Irina Ratushinskaya
Beyond the Limit / Vne limita: Poems
Northwestern University Press, 1987. First edition. Translation by Frances Padoor Brent and Carol J. Avins. 0810107481 xvii/121 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 5.75" x 9", is bound in black cloth, with stamped silver lettering to spine. Book displays very light shelwear. Binding is sound. Interior is clean and bright. Dust jacket exhibits mild wear and is now in mylar cover. Bilingual in Russian and English.
""Beyond the Limit" is a cycle of forty-seven poems written during the first portion of Irina Ratushinskaya's term in the "strict regime" camp for women political prisoners at Barashevo in Mordovia. The poems bear witness to the disequilibrium of history while they record a resilient interior life. On 5 March 1983, Irina Ratushinskaya was sentenced to seven years of hard labor to be followed by five years of internal exile for "agitation carried on for the purpose of subverting the Soviet regime." Ratushinskaya was twenty-nine years old. During the years in the camp, despite deteriorating health, hunger strikes, and continual punishments in cold isolation. Ratushinskaya composed poems filled with intelligence, wit, and a longing for better times: "Heat will die down, the road will be cool, but on the fields we've left / sluggish bees will thrum..." Her work has been compared with that of Marina Tsvetaeva and Anna Akhmatova. On 9 October 1986, the eve of the Reykjavik summit, she was released from  a Kiev prison."