Following graduation, Stus briefly worked as a high school teacher of the Ukrainian language and literature in Tauzhnia village of Kirovohrad Oblast, and then was conscripted into the Soviet Army for two years. While studying at the university and during his military service in the Ural mountains, he started to write poetry and translated into Ukrainian more than a hundred verses by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Rainer Maria Rilke. The original copies of his translations were later confiscated by the KGB, and were lost.