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When God Is the Underdog
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19304 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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6 / 1991 |
2,956 Words |
| Author
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Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
IN THE BEGINNING
Irina Ratushinskaya, translated by Alyona Kojevnikov
New York: Knopf, 1991
320 pp., $23.00
The Russian poet Irina Ratushinskaya grew up free in a totalitarian society and that meant sooner of later she would collide with the authorities. By the age of twenty-eight, she had been sentenced to seven years' hard labor and five years' internal exile for her human rights activities or, as they were termed in the indictment, "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." International pressure caused her release in 1986 after she had been imprisoned for more than four years. Her ordeals in the Gulag were chronicled in her previous memoir, Grey Is the Color of Hope. To keep their spirit alive, some of the women in the camp banded together, planting secret gardens, caring for each other in times of illness, and living by a motto: "Back to freedom with a clear conscience." The photo on the back cover of Grey Is the Color of Hope shows Ratushinskaya and her husband arriving at Heathrow Airport in London. She looks absolutely radiant, her entire face emanating the joy freedom. But it is her eyes that are most remarkable, most memorable. They look directly into the camera with a purity that is stunning, exhilarating. She had indeed gone "back to freedom with a clear conscience."
Where does a person get the courage to do what is right even though the cost will be terrible? Where does a person get the moral strength to endure the punishment that was inevitable in Soviet society for taking a stand? The answer is to be found, like everything else, "in the beginning," the title of Ratushinskaya's new memoir.
In fact, this is a dual autobiography, interweaving Ratushinskaya's life with that of Igor Geraschenko, until they marry and the story of their life becomes one story. Irina Ratushinskaya was born in 1954 in Odessa, a port city on the Black Sea, a sort of Soviet Marseilles, famed for its brash vitality, its spicy mix of nationalities, its proclivities for breaking the rules. Though there are certain eternal aspects of childhood--scraped knees, pet cats, endless questions put to adults--a Soviet childhood loses its innocence much earlier than most because the social system intrudes so bluntly into everyday life. Or perhaps that is precisely the reason that some Russians, like Ratushinskaya, preserve their inner purity, their clear conscience, so long and so well--because innocence was threatened early and the hard moral choices made early on, but made
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