Beyond the Limit

by Irina Ratushinskaya, Frances Padorr Brent (Translator), Carol J. Avins (Translator)

English translations accompany the original Russian texts of poems about conscience, imprisonment, exile, survival, hope, despair, betrayal, winter, and freedom.

Genres: Poetry, Russia

121 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1987

About the author

Irina Ratushinskaya was born in Odessa, Ukraine. Her father was Boris Leonidovich, an engineer, and her mother was Irina Valentinovna Ratushinsky, a teacher of Russian literature. Her mother's family originated from Poland, and her grandfather was deported to Siberia shortly after the January Uprising, a Polish uprising against forced conscription in the Russian Army in 1863.

Irina was educated at Odessa University and was graduated with a master's degree in physics in 1976. Before her graduation she taught at a primary school in Odessa from 1975–78.

On September 17, 1982, Irina was arrested for anti-Soviet agitation. In April 1983, she was convicted of "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting or weakening the Soviet regime", sentenced to seven years in a labor camp followed by five years of internal exile. She was released on October 9, 1986, on the eve of the summit in Reykjavík, Iceland between President Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev.

While imprisoned, Irina continued to write poetry. Her previous works usually centered on love, Christian theology, and artistic creation, not on politics or policies as her accusers stated. Her new works that were written in prison, which were written on soap until memorized and then washed away, number some 250. They expressed an appreciation for human rights; liberty, freedom, and the beauty of life. Her memoir, Grey is the Colour of Hope, chronicles her prison experience. Her later poems recount her struggles to endure the hardships and horrors of prison life. Irina is a member of International PEN, who monitored her situation during her incarceration.

In 1987, Irina moved to the United States, where she received the Religious Freedom Award from the Institute on Religion and Democracy. In the same year she was deprived of Soviet citizenship by Politburo. She also was the Poet in Residence at Northwestern University from 1987–89. She lived in London, UK until December 1998, when she returned to Russia to educate her children in Russian school after a year of procedures to restore Russian citizenship.

She lives in Moscow with her husband, human rights activist Igor Gerashchenko, and two sons.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

In March of 1983, Irina Ratushinskaya, a Russian poet, was charged by Soviet authorities with “authorship of poetry” and “documents in defense of human rights.” Anyone who has read up on the Stalin years (and beyond), knows that the Russians take poetry and poets seriously. In Ratushinskaya’s case, she was a poet involved with the budding Polish labor movement, which I suppose made her a “criminal” in their eyes. In a ridiculous trial, she was sentenced to seven years of hard labor, to be followed by five additional years of internal exile. The forward to this book notes that this sentence was the “harshest punishment a woman political prisoner had received sine the Stalin period.” Guess she pissed someone off.

Ratushinskaya did some of this time, and suffered greatly. She was eventually set free (due to Western pressure) in late 1986, whereupon she left Russia (not before first being denied an exit visa) for London. Beyond the Limit is the poetry that came from that period of imprisonment. The poems were written with a sharpened matchstick on a bar of soap, memorized, and then washed away. (Why would I ever want to read Billy Collins?) Such a method recalls Akhmatova’s writing methods during the Stalin years (she would write the poems down, memorize them, and then burn them in an ash tray). Now Akhmatova didn’t go to jail, though that threat was always there, but many of those she loved and cared for, did. One poet, a giant for those-who-know, was Osip Mandelstam. He wrote a poem about Stalin (which was practically a suicide note) that led to his imprisonment, and eventual death. It’s with Mandelstam that Ratushinskyaa shares the brutal experience of being a poet against the State, a member of the Gulag. We are fortunate that she was able to survive.

The collection is as remarkable collection of Witness poetry as I’ve encountered, and it certainly deserves its place along side the poems of Mandelstam and Ahkmatova, but also beside the works of Solzhenitzyn. At her best, Ratushinskaya is both poet and prophet. Not so much in a national sense (though her love of Russia is obvious), but in a deeply personal sense. Though the poems are not overtly religious, I kept hearing echoes of the Psalms. Especially Psalm 42. You get numerous glimpses of her ordeal in her poems, but you also see her constantly looking outward, dreaming of freedom, which leaves the reader aching with her, for her. The potential for despair must have been overwhelming at times. But here was this poet, composing in her in her cell, engaging in hunger strikes(!), head shaved, hanging tough. Beyond the Limit is one of the most noble, affirming, and courageous collections of poetry that I’ve read. It goes on my short shelf – next to Akhmatova and Mandelstam. I think they would approve.

Normally I interweave bits of poetry whenever I do a poetry review. I can’t tell you how difficult and time consuming those can be to write. (But they are also rewarding.) I may at some point, upon re-reading, revise this review accordingly (it deserves that kind of treatment, so it will probably bother me until I do so). In the meantime, here’s a link to poem from the collection:

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/19...

Also, here’s a thoughtful (and fairy recent) piece on Ratushinskaya, by the poet Susan Kelly-DeWitt, that appeared in the Coal Hill Review (which contains an excerpt of a poem from the collection):

http://www.coalhillreview.com/?p=498

*One cool note: I picked up my copy of this book at a used book store in DC. From the looks of it, I have a signed copy from Ratushinskaya.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

July was the cruelest month, at least regarding those writers who I think we ought to honor most--those who speak the truth regardless of cost. I am thinking here of writers like Naguib Mahfouz, wounded by extremists; Osip Mandelstam, sent to the gulag for reciting a poem about Stalin; and Pramoedya Toer, who, confined to an Indonesian prison island, remembered his great tetralogy by reciting it to fellow detainees. And in July we lost both Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese poet dissident and Irina Ratushinskaya, imprisoned by the Soviets for, among other charges, writing poetry. Ratushinskaya wrote many of the poems in "Beyond the Limit" while in an isolation cell using sharpened matchsticks to carve on bars of soap. However composed, the poetry in this book speaks for itself. She reveals a mind that almost never leaves behind the senseless brutality under which these poems were composed, but is also always mindful of consolations: of long friendship and the companionship of fellow prisoners, of both Russian and classic art, of love. To say that her poems convey hope underplays their gravity, but there is something here beyond endurance, too, a vibrant determination not to forget what is important, a ferocious refusal to be silenced. "I'll live through this, survive, and they'll ask me/how they beat my head on the prison cot,/how it froze during the nights/... names from the past burst in my memory--/beautiful--like old weapons./And I'll tell about the best in the world,/the most tender, who don't break..." "We'll remember conversations through walls,/ happiest dreams in half-delirium/ Mordovian peasant women, passing us crusts of bread./ --Ay, at least take a bite, don't go hungry!..." Not that all the poems are about incarceration; there is actually great variety: Penelope makes an appearance, as does a Virgin in an abandoned church, and there is a sensory appreciation of nature in a number of them. For a prison-born book, perhaps even for poetry, this volume is an easy read, one that repays frequent return. And it is never less than sharp and passionate.

[Sarah Price · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the late 1980s/early 1990s, I was working closely with Amnesty International, and was honored to meet Irina when she arrived in the United States, after a campaign I had been part of, to free her. At that time, Russian political prisoners were not held as prisoners, but as "patients" in "mental institutions." But they were still prisons. They also didn't have to be as outspoken and publicly known as Pussy Riot. They were imprisoned for having small meetings in their basements, and it didn't have to even be meetings that criticized the government, as some just met because they wanted somewhere to pray, and thought they were doing so, privately. It only ever took one informer to change their lives.

I'm thrilled to see this book here, because it is one I have held on to, all these years. Irina is an amazing spirit, as evidenced in her poetry, and her experience. Held for years in a Russian prison, she was unable to have much with her in her cell. So, she used to write her poems out on a bar of soap with the end of a matchstick, commit the poem to memory, then wash herself with the soap, so as to literally erase any evidence. When she was finally free, she put all the poems together for this book.

What is clear in her writing is not only her natural talent, but also her uplifting attitude. Even in despair, there is hope in her words, whether she is wondering to herself how she will be executed, or rescued. Or writing about a food-stealing mouse that has made her cell his home, and whom she has befriended and named Mouse Mashka. And during times of hunger strikes, in-prison protests, and banishment to freezing punishment cells, she writes of what life will be like for her when this is all over.

I can't recommend this book highly enough.

[Anastasia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only read the Russian originals in this bilingual edition, and my review is based on that. I appreciate the labor of translation by Padorr Brent and J. Avins, but couldn't connect with the poems in English. They seem accurately translated, but at the expense of conveying Ratushinskaya' s form and feeling. I look forward to reading these poems in other translations.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautiful and heartaching. I plan on re-reading when I have a a greater understanding of Russian history and culture. There is a notes section on the back I discovered after finishing the collection that contextualizes some of the poem's themes, references, etc which was really insightful.