Description
Vortex gathers the poetry of Vasyl Stus, one of Ukraine’s greatest twentieth-century poets, in the most substantial English-language selection to date. This bilingual volume traces Stus’s trajectory from early experimental poems to profound meditations written during his Soviet incarceration. It reveals Stus as a poet of psychological intensity and philosophical depth, moving between historical extremity and the human condition with singular ethical force.
Vasyl Stus (1938–1985) was a Ukrainian poet, critic, translator, and dissident. Raised in Donetsk, he emerged as a moral voice of his generation. After publicly protesting the arrests of Ukrainian intellectuals in 1965, he was banned from publishing in Soviet Ukraine. For his writing and dissident activity, he spent more than a decade in Soviet prisons, labor camps, and exile, before dying in 1985 in the Perm-36 labor camp. Stus’s poetry remains a touchstone of Ukrainian literature and cultural memory.
Bohdan Tokarskyi is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. A scholar and translator of Ukrainian literature, he is a leading authority on Vasyl Stus. He is currently completing a monograph on the poet’s work. He is also the author of The Un/Executed Renaissance: Ukrainian Soviet Modernism and Its Legacies.
Nina Murray is a Ukrainian-American poet and translator. She is the author of the poetry collections Glapthorn Circular (LiveCanon Poetry, 2023) and Alcestis in the Underworld (Circling Rivers Press, 2019) as well as several chapbooks. She is a retired U.S. Diplomat.
Lost Horse Press Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry Series Volume #20
$24 / 979-8-9933139-2-4 / Pbk. / 250 pages (NOVEMBER 2026)
