus’s texts (published and unpublished) — his poems, literary works, epistolary, diaries and notes. In this work the formation and development of Stus’s concept of poetic creativity, which is reconstructed as a text in the hermeneutic sense, is studied gradually.
V. Stus’s concept of poetic creativity has never been the subject of systematic research, but many scholars have addressed certain issues related to this problem: the relationship between the poet and power, the poet and the people; the influence of R.M. Rilke’s, B. Pasternak’s, J.W. Goethe’s aesthetics on V. Stus; the importance of V. Stus’s biography for understanding his work, merging life and work; the concept of self-filling-with-self (samosoboyunapovnennia) as an important element of the author’s reflections on creativity.
V. Stus’s biography is considered as one of the contexts of understanding the concept. Examining Stus’s reception of the idea of creating life, we determined how it influenced the formation of his views on the poet and poetry. Stus’s inherent orientation on the models of literary characters (Pavka Korchagin, Pavel Vlasov) demonstrates, on one hand, the poet’s connection to Soviet mass consciousness, and on the other — emphasizes his individual moral and ethical guidelines, confirms the poet’s focus on hagiographic biography. We give particular importance to the period of pretrial imprisonment in 1972, which became for Stus a time of understanding his purpose and destiny, and was called by the author "time of creativity". Such biographical circumstances were clearly rethought in the poetry of this period, during which the collection "A Time of Creativity / Dichtenszeit" appeared. One of the determinants of this period is the motive of "a new birth", which was analyzed in a comparative comparison with the motive of "a second birth" of B. Pasternak and J.W. Goethe.
The origins of the idea of creating life are connected with romanticism, which for Stus was embodied, first of all, by Goethe and Shevchenko. Creative self-awareness, understanding and acceptance of one's own destiny, expressed by Stus in the poem "I never understood" (Ya tak i ne zbahnuv), the intertextual background of which are the works of Shevchenko and ethical maxims of Skovoroda, called by the poet "one of the best friends".
The set of moral and ethical guidelines that Stus extended to his life and work consisted of such concepts as kindness, honesty, sincerity and generosity, hard work, love, justice, suffering. Stus perceives the work itself as a way to transform and improve the world, so there is a teleology of poetic text — to change life for the better.
The analysis of Vasyl Stus’s texts allowed to determine the ontology and axiology of poetic creativity in its interpretation, to identify a set of ideas from which his concept of poetic creativity emerges. The organic combination of life and creativity is the basis of the ontological status of the poetic word, when life itself becomes a text.
The process of comprehension of the figure of the poet by V. Stus was complex and multifaceted. A poet is both a simple, sincere, life-loving person, and one who chooses a "passionate path" in the name of his own people. Stus’s self-identification as a poet changed from "a man who writes poetry" to "a poet who longs for heaven". Stus comprehended the mission of the poet in dialogue with R.M. Rilke, B. Pasternak, M. Tsvetaeva, V. Svidzinsky, P. Tychyna and others. The relations between the poet and the totalitarian power are most clearly understood Stus’s work about Pavlo Tychyna "The Phenomenon of the Age or the Ascent to Golgotha of Glory". We considered this text using the context of A. Camus’s "Les Discours de Suède", as well as in the broader context of the "Ukrainian poet", comprehended by Stus in that period.
We showed the ways and stages of the formation of Stus’s concept of poetic creativity: explicit, reflected thoughts, expressed in literary articles, notes, letters, as well as the implicit layer of the text — the living weaving of Stus’s poetry, the poet’s tragic experience of inhuman conditions. The study revealed the diversity of Stus’s personality as a person and as a poet, his zest for and devotion to life, but also his opposition to the world, which becomes forbidden for the poet.
