"Requiem" by Anna Akhmatova
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Requiem is an elegy written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961 by Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova composed, worked and reworked the long sequence in secret, depicting the suffering of the common people under the Stalinist Terror. She carried it with her, redrafting, as she worked and lived in towns and cities across the Soviet Union. It was conspicuously absent from her collected works, given its explicit condemnation of the purges. The work in Russian finally appeared in book form in Munich in 1963, the whole work not published within the USSR until 1987. It would become her best known work.
The work consists of ten numbered poems that examine a series of emotional states, exploring suffering, despair, devotion, rather than a clear narrative. Biblical themes such as Christ's crucifixion and the devastation of Mary, Mother of Jesus and Mary Magdelene, reflect the ravaging of Russia, particularly witnessing the harrowing of women in the 1930s. It represented, to some degree, a rejection of her own earlier romantic work as she took on the public role as chronicler of the Terror. This is a role she holds to this day. Following its publication, Requiem became known internationally for its blend of graceful language and complex and classical Russian poetry.
The set of poems is introduced by one prose paragraph that briefly states how she was “picked out” to describe the months of waiting outside Leningrad Prison, along with many other women, for just a glimpse of fathers, brothers or sons who had been taken away by the secret police in Russia. Following the introductory paragraph, the core set of poems in Requiem consists of 10 short numbered poems, beginning with the first reflecting on the arrest of Akhmatova's third husband Nikolay Punin and other close confidants. The next nine core poems make references to the grief and agony she faced when her son, Lev Gumilev was arrested by the secret police in 1938. She writes, "one hundred million voices shout" through her "tortured mouth".
Seventeen months I've pleaded
for you to come home.
Flung myself at the hangman’s feet.
My terror, oh my son.
And I can’t understand.
Now all’s eternal confusion.
Who’s beast, and who’s man?
How long till execution?
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