Ukrainian Dissidents: An Anthology of Texts

This anthology draws attention to the Ukrainian dissident movement and offers detailed insights into this phenomenon among Western readers. The stories of ideas and personal undertakings are unfolding before the reader in a vivid pulsation of texts that testify for themselves. The collection gathers texts from different genres: from poetry, public speeches, and samvydav (self-published, uncensored) texts to court speeches, texts on being held in jails, special psychiatric hospitals for those not accepting the official ideology, and prison camps, and finally to self-reflection on personal experiences of opposing the totalitarian system.The variety of texts creates a multidimensional and meaningful picture of the Ukrainian dissident movement—a generation of Ukrainian public and cultural figures who, one way or the other, insisted on their freedom of speech and made history by daring to challenge the official ideology and culture. The book is compiled by Oleksii Sinchenko, Dmytro Stus,