Welcome to a new series profiling poets, in this profile I will be exploring the work of infamous Russian dissident Irina Ratushinskaya charting her life and her work, and the struggles and triumphs of her existence.
These profiles will be a mixed affair, with media links and music to compound your exploration of the poets work, as well as presenting the poems themselves, and some some music I think relates to each one, in this sense these profiles are very personal conversations across time with spirits kindred and otherwise.
Poem1: I Will Live and Survive by Irina Ratushinskaya
And I will tell of the first beauty
I saw in captivity.
A frost-covered window! No spy-holes, nor walls,
Nor cell-bars, nor the long endured pain –
Only a blue radiance on a tiny pane of glass,
A cast pattern – none more beautiful could be dreamt!
The more clearly you looked the more powerfully blossomed
Those brigand forests, campfires and birds!
And how many times there was bitter cold weather
And how many windows sparkled after that one –
But never was it repeated
That upheaval of rainbow ice!
As you should be able to feel when reading these poems, this is poetry high tension, and you get the feeling of the oppressive power surrounding the poet, lines like
express a feeling both of great despair and emptiness, a landscape of both desolation and sadness. An overwhelming feeling of nature reverberates through her poems too I think, and the beauty of the otherwise ordinary.
How horror makes us see such things I imagine. They are pure hymns to humanism, and I find when reading them a good reminder that I am human too. True there are many obvious allusions to Christians sentiments and feelings in her poems, but I find reading her that is the human element that stands out, rather than anything divine or ordained like overbearing Catholic symbolism, more a feeling of a light flickering in the darkness.
Final Thoughts
… you must not, under any circumstances, allow yourself to hate. Not because your tormentors have not earned it. But if you allow hatred to take root, it would flourish and spread during your years in the camps, driving out everything else, and ultimately corrode and warp your soul. You will no longer be yourself, your identity will be destroyed, all that will remain will be a hysterical, maddened and bedevilled husk of the human being that once was.”
Chris Godber is an artist, programmer and writer originally from the UK currently based in Moscow.
Chris has written poems since his youth and writes regularly for online publications as well as producing short stories and writing philosophical essays for London Based artists collective The Tunnel.
He also has experience teaching English as a foreign language to young Russian Students at an English camp called Rekaleto in Russia.
Thanks for this essay …