498
PARTISAN REVIEW
It is only a small elite that is strong enough to resist falsehood;
the rest, like the "rabble of birds" of the epigraph to the volume, are
the obedient ones who march down Red Square in a May Parade.
The rewards for belonging to this elite are that, unlike most people
out there, you have friends you can trust, and that you have a sense
of self-worth. But when you are in solitary confinement (as Ratu–
shinskaya was, for one hundred thirty-eight days on one occasion), it
takes a heroic effort to sustain faith not only in the ability of that
group to help you in any way but even in its very existence. For all
she knew, her fellow prisoners might all have broken down under
torture, and the underground
literati
who had appreciated her poetry
might all have made compromises with the authorities: after all, it is
very tempting to live a half-lie in order to be able to tell a half-truth,
and there is nothing easier than to get kneaded into the sticky
philistine dough of official Soviet cultural life. Perhaps the most ter–
rifying image showing the poet's isolation is that of a volume of
poetry published only through
samizdat
and now lying forgotten in
"archival decomposition," being "leafed by a rat's paw on a slimy
table."
Beyond the Limit
itself testifies to the fact that such oblivion was
not in store for Ratushinskaya . Indeed, she was still in prison when
her friends smuggled out of the Soviet Union the cycle of poems that
had caused her arrest: these were published by Hermitage in 1984 as
Poems,
a trilingual Russian-French-English edition sponsored by In–
ternational PEN . Subsequently Hermitage - which has become the
major publisher of Russian underground and emigre literature-
brought out a bilingual volume of her short stories,
A Tale of Three
~
Heads,
as well (1986). Many of the poems she wrote in prison also
reached her friends through channels which, as she said in an inter-
view in
The New York Review of Books
(May 7, 1987), she would rather
not reveal. These prison poems were just being shaped into
Beyond
the Limit
when she was set free and eventually allowed to emigrate in
the fall of 1986. As we become acquainted with more and more of
her work, we realize that a major new poet has emerged from that
fertile ground for literature, the torment of Soviet life. The bilingual
Beyond the Limit
shows the maturing of her art and offers the best
translations so far, but as Avins says in the introduction , "The voice
heard by readers of the English is inevitably in a different cadence, a
different pitch, than that of the poet herself." One wishes that more
American poets would come forward to attempt other approxima-
tions to the original.
