Dmytro Stus is the son of dissident poet Vasyl Stus, who because of back-to-back draconian sentences of hard labor and exile was largely absent from his son’s life, except through letters sent to him. Dmytro completed his PhD in philology in Kyiv, wrote a monograph about his father and has continued on into a successful career in publishing. Together with his mother, Valentyna Popeliukh, Stus donated the bulk of his father’s papers to the T.H. Shevchenko Institute of Literature in 1991, making possible the publication of many hitherto unknown or unseen poems, letters and prose.