In the Beginning
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IN THE BEGINNING goes back to the poet's life before her arrest, interweaving her experiences of growing up in Odessa with those of her childhood friend and future husband Igor Geraschenko. With wit and simplicity Irina describes a biased and turbulent education, being pressured to work for the KGB, the growth of faith that became so important to her in later life, and an impromptu wedding. Ratushinskaya shows how her early experiences moulded her personality, enabling her at a time of almost unbearable pressure to remain true to her own convictions.
Born in Ukraine in 1954, Irina Ratushinskaya was a leading Russian poet and dissident, who was sentenced in 1983 to seven years' hard labour and five years' internal exile for her poetry, deemed to be 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'. She was unaware that her poems had been smuggled out and published in Britain by Bloodaxe in 1986, and that an international campaign had been mounted on her behalf. Following a series of hunger strikes, she was released in October that year. Initially she and her husband moved to the US, then spent ten years in Britain before returning to Russia in 1998 with their twin sons. In addition to her poetry, she wrote the memoirs Grey is the Colour of Hope (Hodder & Stoughton, 1989) and In the Beginning (Hodder &Stoughton, 1991), as well as the novels The Odessans (1996) and Fictions and Lies (1999). She died of cancer in 2017.