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Article: She wrote poetry - `that was my crime'
- Article from:
- Chicago Sun-Times
- Article date:
- March 6, 1987
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright (null) Chicago Sun-Times. (Hide copyright information)
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The poems of Irina Retushinskaya are angry, hopeful, defiant,
loving, religious, questioning and funny.
"That was my crime," she said.
Writing poetry?
"Yes, it was first item of my sentence (charges) - six poems.
"Our people take literature very seriously," she said in an
interview at Northwestern University. "It is our Russian tradition.
No wonder when our government takes literature very seriously, too.
It moves people."
Retushinskaya was sentenced on March 5, 1983, to seven years in
a labor camp and five years of internal exile for writing anti-Soviet
poems.
But if they thought to silence the poet, her captors should have
confiscated her soap. In four years and one month of ...