Portraits in a Barbed Wire Frame

Vadim Delaunay (1947, Moscow - 1983, Paris) was a Soviet poet and dissident. On August 25, 1968, he and seven other dissidents organized the now-famous demonstration in support of the Prague Spring in Red Square near the Moscow Kremlin. Delaunay and Pavel Litvinov held the famous banner with the words "For your freedom and ours". Seven people were arrested and Delaunay was sentenced to almost three years in a labor camp that he served in western Siberia. In June 1971, he finished serving his sentence and returned to Moscow. In 1973, his wife Irina Belogorodskaya was arrested for her involvement with an underground journal, Chronicle of Current Events. In 1975 they both emigrated to France. On June 13th, 1983 Vadim Delaunay died of a heart attack in Paris at the age of 35. In 1984, his book of poetry Verses: 1963-1983 was published. The same year, he was posthumously awarded the Vladimir Dal Prize for his book Portraits in a Barbed Wire Frame. This book of Vadim Delaunay is the only novel he ever wrote. It is not a memoir or a thesis on prison camp life. It is a collection of sketches in which the author vividly depicted the personalities and nature of his camp-mates and relationships between them. He managed to convey the emotional state of the life in a camp with that ultimate honesty that is paid for with your heart's blood. This book is a testimony of an eyewitness and a participant in that desperate struggle "for your freedom and ours" and is meant to remind people once again in what place and during what time they are living. On the pages of this small book Delaunay talks, in essence, not only about the fate of prisoners, but about the fate of Russia as a whole, the fate of a country that tragically found itself behind barbed wire. Between the lines he gives an analysis of the strategy of a police state in pursuit of its selfish agenda. This strategy is extremely simple both in relation to those in the camp and those outside it in the Greater Zone, and eternal, like humanity itself. It plays on the worst sides of human nature as well as the best.