A Biographical Note
Irina Ratushinskaya is a dissident Soviet poet. On March 5, 1983, the 29-year-old received the maximum penalty - twelve years in a labor camp - for writing poetry that the Soviet state claimed constituted "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime." The poems we publish here were smuggled out of prison after being written line-by-line on a bar of soap with a match found in her cell. She spent over 138 days in isolation and suffered a concussion from a beating by a guard. Last September Ratushinskaya was released from prison; in December she came to the West. In June of this year, the Soviet Union stripped Ratushinskaya of her citizenship.
The Editor
29.
Like Mandelstam's swallow
parting sinks to heart,
Pasternak sends rains,
And Tsvetaeva - wind.
So the rotation of the universe
will be accomplished without false sound
a word is needed - and only poets
answer for that.
And the thundercracks of spring
sail by Tiutchev's waters,
and the ideal of autumn comes into being
again and again.
Yet no one's voice has reached
its wing to freedom,
rendered freedom,
though that is a Russian word.
- 25 April 1984
38.
Russia marks us,
her blizzard scorched to whiteness,
obscurantism of dark funnels,
of crevices in snow.
- Get away, you eyeless one, away!
Only how are we to leave each other -
In endless whirling?
In discord? Kinship with her?
And when at last you beat yourself free
from the excruciating tenderness
of despotic embraces,
- for if you fall asleep it's to remain there forever -
everything swims in your head,
as young ones draw on cigarettes,
and the lungs are lacerated
like and odd-sized envelope.
And
...
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