Vasyl Stus is a Ukrainian poet of the sixties, a master of philosophical, lyrical, and satirical poetry, a political prisoner, and a Hero of Ukraine.
An innovator and experimenter in modern Ukrainian poetry. Numerous stylistic devices of verlibrium and rhyme express the poetics of his poems.
Stus's poems are filled with philosophical-expressionist images of the path, destiny, motives of loneliness and struggle, death and understanding of human destiny.
Many poems also reflect the author's inner feelings after his arrest and in his camp existence. He also has natural-philosophical reflections on the beauty of the world, which are combined with life-affirming calls for spiritual struggle.