On 19 March at 8.00 pm, the Salle Colonne in Paris will host a musical and literary event entitled Vasyl Stus, Herald and Poet of Ukraine. The event will be opened by the French Slavicist Georges Niva and the Ukrainian philosopher Kostyantyn Sihov.
The evening is dedicated to the Ukrainian dissident poet Vasyl Stus — one of the most striking symbols of cultural and moral resistance to the Soviet regime. Stus was born in 1938 in western Ukraine and grew up in the city of Stalino (now Donetsk). In 1965, he became one of the most active participants in the Ukrainian dissident movement.
The poet’s first collection of poems was published in 1970, but his work was banned by the Soviet authorities under Leonid Brezhnev. For his civic stance, Stus was arrested twice and sent to the Gulag. It was there that he wrote his magnum opus — the two-volume collection Palimpsests — and also translated the poetry of Rilke and Goethe into Ukrainian. The poet died in 1985 at the Perm-36 forced-labour camp following a prolonged hunger strike.
The evening’s programme will combine poetry, music and staged readings. Audiences will be taken on a journey through the poet’s life and inner world through a selection of his poems and letters. The programme will reveal not only Stus the dissident, but also Stus as a son, husband and father who agonised over the fate of his loved ones.
The highlight of the event will be a performance of composer Olena Ilnytska’s Face à soi — a song cycle based on five of Stus’s poems for mezzo-soprano, piano and cello, which premiered in 2025 in the German city of Bamberg.
The evening will feature: Olena Ilnytska — composition, piano; Oleksandra Turyanska — mezzo-soprano; Alexis Barrière — recitation; Clément Maillé — cello.
The texts for the performance are taken from translations by Georges Niva and from the book Palimpsests: Poetry and Letters from the Gulag, which will soon be published by Éditions Noir sur Blanc.