1985: Irina Ratushinskaya

1985

Irina Ratushinskaya - USSR

Imprisoned

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, Ukraine, in 1954. During her teens she developed an interest in poetry and began to write her own poems, however was told by an ‘official' writer that if she wanted to succeed she would have to be a writer for the regime. She graduated from the University of Odessa with a masters' degree in physics in 1976 and went on teach primary education.

In 1980 Ratushinskaya and her husband Igor Gerashchenko applied for permission to leave the Soviet Union. The request was refused and the couple became involved in the human rights movement. Irina's poetry was distributed in the underground press and the following year she served ten days imprisonment for ‘hooliganism' after taking part in a human rights demonstration in Pushkin Square in Moscow.

Ratushinkskaya was arrested again in 1982 and convicted of ‘dissemination of slanderous documentation in poetic form' and sentenced to twelve years in a labour camp. During her incarceration she continued to compose poems, famously writing verses on a bar of soap. Many of these poems were smuggled out of the camp and published outside the Soviet Union.

After four years in the labour camp she was released and was able to go to London where she wrote her prison memoirs, Grey is the Color of Hope. She returned to Russia with her family in the late 1990s.

Writing Sample:

Throwing Time into Tins

We have learned, indeed, to throw time into tins
And have stirred in the condensed night at all times.
This century grows ever darker, and the next will not come soon,
To wipe clean the names off yesterday's prison wall.

We loaded it with the voices of departing friends,
With the names of unborn children - for a new wall.
We equipped it so lovingly, but we ourselves
Do not row in it, we are not even allowed on board.

But covering the measured-out load with coarse matting
We still manage to broadcast the seed.
Our hands are torn but we still pluck out the dragon's
Teeth from the crops, which are fated to stand after us.

From Pencil Letter, 1988 translated by Richard McKane with Helen Szamuely in This Prison Where I Live: The PEN Anthology of Imprisoned Writers (New York: Cassel,1996) ISBN 0-304-33306-9