Gorbanevskaya, Natalya Yevgenevna (1936–)

views updated

Gorbanevskaya, Natalya Yevgenevna (1936–)

Russian poet and memoirist. Name variations: Natal'ia Evgen'evna Gorbanévskaia or Natalia Evgenevna Gorbanévskaia. Born 1936 in Moscow, Russia; studied philology at Moscow and Leningrad universities; children: 2.

Activist and poet, helped to found the samizdat journal Khronika tekushchikh sobytiy (Chronicle of Current Events, 1968) which was published abroad and detailed cases of state prosecution and civil-rights abuse; as one of the 7 Red Square demonstrators against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, was arrested (1969) and confined in a psychiatric prison (1970); freed (1972), continued to edit her journal; permitted her poetry collection Poberezhye (The Littoral) to be published in US (1973); was allowed to immigrate to Paris (1975), with her 2 children; worked as deputy editor of the Russian-language magazine Kontinent and continued to publish poetry.