FEAR NO EVIL
Natan Sharansky
New York, Random House, 1988
437 pp., $19.95
SELECTED POEMS
Vasyl Stus
New York, Cekewych-Steciuk Memorial, 1989
166 pp., $19.95
GREY IS THE COLOR OF HOPE
Irina Ratushinskaya
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
359 pp., $18.95
That poetry can give and preserve life is not a simple truism. The examples of Natan Sharansky, Irina Ratushinskaya, and Vasyl Stus offer the most eloquent modern examples of poetry not only defining the human spirit but transforming it, and keeping it. All three recently experienced the gulag camps, and all found in poetry the vocabulary to express religious faith no less than love and passion. Poetry made possible their spiritual survival, indeed, fueled their fierce defiance against the authorities that incarcerated them in violatin of any elementary respect for human rights.
Poetry allows an escape from the tyranny of the predictable, the literal, the trivial, from the dehumanizing effect of imposed--and hence arbitrary--order. Poetry accommodates the impossible, the fantastic, the absolutely individual, through flight of language and the courage of dreams. Once poetry is the adopted mode, dissent becomes mere statement and defiance the natural, harmonic response to the cacophony of oppression.
In fact, within the context of totalitarianism, poetry is the most logical, even necessary, corollary for dissent: to escape the socialist realism of drab conformity, the incarceration of human imagination within set, predetermined, linguistic categories. Prefabricated perception must give way to idiosyncratic vision. The word pushed to--and beyond--its cognitive limits: that, after all, is metaphor. And the accurate reproduction of one's truly felt response to the world rather than one's expected, directed, let alone manipulated, quasi-response, when inspired by genius, passion, and commitment to beauty: that, after all, is poetry. Its gift to those who could use it has been recorded in these three remarkable books, for contemplation and awe.
King David defies the KGB
Natan Sharansky's poetic mentor was biblical. He explains, simply: "I can't say that I understood the Psalms completely, but I sensed their spirit and felt both the joy and suffering of King David, their author. His words lifted me above the mundane and directed me toward the eternal."
Is it really possible to survive a hundred-day hunger strike, torture, and excruciating cold, armed with mere literary beauty? Consider this:
Though I walk through the valley of the
shadow of death
I will fear no
...
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