Author's website Alexander Korotko

A conversation between Maxim Hodak and poet, prose writer and essayist Alexander Korotko about the narrative poem “Stus”, the freedom of the poet, the nature of creativity, translation, and why the figure of Vasyl Stus resonates so powerfully today.

The interview was recorded in English. The video is available with Ukrainian subtitles: https://youtu.be/ymO3S-jopzs

Maxim Hodak: Our guest today is Alexander Korotko, poet, prose writer, essayist, author of nearly forty books, whose poetry has been translated into some twenty languages, a member of the European Academy of Sciences, Arts and Literature, and an honorary member of English PEN. But today we will focus primarily on one book, the narrative poem “Stus”, just published by Glagoslav Publications simultaneously in five languages. An unusual edition: the original, along with Ukrainian, English, German, and Polish translations. This is a book about a man who paid with his life for the right to speak the truth. And it is also about what happens when the state confronts a poet. Alexander, welcome!

Alexander Korotko: Good afternoon. I’m very pleased that we have this opportunity for me to share my own perspective and answer many of your questions.

Maxim Hodak: Thank you for agreeing to this interview. I’d like to begin with a few questions about you. You were born in Korosten. You studied in Odessa and now live in Kyiv. And if you were asked to name the place where you first felt like a poet — not where you wrote your first poem, but where you truly felt it — which of those places would it be?

Alexander Korotko: That I remember very clearly, because it was a turning point in my life. It happened in Odessa, in the early 1970s, in Arcadia. When I was young, I was very fond of fishing, and suddenly I heard a voice inside me. That voice was dictating a poem to me, some kind of text. I was stunned. It was something extraordinary. I had written before, a lot. I had been writing since I was seven or nine years old. I was always writing, reading and writing. But that feeling of an entirely different kind of contact with something higher — I won’t call it divine just yet; we’ll come back to that later — I felt it then. I felt it in the early seventies. After that I became aware of my own style, my own manner of writing, my own path. Because I am deeply convinced that whether you’re a poet or a prose writer, it doesn’t matter: if you can live without writing, it’s better not to write. But if you do write, you have to say something, something no one has said before you.

Maxim Hodak: Thank you. You graduated in economics. I’m a lawyer by profession, and I also studied economics, so I understand the kind of field you came from. I’m curious how someone with that education comes to poetry. What did economics give you as a poet, if anything?

Alexander Korotko: Let me answer the last part first: economics gave me nothing as a poet. It gave me a broad education, general knowledge, a certain level of erudition. But it had nothing to do with poetry. It just happened that I enrolled, graduated, and so on. But I want to say: poets are not made — poets are born. No education — not economics, not even a specialized literary institute — can teach you how to write. Anyone setting out on this path needs to understand that education, or the state, has nothing to do with it. Creative work is an individual vocation, an entirely individual endeavor. The right to create is granted by God. He can take it away as well, but He is the one who grants it. So my economics degree gave me nothing in terms of poetry; it gave me life experience. Poetry is a parallel world. It is something else. No, it gave me nothing as a poet.

Maxim Hodak: On your website there is a line: “A poet is always on a spiritual and intellectual path. If the reader does not walk alongside the poet, they will get nothing from poetry.” What must a reader do in order to walk alongside?

Alexander Korotko: That is a very difficult question. The thing is, poetry is immense work. Poetry, like any creative work, demands enormous effort. Above all, spiritual effort. When we ask what a reader must do to walk alongside the poet, it is first and foremost work of the heart and soul. And I want to stress something very important: the poet should not have to seek out the reader; rather, the reader must find their poet. And when readers find that poet, when they feel close to them, they set out on that path together. Because understanding a difficult poet, especially a great poet, takes enormous effort. To me, that effort is comparable to the effort of writing poetry itself. It is work of the heart and soul. It is the ability and desire to resonate with the poet’s creative vision, with its realization, with the poet you have chosen to follow. It is a very particular kind of work — the work of heart and soul. It is intellectual work. And I should add that it truly is work. I used to do mountaineering, and if you compare it with mountaineering or rock climbing, it is an ascent toward spiritual peaks, a vertical ascent into oneself. And you can fall. The reader follows behind you. It is a very difficult route that demands enormous commitment — from the reader too, enormous commitment. A great creative artist is always alone. Above all, there is solitude — profound solitude. Great poets are deeply immersed in themselves, you understand? And we are readers too, you and I. I write, but I also read. I too find authors I live with, in a sense. We’ll come to Stus and touch on this as well. And of course one of my favorite writers is Kafka. I live with his work, and I can return to him at any moment. I always do. There aren’t many writers like that, but there are some. And that is already my own work as a reader of Kafka.

Maxim Hodak: You spoke about the poet’s freedom. I’d like to talk now about what happens when that freedom encounters the state, which, after all, does not tolerate freedom very well. We can see it around us today, even in the Europe we thought was free. I’ve lived here for almost four decades and I can see how people are trying, with all their might, to destroy that freedom. So here’s my question. Sooner or later, every totalitarian regime comes into conflict with a true poet. Historically, we see examples of this in every period of history, in every generation. As for Stus, he did not call for violence, nor did he plot conspiracies. His only “crime” was insisting on the right to speak the truth and remain a free person. I’m a lawyer, and in recent years I’ve worked in human rights, so professionally this interests me. It’s what I do from morning till night. Why is a dictatorship so afraid of precisely that? Not of weapons, but of a poem. In my own cases, for example, a dictatorship fears this in my clients: the truth they express.

Alexander Korotko: I think the answer to that question lies on the surface. It is fairly simple and at the same time not so simple. A dictatorship is embodied in a person — a dictator. And every dictator is afraid, above all, of dissent. I recall a line by Maximilian Voloshin. He said: “Equality, as a rule, cuts the legs off the tall, because it cannot make a dwarf grow.” And every dictator sees a threat everywhere to his own power, especially from great, powerful poets. Because what does poetry do? It lays things bare. It makes the truth about a dictator stark, tangible, impossible to ignore. It strips everything bare. Because in poetry, everything is actually quite simple. It is the word. God created our earthly world and the first human being, Adam, through the Word. The word has enormous power, enormous energy. Words heal. Words can rouse people to struggle. They can become a tsunami capable of sweeping away any dictator. That is why dictators do everything to isolate, destroy and crush vivid, outstanding individuals — great poets among them. They are a threat to the system, to the regime. That is why dictators fear them. This is obvious. The greatest gift God gave human beings at creation was freedom of choice — a gift given to us alone. It is said that a human being is a speaking soul, and we were given freedom of choice. And so, of course, that is a threat to them. It is like telling birds not to fly. A poet cannot serve power. If a poet serves the system, the state or a dictator, he cannot fully express himself. There is no freedom of speech, no freedom of choice, no freedom of spirit. Do you see? Their fear and anxiety are understandable. That is how the entire Soviet system worked: psychiatric hospitals, camps. Stus went through all of it.

Maxim Hodak: And that brings me to a follow-up. The Soviet empire is gone. Something else may be trying to replace it, but that empire is gone, while Stus’s poems remain. Is that inevitable, or was it luck? Manuscripts were destroyed in those years, and much was lost.

Alexander Korotko: First of all, when we say “luck”, we can almost equate it with chance. For me, chance remains chance. The phenomenon of Stus was certainly not luck or an accident. There can be no question of luck here. Great poets — and Stus was certainly a great poet — are always ahead of their time, always older than their generation. Great poets can look beyond the horizon. When they write, they work not only consciously but subconsciously. And there are poets of the highest order who sometimes write almost unconsciously — in those moments we call inspiration. You write something in the day, evening or night; in the morning you look at the manuscript and realize someone seemed to be dictating it to you. You couldn’t have written it on your own. It is a profound divine touch, something creative people know. So when Stus lived in those dark, difficult Soviet times, he was not thinking about any of this. Today streets and squares bear his name, and his work is published and republished. And now, on September 4, there will even be banknotes — as announced by the head of the National Bank — bearing Stus’s image. The timing aligned, it simply aligned. The distance in time is less than fifty years, isn’t it? And yet there was complete oblivion for years. So of course this is not luck, not coincidence. There can be no luck in art — not in that sense. It is a road called life. Remember, there was a great Soviet-era poet, David Samoylov. He was, in a sense, a representative of the Pushkin tradition, in rhythm, melody and so on. And once, already a mature poet, he wrote a poem that was unusual for him. In essence, it said: every evening more than a million poets sit down to write poetry. But if the genius happens to be drunk that day, all of it is in vain. In other words, this is not luck. It is a gift from God.

Maxim Hodak: Then that raises a question: when did this gift from God enter your life? When did you begin to take an interest in Stus and eventually start writing this poem? When did you first read Stus, and what was it about him that made you stop and pay attention?

Alexander Korotko: I first encountered Stus’s poetry, if memory serves, in the early 2000s. It made a strong impression on me, but I didn’t fully immerse myself in it. Perhaps I didn’t have enough time; I don’t remember the circumstances. Later, if memory serves, in 2016, I wrote an essay called “Two Vasyls”. There was Vasyl Stus, and there was Vasyl Symonenko. They were both Sixtiers. Symonenko also died very young, at twenty-nine. He was beaten by the police and so on. And I wrote an essay called “Two Vasyls”. After a while some good friends of mine from Venice called and said, “Why don’t you try writing a narrative poem about Stus?” Then after that conversation — it was quite spontaneous, almost accidental — I began to look closely at Stus’s poetry. And then one thing struck me deeply, something that stood out very clearly to me as a poet. In Stus, pain — human pain, immense pain — takes on the power of language. That is an extremely rare phenomenon. And it was deeply characteristic of Stus. I went through the archives and read everything I could. Then came an even greater shock than the poetry, frankly: his diaries. His diaries are absolutely pure — absolutely brilliant. Simply brilliant. People say that a truly gifted person is gifted in everything, and it is no accident that in the poem I end every chapter with fragments from his diaries. They are extraordinary. They shook me. By the beginning of 2019, I started writing the poem. That’s a separate story. So: around 2000 — my first encounter; then, if I’m not mistaken, 2016 — an essay about two outstanding Sixtiers, Vasyl Stus and Vasyl Symonenko. Then that conversation with friends became the impulse, and so what began by chance became something inevitable. The conversation was accidental, but from it grew, quite naturally, this work.

Maxim Hodak: And another point: you are a Russian-language poet, writing about a Ukrainian poet who was persecuted, among other things, for the Ukrainian word. Many people may see a paradox in that. I understand Ukrainian perfectly, but I left Ukraine thirty-four years ago, or thereabouts. I speak Ukrainian slowly. Many people may see a paradox here. What would you say to them?

Alexander Korotko: I am just as much a citizen of Ukraine as anyone who may have trouble accepting this today. I cannot change the fact that I was born in Soviet Ukraine, when many people spoke Russian. That is simply part of our history. So I have the same moral right. If the stars aligned in such a way that God gave me the opportunity to write this poem, then it was my civic duty. I have nothing to reproach myself for. Stus was a citizen of Ukraine, I am a citizen of Ukraine. And there is also a Ukrainian polyphony here. I speak Ukrainian fluently; I have no problem with it. I already translate my own work into Ukrainian, and so on. But I think in Russian, and that’s the language I wrote it in. Why should I apologize? What have I done wrong by writing this poem? I understand that we are living through an absolutely tragic time: the war, everything that is happening to us. Today we are living at the epicenter of human pain and suffering. And I understand people who are not ready to accept it today. This is wartime. War changes people’s consciousness, and I, like anyone else, have to take that into account. I understand it. I feel no resentment and no negative emotion about it. I wrote the poem, I had it translated, and the translation is very good. Perhaps we’ll talk about why it was done this way, but that is my life. This is how I realized the gift God gave me. That’s simply how it is, without trying to make it more complicated.

Maxim Hodak: Now, moving directly to the poem itself and how it is constructed. As I see it, “Stus” is neither a biography nor a documentary narrative. You structure the poem as a sequence of poetic visions. Why did you choose to avoid a straightforward narrative?

Alexander Korotko: Before I explain why the poem is built this way, I’d like to say something about my own philosophy and principles for writing long-form poetry. This is not my first narrative poem. I’ve written dozens of long poems; many have been translated, and so on. So, how do I work? First of all, you need a plan, but I always go further. What interests me is not even the plan, but the conception. How the conception takes shape in my mind. I walk around with it and return to the subject every day, developing it internally, holding all of it in my head. And to the conception itself I devote seventy or eighty percent of the time before the poem is finished. For example, this is how “Stus” was written. We’ll come to form and content in a moment. For six months — six months — I worked on the concept, the plan, the poem’s conception. And if the conception is brilliant, then, believe me, the execution can be brilliant too. Forgive the word “brilliant” — perhaps it sounds immodest. But I wrote the poem itself in less than a month. Almost like a binge. You don’t come out of it until it’s done — but behind that stands an enormous amount of work. So why this form? Why not a straightforward narrative? We all come from childhood. I loved looking into and turning a kaleidoscope. I still keep one in front of me. It’s a mosaic, isn’t it? You turn the kaleidoscope, and suddenly these astonishing, vivid, almost three-dimensional images appear. So, for me, the way to convey this poet’s fate, suffering and work was through this mosaic of vivid emotional images, which I passed through myself like an electric current. That is how I tried to convey the poem in a perhaps unconventional way. But what matters is the result. Take painting. You stand before a picture in a gallery without being particularly trained or educated in art. What question matters? Does the painting move you? Does it make you stop? When we talk specifically about the poem “Stus”, which you published — and I am very grateful to you — we are really asking whether it catches you, whether it moves you. I chose this form consciously. That was precisely my intention: to take this path. A biographer, working in prose, could approach it differently. But poetry is something else, you understand? I can’t judge whether it succeeded. That’s not for me to judge. But the choice was conscious, not spontaneous. Critics and literary scholars may have questions. Fine, I’m ready to answer them, but I know what I created and why I chose this path: a kaleidoscope, a mosaic and a kind of polyphony. And everything essential is there. It has Kolyma and the Gulag. There is a dialogue with his son, there is a conversation with his grandmother; there is his relationship to his homeland and what it meant to him. There is the tragedy of his fate, the terrible pain of a man who knowingly chose a path of sacrifice.

Maxim Hodak: Yes, thank you very much. The trouble is, my questions aren’t getting any fewer. The questions I want to ask seem to go a level deeper, because in the poem you reconstruct Stus’s inner struggle. I’m interested in how one poet enters another poet’s inner world without, in a sense, appropriating his voice.

Alexander Korotko: Exactly.

Maxim Hodak: Where was that boundary for you?

Alexander Korotko: That’s an extremely difficult and interesting question. To answer it philosophically, I’d like to start a little further back and then return to it. What does this involve? You’ve identified it very precisely, because we have to talk, to some extent, about esotericism. We have to talk about mysticism, meditation, transformation, even the transmigration of souls. And it is an extremely difficult question: how can you place yourself, even temporarily, inside another person’s body and immerse yourself in that experience? That is the most frightening part, the hardest and the most dangerous. There has to be an extremely fine boundary that you cannot cross. And how do you answer that? A great artist must have a sense of proportion and a sense of taste. You must know when to stop. And what does it mean to stop? It means you have written the work, let it rest, and eventually see that you can neither take anything away nor add anything. If you keep changing it, a simple image comes to mind: a well. We draw water, and eventually the water level reaches the silt. If you do not leave the well alone and let the water settle and replenish itself, it will be lost. Poetry is the same. “Do no harm” applies here too. This is an intangible feeling: you know the work is finished; you hear it, you feel it. And what else tells you? There is also a very stern inquisitor: the blank page, which passes judgment on falseness, hypocrisy, pathos, affectation and so on. That too is part of the transformation. This is one of the hardest techniques. I often think about actors and the tragic fates so many of them have. Can you imagine the people they have to become? Then they can forget who they are. I sometimes think I would ban that profession. It can be a terrible trauma — almost a kind of suicide of the soul. So that is the path I chose. That is how I see it.

Maxim Hodak: Stus continues a tradition of spiritual resistance in Ukrainian literature — and what you’ve just described makes entering his inner world twice, ten times as dangerous — a tradition that began with Shevchenko. We also published “Kobzar” in English. It’s a very important book for our publishing house, and I can see that Western readers are interested in it, though gradually. They are gradually discovering who Taras Shevchenko was and that he existed at all. Just as they are gradually learning what Ukraine is — that it is a distinct country, a distinct culture, a distinct nation with a right to exist. It is a gradual process. Did you yourself feel that you were writing within this tradition of spiritual resistance?

Alexander Korotko: That’s a very difficult question. Of course, I am not Shevchenko and I am not Stus. My task, when I took this on and began developing the idea and the poem, was to write about Stus, and I can’t say I was part of that process. But here’s the point: I finished the poem in 2019. You published it, I think, in April 2026 — this April. That shows I wasn’t writing to the political moment. No one before me had written a narrative poem about him. I don’t know why it all happened this way. It remains something of a mystery, because writing about a personality as complex and multifaceted as Stus — so complex, so tragic and so self-sacrificing — was not easy. Of course I was not myself part of that resistance; I would never claim that. But I wanted to show, with the poetic means available to me, who Stus was. That was an extremely difficult task for me personally. And of course, when I immersed myself in it, it was extremely difficult, because the distance between me and Stus was immense — not to mention Shevchenko. I don’t appropriate any of that for myself. I simply wrote the poem. And once a work is written, once a book exists, it no longer belongs to you. It lives its own life, and Providence decides what happens to it. So no, I was not part of that resistance. I cannot take it upon myself to judge myself in those terms. I simply wrote about Stus and wanted to use poetic language to tell the story of this extraordinary, immensely gifted, self-sacrificing person. That’s what I was trying to do. Whether I succeeded is not for me to judge.

Maxim Hodak: And now the poem is available in five languages. Which raises a question. A five-language edition is rare even for us. Producing it to a high standard was very difficult. Many translators, many editors, proofreaders. Why did this poem require five languages? I’d like to hear your view.

Alexander Korotko: First of all, I want to thank you once again, because this was an extraordinary amount of work. Usually we see bilingual editions — the original plus, say, English or French. Here the scale is remarkable. And perhaps that too is no accident. Perhaps we didn’t fully realize it while I was writing, or even when you published it. Why five languages? The answer is simple. The translators who worked on this poem had already worked with me for many years before “Stus”. There were many other translators I worked with and eventually chose not to continue with. And when I showed this poem to Michael Pursglove for the English translation, Anna Bednarczyk in Poland, and Alois Woldan for German — the process actually began with the Ukrainian translation by Olha Ilchuk. That was an enormous amount of work. These languages came naturally because these were translators with whom I had already translated and lived through so much. What is a translator? How can I put it simply? First, there has to be compatibility. It’s like love at first sight. That connection either happens or it doesn’t. As young people say, either there’s chemistry or there isn’t. Without that compatibility, it’s not enough simply to translate accurately, even beautifully. If you don’t understand and feel the person — and they don’t feel you — it won’t work. It’s that simple. I had worked with them for many years before this. I’m very glad they responded and contributed to the poem and to bringing it to readers in several European languages. That’s how it came together.

Maxim Hodak: Very interesting. Now we have an audio version too. Michael Pursglove reads the poem in English. You’ve probably listened to it. Did the way it sounded match what you heard inside yourself?

Alexander Korotko: That’s a very interesting question — and a rather mystical story. Mike is an extraordinary person, incredibly gifted, with a wonderfully English sense of humor and irony. And when you decided that we could produce an audiobook, I contacted Michael. He said, “Alexander, I’d love to, but I’m feeling very unwell. I recently had a heart attack, so I can’t help you with this.” I said, “Okay, Michael. Take care of yourself,” and we said goodbye. A few days later he wrote and said, “I suggest that my wife, Kate Pursglove, record the poem. She’s a well-known poet and translator, and an experienced reader.” I said, “Michael, I trust you. If you think that’s right, okay.” Some time passed, and I received the first two or three tracks — in his voice. I said, “Michael, I realized that she couldn’t manage it. It’s a difficult text, a difficult poem.” He had translated it, and without saying anything, he went to the studio with the last of his strength and recorded it. Later he told me: “Getting to the studio was difficult. My wife had to take me there by taxi. But I simply had to do it.” And what was my reaction? I’ve listened to it not once or twice, but dozens of times. I’m stunned. He found exactly the right resonance. It sounds so right in English that it gives me goosebumps. I’m immensely grateful to him. When we began recording the first chapters, I showed them to you. You approved too — I remember how enthusiastic you were. That made me doubly happy, and it all came together. That can’t be mere chance. That’s what you call Providence.

Maxim Hodak: Yes, I’ve listened to it, and it moved me deeply. And now it’s available practically everywhere, for people to download. And the book, in both print and audio form, is appearing at a moment when everything it speaks about has once again become our present reality. I could never have imagined that my generation — new once, not so new anymore, but still not quite a postwar generation; I still remember the Soviet Union, though I was a child then — that we would all, in one form or another, be returning to something that can be summed up in one word: totalitarianism, in all its different manifestations. And a question for you: what do Stus’s words teach the generation born in independent Ukraine?

Alexander Korotko: You know, since the beginning of the war I haven’t left. I’ve stayed in Ukraine, and I feel with every fiber of my heart and soul what is happening to us. Believe me, interest is growing among young people in the poem “Stus”. What can Stus teach us? He teaches extraordinary self-sacrifice, extraordinary dedication. He teaches us to love our country without pathos, without unnecessary trappings. His language is very spare, very hard-edged, and it speaks directly to the present. It resonates with our time, with our tragedy. He has never been more relevant, and young people understand that. Young people today are more patriotic. Ukraine is standing firm; by now there is nothing left to prove or explain. And young people, perhaps more than anyone, need Stus, and they respond to his words. His was an immense act of self-sacrifice. In a sense, he chose this path himself. He said, “It is fate.” You do not choose fate. And he walked that path. Today, young people feel and understand that. They see that in his poetry — quite apart from his extraordinary life — there is nothing ornamental, nothing artificial, nothing designed merely to impress or confuse. There is life itself: no decorative colors, only black and white. And today we live in that kind of reality. In a sense, he brought this time closer. With his life and with his death. Everything he created has come back to us. As Bulgakov said, “Manuscripts don’t burn.” A great deal was confiscated from him, and we don’t know how much was lost. But what has reached us is a truly great, immense part of Ukraine’s cultural legacy. He belongs to Ukraine. And the fact that his time has come, that his time has come, is deeply significant, because he said that a person should live only in a free, independent country. He said that and fought for it. And now this is our time. What is Ukraine fighting for? For its independence. Ukraine did not attack anyone. So of course he teaches young people — and all of us. But to comprehend him, to measure yourself against the path of his life is almost impossible. I’ve asked myself before: could I have lived as he did? Perhaps it’s not quite the right question. I couldn’t have endured a year, a month, a day — I don’t think I could have endured an hour. I know I couldn’t. That is the scale of his spiritual stature.

Maxim Hodak: Thank you for your profound answers. I’d like to end our conversation with a poem. Perhaps you’ve prepared something you could read for us?

Alexander Korotko: Thank you. This book was published in 2009. It was a cycle called “Silent Songs”. There are many pieces about the Gulag, and I’ll read a poem called “On the Ruins”. Night hangs over evening memory. Noah’s family awaits the flood. It is useless to pound time in a mortar. On the ruins of the empire of fear, the roosters were ordered to crow at full voice, proclaiming the thirties in gray uniforms. And in the prison camp the guard kept watch at night, indulging the newcomers in their new quarters. The homeless lives of children slipped beneath the ice, but hungry dreams found sweets beneath the Christmas tree, with a generous handful of hazelnuts. Half the country in camps, half the country under interrogation; like on ice, like on glass, the fly of happiness crawls. The rule of workers, peasants, and a few sailors, and an armful of rain. That, perhaps, is all.

Maxim Hodak: Thank you. We’ve been speaking with Alexander Korotko about his poem “Stus”. It was published by Glagoslav Publications in five languages: the original, along with Ukrainian, English, German and Polish translations. The book can be ordered on our website, online and through bookstores. There is also a free sample and an audiobook. The author’s poetry, essays and prose can be found on his website, korotko-poetry.com. Alexander, thank you very much for this profound, wide-ranging conversation. Thank you.

Alexander Korotko: Thank you very much. Thank you.