Faces of Natalia Gorbanevskaya

Part 1: Years in the USSR (1936–1975)

Abstract

This article is the first attempt so far to describe the biography of Natalia Gorbanevskaya (1936-2013) from before her emigration (until the end of 1975), including her most important work as a poet, translator and publicist. It covers her youth up to 1956, when she began to mature politically and creatively, and the years after 1956, when the Soviet Union militarily invaded Hungary, which was trying to free itself from communism. The text also attempts to describe the best-known fact in Gorbanevskaya’s political biography, namely that she, along with seven other courageous people, walked out on Moscow’s Red Square on 25 August 1968, this time to protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops. Separate sections of the text are devoted to Gorbanevskaya’s activities in the dissident movement in the USSR from 1965 onwards, in particular her founding and editing of the first ten to ten issues of the samizdat journal Chronicle of Current Events. In the 1960s and later in the 1970s, her fruitful contacts with Polish literary culture, which she also began to translate, continued to play an important role in her biography. The article also describes Natalia Gorbanevskaya’s trial in Moscow in July 1970 and her subsequent stay of more than two years in Moscow's Butyrki prison and in a psychiatric hospital in Kazan. Unusual in a creative sense, the exile period of her life (1976–2013) requires a separate description.