Poetry News

Dissident Poet Irina Ratushinskaya Dies at 63

Originally Published: July 11, 2017

Irina Ratushinskaya, a poet born in Odessa, Ukraine, was arrested in 1982 for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” lived briefly in exile in the U.S., and died in Moscow on July 5. She was “among the last political prisoners of the Brezhnev era, and among the first to be released under Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who arranged for her release in October 1986, while flying to meet President Reagan at a political summit in Reykjavik, Iceland,” writes Harrison Smith in an obituary for the Washington Post. More:

Her three years in the camp — where she worked to make gloves for Soviet workmen and was fed little more than bread and rotten fish broth — nearly killed her, but resulted in an acclaimed memoir, “Grey Is the Colour of Hope” (1988), and more than 250 poems that bore witness to an undiminished optimism.

“We live stubbornly,” she began one poem :

like a small beast who’s gnawed off his paw

to get out of a trap on three.

We’ve mastered that science

And with brave smile —

that way the wounds are bandaged tighter. . .

To avoid detection, Ms. Ratushinskaya wrote her poems on bars of soap, using the burned ends of matchsticks. When the poem was finished and Ms. Ratushinskaya had memorized its text, she hid her creation by washing it away. Eventually, the poems were written on cigarette papers and smuggled out of the camp to her husband, who arranged for publication in the West in collections such as “Beyond the Limit” (1987).

“Reading her poetry is a profound emotional experience,”wrote Maria Carlson, a professor of Russian, in a review of that book for the New York Times Book Review.

For Ms. Ratushinskaya, an untrained poet who studied physics in college because she feared that the humanities were hamstrung by Soviet ideology, the camp served as a kind of literary classroom. “All poets should have such a school,” she told People magazine in 1989. “It taught me to be very spare and concise.”