To see the photos online, click HERE

Natalya Gorbanevskaya was born on 26 May 1936 in Moscow.

In 1964 Natalya Gorbanevskaya graduated from Leningrad University, specializing in ‘philology, teaching Russian language and literature’. She worked in Moscow as a librarian, a bibliographer, and a translator of scientific texts. She was initiator, author, editor and typist of the first issue of the samizdat bulletin Chronicle of Current Events.

Natalya Gorbanevskaya took part in the famous demonstration on Red Square in Moscow on 25 August 1968 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet forces.

She was arrested on 24 December 1969. In April 1970 the Serbsky Institute of Forensic Psychiatry gave her a diagnosis of ‘chronic schizophrenia’ without mention in the clinical protocol by the psychiatric experts any psychopathologies that would have been grounds for hospitalisation. She was sent for forced treatment in a prison-type psychiatric hospital, where she remained until 22 February 1972.

In 1973 Shusha Guppy dedicated her song Natalia to her. The song was later made popular by Joan Baez and was included in the album, From every stage (1976).

In 1971 Gorbanevskaya published an article Free Medical Assistance about the abuse of psychiatry in the USSR written in March 1968 for the book Punished by Madness.

On 17 December 1975 Natalya Gorbanevskaya emigrated. She lived in Paris. She worked in the editorial office of the journal Kontinent and was a freelancer for Radio Svoboda. From the beginning of the 1980s until 2003 she worked for the newspaper Russkaya mysl. From 1999 she was an editor and member of the editorial board of the Russian-language journal Novaya Polsha, published in Warsaw, to which she also contributed as an author and translator.

In 2005 Natalya Gorbanevskaya became a citizen of Poland. She is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, and published translations from Polish, Czech, Slovak and French.

On 23 October 2008 Natalya Gorbanevskaya was given an honorary doctorate by the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

The poetry of Natalya Gorbanevskaya has been translated into English by Gerald Smtih and Daniel Weissbort, into Polish by Wiktor Woroszylski, Stanisław Barańczak, Adam Pomorski, into German by Kai Borovsky, into French by Véronique Schiltz, Georges Nivat, and Christine Zeytounian-Belous, into Czech by Milan Dvořák, and into Ukrainian by Valeria Boguslavskaya.

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For another broadcast interview with Natalia Gorbanevskaya see HERE.