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Last month, the former Soviet dissident and poet Irina Ratushinskaya died of cancer.

When the poem was finished and Ms. Ratushinskaya had memorized its text, she hid her creation by washing it away.

Ms. Ratushinskaya married Igor Gerashchenko, an engineer, in 1979.

The couple took up human rights work in earnest in 1980, attending demonstrations and penning a letter protesting the exile of dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, while also publishing Ms. Ratushinskaya’s poetry in underground magazines.

The 29-year-old’s crime, more or less, was poetry: “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda,” though Ms. Ratushinskaya described herself as apolitical and was more likely to pen verses about the view through her window than the repressive regime of Leonid Brezhnev.