THE STATE OF POETRY
499
Ratushinskaya herself has gotten out, but the main concerns of
her poetry - isolation, falsification, and oblivion - remain gnawing
problems for the intellectual elite to which she belonged back home .
The worst temptation a Soviet citizen can succumb to , as she puts it,
is to "choke on sleep," not even realizing that one has lived. She
promises her fellow inmates that as she passes through in a convoy
she will "commit it all- / to memory - they won't take it away!" Car–
rying a volume of poetry imprinted on her brain is tantamount to
bearing witness to Soviet life . What she fears is that after she has
pressed her confused hands to the hole where her heart used to be,
"they'll sew me a white legend, fitting it , / to array me," and they will
"fling blame at the murdered - / Deny it, weasel out with lies." Her
worst nightmare in this regard is that (in my translation) "over the
place of execution time itself has had a weight loss and a hemor–
rhage ."
Preserving memory is vital to Ratushinskaya, even if it is a
recollection only of horrors. The cruelty of Russia's past is somehow
a comfort to her, perhaps because it opens a wider perspective on the
present. Several times she refers to places of execution as the "execu–
tioner's block," and her fondest image is a proud prince, "reflected
light of blue-bloods," who ascends the scaffold unbending, "surc–
footed - slowly - through the spittle, / and on dirty straw, through
ages ." The parodic rhyme
"po plevkam
/
po vekam,"
transforming spit–
tle - the filth of the present - into the glory of centuries, is perhaps
the most powerful technical device in the volume. Another poem
takes us back to ancient Greece, detailing with gusto how Odysseus ,
returning home, took revenge on his detractors. The sentence "to all
who did evil, punishment meted / from lawful power" no doubt
reflects what the poet would have liked to see befall her own captors,
yet she does not let her emotions run away with her: she ends the
poem with the ironic "now the slavewomen wipe blood from
mosaics- / and happiness starts," which testifies to a perfect control
of her medium.
Evoking poe ts of antiquity reminds one of Mandelstam. Indeed
Ratushinskaya makes several references not only to him but to the
other three giants of Russia's "Lost Generation," to Pasternak, Akh–
matova , and Tsvetaeva. The shared experience of having read these
poets bonds her even more strongly to the best Russian literary
circles of today than do political convictions. The peculiarity of the
Russian situation is that you break with tradition - that of official
literature - by following a countertradition. Thus Ratushinskaya's
