Vasyl Stus and Osyp Mandelstam: on crossroads of poetic worlds

The article focuses on the coincidences in V. Stus’s and O. Mandelstam’s biographies and notes the psychological and typological similarities of their personalities as well as their fascination with the German language and natural sciences (biology, chemistry). Both writers’ literary interests were alike, they were especially focused on the works of such Russian authors as A. Pushkin, A. Herzen, A. Blok, B. Pasternak, N. Gumilyov, M. Lermontov, F. Tyutchev, and others). Among world classical writers, Stus loved the works of J. W. von Goethe most of all, and Mandelstam admired the works by Dante Alighieri. The paper also deals with Stus’s translations from R. M. Rilke and Mandelstam’s translations from F. Petrarca. The critical activity of Stus and Mandelstam is also mentioned, in particular, O. Mandelstam’s essay “Conversation about Dante” and V. Stus’s paper about P. Tychyna “Phenomenon of the Age (Ascension on Calvary of Glory)”. Stus’s letters and manuscripts reveal his attitude to the works of O. Mandelstam, whose poetry appeared in Stus’s life at crucial points. Stus referred to it during his imprisonment in the Soviet camps and tried to understand the problem of “poet and power”. A comparative analysis of the fragments from Mandelstam’s poems, cited in the works by the Ukrainian poet, and the original texts written by Mandelstam revealed сertain deviations. Stus used repetitions instead of the ‘forgotten’ words, which is a general characteristic of his own poetics. At the textual level, the poems of Stus and Mandelstam are future-oriented. It can be observed in the appeals to the reader used by each of them in a specific way: the Ukrainian poet speaks as a ‘son’, while the Russian one as a ‘teacher’, echoing the practice of Pushkin. Both poets loved their homelands very much and were attached to it; both of them could not imagine their life outside the motherland. In their texts, Mandelstam and Stus created the images of a dead city, a prison state, emphasizing the impossibility of the poet’s existence in his own country.