Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa in 1954, and was educated there. She gained a degree in Physics in 1976, and became a teacher at the Odessa Pedagogical Institute.
From childhood Irina had been writing poetry, though always in secret due to its anti-Soviet content. It was only at university that her poems started to be read among her contemporaries and then again in samizdat circles. This earned her unwelcome attention from the KGB. She married Igor Geraschenko in 1979, a childhood friend who, like her, had discovered a faith in God despite having an atheist upbringing. As a couple they became involved in human rights activities, which led to frequent conflict with the authorities, and they were arrested several times. On her 29th birthday, Irina was sentenced to seven years' hard labour and five years of internal exile for the anti-Soviet nature of her poetry.
During this time of imprisonment, a volume of her poems, No, I'm not Afraid, was published in the West (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 1986) which brought attention to her situation. Intense international pressure brought her freedom in 1986. A year later Irina went to the USA, where she received the Religious Freedom Award from the Institute on Religion and Democracy. In the same year she was deprived of Soviet citizenship. In 1988 her second book of poetry, Pencil Letter (Alfred A. Knopf), and Grey is the Colour of Hope (Hodder & Stoughton), which describes her harrowing experience in the notorious Small Zone of a Mordovian prison camp, were published. Irina lived in London, UK until December 1998, when she returned to Russia, having gone through a year of procedures to restore Russian citizenship. She now lives in Moscow with her husband and two sons.
Bibliography:
POETRY
No, I'm not Afraid (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, UK, 1986)
Beyond the Limit (Northwestern University Press, US, 1987)
Pencil Letter (Alfred A. Knopf, US, 1987 and Random House UK Ltd, UK, 1988)
Dance with a Shadow (Bloodaxe Books Ltd, UK, 1992)
OTHER TITLES
Grey is the Colour of Hope (Hodder & Stoughton, 1988)
In the Beginning (Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)
The Odessans (Sceptre, 1996)
Fiction and Lies (John Murray, 1999)
Wind of the Journey (2000)
|
|
|
