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Poetry in the Gulag
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15231 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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8 / 1989 |
2,307 Words |
| Author
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Juliana Geran Pilon
Juliana Geran Pilon is executive director of the National
Forum Foundation. |
FEAR NO EVIL
Natan Sharansky
New York, Random House, 1988
437 pp., $19.95
SELECTED POEMS
Vasyl Stus
New York, Cekewych-Steciuk Memorial, 1989
166 pp., $19.95
GREY IS THE COLOR OF HOPE
Irina Ratushinskaya
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1988
359 pp., $18.95
That poetry can give and preserve life is not a simple truism. The examples of Natan Sharansky, Irina Ratushinskaya, and Vasyl Stus offer the most eloquent modern examples of poetry not only defining the human spirit but transforming it, and keeping it. All three recently experienced the gulag camps, and all found in poetry the vocabulary to express religious faith no less than love and passion. Poetry made possible their spiritual survival, indeed, fueled their fierce defiance against the authorities that incarcerated them in violatin of any elementary respect for human rights.
Poetry allows an escape from the tyranny of the predictable, the literal, the trivial, from the dehumanizing effect of imposed--and hence arbitrary--order. Poetry accommodates the impossible, the fantastic, the absolutely individual, through flight of language and the courage of dreams. Once poetry is the adopted
... (1996 of 12912 Characters)
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