Anna Akhmatova’s stunning song for the dead was written in stages, most of it between 1935 and 1940, with the epigram and opening movement added two decades later. As with her other poems that could invoke the wrath of the authorities, Requiem was committed to memory by the poet’s friends. Originally appearing in Munich, Germany, in 1963, it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. The 15-part poem stands where the intimate and the universal meet, borrowing something of its structure from Christianity’s Way of the Cross, from condemnation through crucifixion.

From the start, Akhmatova makes clear that she remained in the USSR as witness, true to her concept of the moral responsibility of the poet, rather than enter voluntary exile. The “I” of the poem is both Akhmatova and a composite suffering woman. The impetus for the poem comes during the purges carried out by Stalin’s head of the NKVD (precursor to the KGB), Nikolay Yezhov, when a freezing, faceless woman who recognizes the poet asks in a whisper whether Akhmatova can describe their collective ordeal. It becomes a national duty as well as a private lament. Hence, the cycle is specific in its details but also shows that identical circumstances are the shared reality of thousands of other women.

The dawn arrest refers to Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilyov, and her lover, Nikolay Punin, who were apprehended in 1935. The speaker identifies with “the wives of the Streltsy,” a group of soldiers defeated and either executed or banished by Peter the Great. The weight of Russian history thus is brought to bear on Akhmatova’s historical moment, so that centuries of wailing women form the backdrop of her story. Her ex-husband and fellow Acmeist poet, Nikolay Gumilyov, had been shot by the Bolsheviks in 1921, and now their son has been carried off in a Black Maria (a type of police van). She finds it difficult to reconcile her earlier, frivolous life with the life spent standing in line, literally at the foot of the cross, outside the cruciform-shaped Kresty prison in Leningrad (St. Petersburg). It is here where she would have any memorial statue set, not in the pretty places of her youth.

The motif of sacrifice continues with the crying of Mary Magdalene and the silence of the Mother. So many are taken that she cannot name them all, but she prepares a burial shroud for them from their “overheard words,” an allusion to dissidents like her fellow poet and friend Osip Mandelstam, who had also been condemned. She offers up her “exhausted mouth / Through which a hundred million scream” as an assurance that the silenced have a voice in her. The poem promises memory of the horrors taking place even as the stars continue to shine and the rivers Neva, Don, and Yenisey swirl and flow.

Bibliography
Akhmatova, Anna. The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova. Expanded edition. Edited and introduced by Roberta Reeder, translated by Judith Hemschemeyer. Boston: Zephyr Press, 1997.

Ljundgren, Anna. “Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem: A Retrospective of the Love Lyric and Epos.” In Anna Akhmatova 1889–1989, edited by Sonia I. Ketchian. Oakland, Calif.: Berkeley Slavic Specialties, 1993.

Categories: Literature, Russian Literature, World Literature

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