[11/01/26] Stus, Vasyl: Vortex

Lost Horse Press, paperback

Translated by Bohdan Tokarskyi & Nina Murray

Publication Date: November 1, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

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.