DIALOGO E SPERIMENTAZIONE: LA LIRICA DI VASYL' STUS

My dissertation explores the poetry of Vasyl' Stus (1938-1985), a major Ukrainian writer and intellectual of the second half of the 20th century. This work aims at presenting the evolution of Stus' poetic oeuvre from his beginnings in the late Fifties up to his mature poetry of the Seventies. Moreover, it inquires the complex intertextual network of Stus' dialogue with Ukrainian, Russian, and German literature. The first chapter includes a brief sketch of Stus' biography, a discussion of the cultural setting of his human and artistic growth, as well as a critical survey of secondary literature on Stus' life and work. Stus' move to Kyiv at the beginning of the Sixties coincides with the final phase of the Thaw. The historical and literary specificity of the Ukrainian shistdesiatnytstvo, which promoted a fundamental and manifold renewal of Ukrainian culture, is at the core of the chapter. The history of Stus' reception shows how his complex and highly intellectual modernist poetical heritage has not been aptly inquired into by critics. The second chapter deals with Stus' literary essays and letters, with particular regard to his frequent remarks on literature. Stus' dissatisfaction with several trends in the development of Ukrainian literature clearly shows his willingness to contribute actively to its modernization. His many observations on the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Boris Pasternak and other writers confirm his deep interest in their work and justify the search for intertextual links with them in his own production. The third chapter analyzes Stus' poetry, starting from his juvenilia, which include his early collections Delo №13 / BE1339 and Kruhovert', then focusing on Zymovi dereva and Veselyi cvyntar from the late Sixties, and eventually turning to his both masterpieces Chas tvorchosti / Dichtenszeit and Palimpsesty from the Seventies. The fourth chapter is dedicated to a discussion of Stus' modernist poetics in the context of the history of European and Ukrainian poetry of the 20th century. This implies a summarization of the intertextual knots identified in the previous part of the dissertation, with the aim of identifying the main features of Stus' dialogue with his preferential interlocutors, such as Rilke, Pasternak, Cvetaeva, and Shevchenko.