THE STATE OF POETRY
497
BEYOND THE LIMIT: POEMS. By Irina Ratushinskaya. Translated by
Frances Padorr Brent and Carol
j.
Avins. Northwestern University Press.
$22.95.
Poems that were written in a forced labor camp on a bar
of soap with a sharpened matchstick, to be washed away as soon as
they were committed to memory, naturally raise the question of the
poet's a udience. Arrested in September 1982 and sentenced to seven
years' imprisonment for alleged political crimes, what hope did Irina
Ratushinskaya have for ever getting through to a readership? She
barely had the means to let her husband know that she was alive.
Under such circumstances poetry could serve not as a means of com–
munication among people but as an escape from reality or as a
private exercise in self-definition.
Some of Ratushinskaya's poems do indeed indulge in flights of
comforting fantasy, but these take up only a small part of this
volume . Self-definition, on the other hand, can hardly be private for
a political prisoner: it almost inevitably involves defining one's
group affiliations. One of Ratushinskaya's central concerns as an ar–
tist is to be able to state in aesthetically satisfying terms who she is ,
as she lies beaten on a damp prison floor, in relation to Soviet soci–
ety. "The pride of Helsinki Watch is not as leep," she writes jestingly
about one of her fellow prisoners; "I hear from the breathing." There
is another "lawbreaker" in a camp near Perm, she adds, who is not
sleeping either. And another "obsessed" person, somewhere in Kiev,
keeps tuning a receiver. There is an archipelago out there not only of
prisons but also of people of her own kind , she asserts with a leap of
faith. She calls them "the best in all the world , / the most tender , who
don't break." The only qualification required for membership in this
group is a refusal to lie .
Poem
1 records the stream of consciousness of
a prisoner be ing tortured and being tempted, either by a torturer or
by a n inner voice of self-preservation, to succumb to lies :
Be quiet - beg
Not for ruin - for pardon–
be quiet - say
a word - and save
yourself! In falsehood–
do you want-humbled–
to resurrect-life!
