The performance is based on the book of the same name by Natalya Gorbanevskaya, who was one of these “Brave eight”. Together with Konstantin Babicky, a linguist, Vadim Delon, a poet, Vladimir Dremlyuga, a worker, Viktor Fainberg, a specialist in English philology, Pavel Litvinov, a physicist, Larisa Bogoraz, a linguist, and Tatyana Baeva, a student, she demonstrated peacefully on the Red Square against the occupation of Czechoslovakia by the Warsaw Treaty armies.
The demonstration was dispersed in a few minutes by undercover agents of the State Security Service and its participants were arrested. After that they were questioned, tried, imprisoned, sent to exile, labour camps or psychiatric prison-hospitals.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya was arrested a year later due to her little son. Before it happened in December 1969, she regularly informed foreign mass media about the trial with her colleagues and friends and she wrote a book called Noon. The case became known all over the world after the book was published in western countries.
Natalya Gorbanevskaya was sent to a mental hospital, like many other Soviet dissidents of that time (e.g. Viktor Fainberg, Vladimir Bukovsky). She was treated for alleged schizophrenia with a specific diagnosis of Brezhnev’s regime called “heresy of reformism”. When she was released, she emigrated to Paris in 1975, where she lived until her death in 2013.
