He was the founder and, since 1989 a permanent editor of the Orthodox newspaper Nasha Vira, president of the Ukrainian PEN Club.

In 1959, 1960, 1961, and 1965 Sverstiuk was fired from his job for political reasons for speaking out against the discrimination against Ukrainian culture and in 1972 for a speech at the funeral of Dmytro Zerov.

In January 1972, Sverstiuk was arrested, and in March 1973, he was sentenced under Article 62 Part I of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR for the production and distribution of "self-publishing" documents to seven years in the camps.

[2] He served in the Perm region and at the end, he received 15 days in solitary confinement, where he sat with criminal prisoners, avoided the "programmed" conflict with them by the administration of the "zone".

[5] In the summer of 1988, together with comrades from the Ukrainian Communist Party, Sverstiuk honored the 1000th anniversary of the Baptism of Rus-Ukraine near the monument of St. Volodymyr.

He was one of the participants of the "First of December" initiative group - an association of Ukrainian intellectuals and public figures created in 2011.

[6] In its composition, he was one of the authors of the National Act of Freedom - a social contract proposed to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, which was published on 14 February 2014 and was intended to find ways out of the political crisis.

Some of Sverstyuk's literary and critical essays appeared (mainly in the first half of the 1960s) in the magazines "Vitchyzna," "Dnipro," "Zhovten," "Duklya" (an essay about Mykola Zerov), the newspaper "Literature Ukraine ";[1] others (from the end of the 1960s) in "Samvydav" (Kotlyarevsky laughs, The Last Tear - about Taras Shevchenko, Vasyl Symonenko - an idea, Traces of tales about Ivan's youth, etc.

), reprinted abroad (mainly in the collection "Wide Sea of Ukraine", 1972, "Panorama of the newest literature in the Ukrainian SSR," 1974).