In society Name and dates November 30, 2013 Viktor Shenderovich In December last year, in Paris, at the Gorbanevsky house. A tiny apartment, mandatory lunch, sour cabbage soup. - Very tasty! - I say. “I have a secret,” Gorbanevskaya reports. - I put celery in all soups. I want it to be written at my grave: "She knew how to cook soup." And, an hour later: - So! There are no pure cups, reluctance to wash, we will drink coffee in a cafe! - Yes, we have to ... - Well, whatever you want. And I'll go!

Well, busy swallow, where are you going to work? Home, uncensored news, Say hello from me. Tell me what's an inch underground and with a throat full of earth, alive and breathing, freezing, but still not deathly evil. Say that, with your eyes open, collecting sand and podzol, I see, I still see tramples the unconsciousness of death. Tell me I don't hope anymore to the meeting, but as long as she’s alive, I won’t give up and I won’t grow cold, And it is not just words.

Classical ballad And one silence said to another: - Let's pause. And the long-long way was their way to the house Under the sky of a stranger. And gray streets on half Packed the same. And their address on a crumpled envelope I got in the rain. And ink blinked silently There, under the bridge. And suddenly another howled like a wolf: - And where is he, the house?! And one silence said to another: - Nothing, shut up. Let our path to the house longer And the keys disappeared.

She managed everything. I managed to write many wonderful thin and pure poems and give us poets of Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia in marvelous translations into Russian, managed to love and be loved, managed to grow children. She was not afraid of anything. The tiny, touching Natasha, with a embarrassed and such open smile, was not afraid of anything. She stood in the wind of this world all her life and did not hide from it at all.

Like many, I learned about Natalia Gorbanevskaya much earlier than I met her. Everyone knew that she, along with others, went out in August of the 68th to Red Square to support the Prague Spring and condemn the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia. And very few people knew then that she was the editor of the Chronicle of current events. The first editor to laid the foundations and traditions of this legendary publication. Then there were arrest, 4th branch of the Institute of Judicial Psychiatry.