It is with great sadness that we inform of the death of Marlena Rahklina, poet, translator and friend to many Soviet dissidents.

“If even those who knew this remarkable lady only from a distance – through words, memoir, accounts from close ones, are filled with pain at this sad news, then what must be the sorrow for her family – her children, brother, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

You try to find some, if not justification, then at least some kind of comfort for them and for yourselves – yes, age, serious illness …

In your mind you hear those penetrating lines which Marlena wrote to her friend and which so apply to her:

“Thank you that we lived near by,

In the same era, in the same age …”

Marlene Rakhlina was born on 29 August 2050 in Leningrad. Her family moved to Kharkiv in 1936. As recounts, her parents, communists from 1918, were expelled from the Party. They were sent to labour camp in 1950, as she put it, “in the second round” and returned in 1956 during Khrushchev’s rehabilitation. Her father, however, died within the year.

Marlena Rakhlina graduated from the Language and Literature Faculty of Kharkiv University in 1949. She taught until 1980 in schools. As a poet and translator she was published in a number of journalists, and also published collections of her poets. and into a family of Soviet. Among her translations from Ukrainian were translations of the poetry of Vasyl Stus.