• DOI:10.1080/00085006.2003.11092332
• Corpus ID: 154140951

>“Nothing turns out right, but something still emerges:” On the Poetry of Natalia Gorbanevskaia

@article{Ried2003NothingTO,
  title={>“Nothing turns out right, but something still emerges:” On the Poetry of Natalia Gorbanevskaia},
  author={Allan Ried},
  journal={Canadian Slavonic Papers},
  year={2003},
  volume={45},
  pages={351 - 370}
}

• Allan Ried
• Published 1 September 2003
• History
• Canadian Slavonic Papers

Abstract Natalia Gorbanevskaia (1936-) began writing poetry in the mid-1950s, gave frequent public readings and was published initially in samizdat and tamizdat, but she first really came to prominence as a political dissident, notably as founder and first editor of The Chronicle of Current Events, then as one of the seven participants in the famous demonstration on Red Square on 25 August 1968 against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (described in her book Polden’: Delo o demonstratsii 25-ogo avgusta 1968 goda na Krasnoi Ploshchadi). Following her imprisonment in a psychiatric institution and various other abuses, she emigrated to Paris in 1975 and played a major role in several key émigré publications, including Kontinent and Russkaia Mysl’. As a poet, she was recognized early by, among others, Akhmatova, but even now—after a dozen or so collections of her verse have been published, not to mention a large number of selections in various journals and anthologies, as well as her extensive editorial work, critical writings and translations—there is still only one scholarly article devoted to her work, and it dates from 1982. The present study presents and analyzes a number of individual poems selected from various periods of her writing, with the primary aim of indicating the remarkable range and power of her work and to provoke and encourage further interest and study. It also includes an extensive bibliography of publications by and about Gorbanevskaia.