INTERVIEW – Upset by the Russian invasion, the most famous Russianist in Europe, who has just celebrated his 91st birthday, decided to respond to this catastrophe by learning Ukrainian and translating the great poet Vasyl Stus for the first time into French.
Installed in the office filled with Russian books of his Alpine chalet in Ésery, on the edge of Genevan Switzerland, whose massifs can be seen cut out against the pastel of the sky, the great Russologist Georges Nivat declaims in his beautiful deep voice a few verses by the poet Vasyl Stus… in Ukrainian. « Path of destiny, Path of pain/ On this endless cross, on this terror/ Endless vision of a cry of death/ Ukraine, grant me path of honor. Ukraine, grant me Face without fear »says the poem. Written in the mineral hell of the gulag, from Perm-36 to Kolyma, in the 1970s and 1980s, Stus’s poetry, which describes the painful destiny of this poet and of the Ukrainian nation, martyred but still combative and alive, resonates with poignant news as Putin’s Russia is once again attacking Ukraine, unleashing thousands of killer drones on its cities every day.
On the front, all the soldiers today read Vasyl Stus, who died in 1985 from a hunger strike at the camp…
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