Natalia
Gorbanevskaya, a Russian poet and Soviet dissident, died on November
29th, aged 77
AT NOON in Red Square on August 25th 1968 the bells
tolled, marking not just the hour, but the time. At the site of an old
gallows, eight protesters unfurled scrappy banners in Czech and
Russian. One bore the great slogan of past struggles, “For your freedom
and ours”, but it could hardly have seemed a less likely prospect.
Soviet tanks had just crushed the Prague Spring, and with it the hopes
of millions for a peaceful reform of communism. The eight had seen
their fellows in the tiny dissident movement suffer interrogation,
jail, persecution of relatives and sojourns in mental hospital. They
knew that the full might of the KGB would fall on them, too.
But it didn’t matter. Natalia Gorbanevskaya, a
translator on maternity leave, set off with her three-month-old son, in
a pram borrowed from her friend Masha. The Soviet propaganda machine
was in full flow, claiming wholehearted public support for “fraternal
assistance” to Czechoslovak friends beset by imperialist plots. Even
one pebble would disturb the smooth surface of that pond of lies.
Plain-clothes KGB officers cursed the protesters as
“dirty Yids”. Within minutes they were beaten, arrested and dragged
away. Yet news of the great act of courage leaked out. Joan Baez wrote
a song, Tom Stoppard a play. Defying communism was one thing, but this
went deeper, attacking the Kremlin’s right to rule its empire. It
inspired millions to believe that resistance was not futile.
Do you dare to come to the square?
By the time of the protest, Ms Gorbanevskaya was a
seasoned dissident. She had befriended Anna Akhmatova (helping smuggle
her greatest poem, “Requiem”, to the West); and worked on the Chronicle of Current Events, a samizdat
newsletter. Its smudgy typewritten pages had a tiny circulation—but,
rebroadcast on Western radio stations, they reached millions. Every
keystroke was a challenge to Soviet claims of power and perfection.
So too was her poetry: a journal of the tension between
inner freedom and outward constraint. An individual’s actions might
seem pointlessly small, but they brought priceless self-respect. This
had been a theme for Russian poets ever since Pushkin. But whereas
almost all other dissident intellectuals concentrated on the woes of
Russians, she also considered the captive nations of central Europe,
blighted by war and occupation. For these sins, she felt, she as a
Russian had to take personal responsibility.
It was not I saved Warsaw then, or Prague after,
not I, my guilt’s irredeemable,
my house hermetically sealed and cursed,
house of evil, sin, treachery and crime.
And chained by these everlasting invisible chains to
it,
I’ll find joy and venom in this dreadful house,
in a dark, smoky corner, inebriated, wretched,
where my people lives, guiltless and godless.
It was not her childhood or adolescence that spurred her
courage, but her love of literature. Her mother was a librarian, her
father (whom she never knew) died in the war. Her motivation, she once
said, was selfish: she just wanted a clear conscience. She initially
studied philology, a good subject in a country where the meaning of
words was routinely turned upside down. But she turned with a passion
to Polish, since books in that language were the least-censored
cultural diet available. She was a notable translator of great Polish
writers such as Czeslaw Milosz.
Her punishment for it all was more than two years in a
mental hospital, diagnosed with “sluggish schizophrenia”, a common fate
for the awkward-minded. She seemed to suffer no scars from the chemical
coshes used on her (though she disliked talking about her time there,
saying it would repeat the torture). Blackmail and threats continued,
until in 1975 she felt forced to emigrate.
Settling in Paris, she delighted in the novelties of
life in the West. A passionate walker, she would tramp the streets for
hours, exploring every corner of her new home. (On her first visit to
London, she became expert on the city in three hard-pounding days.) She
developed a passion for pinball, and wrote a poem bemoaning its
disappearance from Paris cafés, as well as their ban on smoking;
cigarettes and coffee kept her going. In a home cluttered to the point
of squalor, she helped edit two émigré journals, both beset by feuds.
When the empire fell she received high honours in Prague
and Warsaw, and travelled frequently to Russia—though under Vladimir
Putin the human-rights heroes of the Soviet era are largely ignored,
not celebrated. The police broke up an anniversary protest this year in
Red Square (which she, pictured in the foreground, attended). Once one
of the fastest typists in dissident circles, she became an ardent
blogger, finding plenty to criticise in modern Russia. The national
tendency to pathos was “juvenile” (her own catchphrase was “No
nonsense, please”). Pomposity, injustice and hypocrisy were other
targets. But worst of all was amnesia.
The crime has not yet been expunged,
the hour of truth has not yet struck.
logs in the stove still ticking over,
although the fire’s already out.
