Written in secret during the darkest years of Stalin’s dictatorship, Requiem is Anna Akhmatova’s personal testament to the violence and oppression suffered by Stalin’s many victims during the Great Terror of the late 1930’s, where Stalin executed those he saw as threats. Requiem is a cycle of lyric poems, forming a series of vignettes describing Akhmatova’s experiences during the years in which she endured the arrest and imprisonment of her only child, her son Lev. Akhmatova uses the cycle both to document her own grief and to bear witness to the horrors faced by the Russian people as a whole, exploring the experience of suffering and the struggle between memory and forgetting that inevitably takes place under a dictatorial regime. Often hailed as Akhmatova’s masterpiece, Requiem is an autographical work by a 20th century Russian poet and a historical record of the Stalinist Terror.

Poet Biography

Anna Akhmatova was born under the name Anna Gorenko on June 23, 1889 in Odessa, a city that is now in the Ukraine but which was part of the Russian Empire at that time. The early years of Akhmatova’s life were largely comfortable and happy. Her mother and father enjoyed a distinguished social status and gave their daughter an excellent education, including periods of study at universities in Kiev and St. Petersburg. Akhmatova began writing poetry at the age of 11. She would later adopt “Akhmatova,” her grandmother’s surname, as her pen name. Her father disapproved of her writing poetry and didn’t want her work associated with his name.

Akhmatova had joined a bustling literary culture in St. Petersburg by the time she was in her early 20’s. During her marriage (1910-1918) to fellow poet Nikolai Gumilev, she gave birth to her only child, a son named Lev, in 1912. In that same year, Akhmatova published her first poetry collection, Evening, which attracted notice and admiration from literary circles. Akhmatova became especially close to poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Sergey Gorodetsky, who formed a small literary movement known as the “Acmeists:” A poetic movement that rejected excessive symbolism and abstraction in favor of vivid, first-person narratives.

Akhmatova’s troubles began a few years after the Bolshevik Revolution, with the rise of Joseph Stalin as dictator of the Soviet State. Stalin exerted increasingly harsh control over the cultural affairs of Russia, and Akhmatova and her peers soon found themselves socially isolated and professionally handicapped. Akhmatova’s poetry was banned from publication and publicly ridiculed by Soviet critics, condemning her to years of poverty and struggle. During the height of the Stalinist Terror of the late 1930’s, Akhmatova was directly affected by the arrests and imprisonments of several of those closest to her, including Mandelstam, who died en route to a prison camp, and her own son, Lev, whose imprisonment forms one of the key events in the Requiem poetry cycle.

The Terror was followed by years of a brutal siege during World War II. Akhmatova and her fellow residents in St. Petersburg, at the time known as “Leningrad,” suffered from extreme deprivation, including starvation from lack of basic food supplies and frequently lethal cold spells during the winter months. During this time Akhmatova began to write another famous poetry cycle, Poem Without a Hero, and continued to work on it for another twenty years. The cycle explores the lives and experiences of Akhmatova and her contemporaries before, during, and after the Bolshevik Revolution.

After the death of Stalin in 1953, Akhmatova’s troubles eased somewhat. She was sometimes allowed to publish her verses again—albeit under the watchful eyes of the Soviet censors. She began to enjoy international recognition in the 1960s, when she received prizes and an honorary degree from the University of Oxford. She was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, although she never won. In 1965, she suffered a heart attack and died the following year, in 1966, in Moscow. She was 76 years old.

Akhmatova’s influence on Russian poetry has been enormous. She is now recognized as one of the major poets of the 20th century, and is sometimes called the greatest female Russian poet of the century. She inspired a younger generation of Russian poets, including the Nobel Prize-winning Joseph Brodsky, who met her personally and described her as his mentor. Requiem, the subject of this guide, is often hailed as her masterpiece. Written in secret during the years of the Terror, it did not appear in print in Russia until 1989, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. Famed for her lyricism, emotional sophistication, and vivid first-person narration, Akhmatova is now praised for the very qualities the Soviet authorities most despised.

Poem Text

Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem. 1961. Pval.org.

Summary

Requiem is a cycle of lyric poems written by Anna Akhmatova over multiple years, mostly 1935 through 1940, during the height of Stalin’s Terror in Soviet Russia. In the short epigraph added to the cycle in 1961, Akhmatova emphasizes that, instead of going into exile during the height of violence and persecution, she stayed in Russia and suffered alongside Stalin’s millions of other victims. In “Instead of a Preface,” added to the cycle in 1957, Akhmatova describes the personal tragedy she endured during those dark years that inspired the writing of the Requiem cycle: The imprisonment of her only son, and her response to a woman standing with her in line outside the prison gates, to whom Akhmatova declares that she can describe the suffering they are all enduring. In “Dedication,” Akhmatova describes the anguish faced by Stalin’s innocent victims during the Terror, in which imprisonment and death embody the dictatorship’s grip on the Russian population. Akhmatova recalls all those who suffered with her during those years, and ends her “Dedication” by addressing the victims directly and dedicating the poetry cycle to them.

In “Introduction/Poems I-VI,” Akhmatova recounts the arrest and imprisonment of her son. She depicts the city of Leningrad—now known as St. Petersburg—as stifled by an oppressive and foreboding atmosphere, while acknowledging the suffering of many other wives and mothers just like her. Akhmatova describes her suffering and grief as all-encompassing, an experience that has utterly transformed both herself and Russia.

In “The Verdict/To Death” (Poems VII-IX), Akhmatova focuses on the tension between memory and forgetting that takes place throughout her ordeal, as well as the personal struggle she faces in trying to endure without giving way to despair. In addressing Death directly, Akhmatova emphasizes the surreal state of affairs in which life and death seem harder and harder to distinguish from one another.

In the concluding parts of the cycle, “Crucifixion/Epilogue” (Poem X and Epilogue), Akhmatova reflects upon the communal experience of suffering. She summons the power of memory against the forces of dictatorship, declaring that it was her experiences under the Terror that were the most formative and important of her life, and that it is by these experiences that she wishes to always be remembered.