1889–1966
○ Illness
The poet who waited at the prison gates
On 14 August 1946 the Orgburo resolution on Zvezda and Leningrad called Akhmatova's poetry "alien to our people," and Zhdanov denounced her as "neither nun nor harlot." She was expelled from the Writers' Union on 4 September 1946. The resolution was annulled as erroneous in 1988.
A leading Acmeist, she became one of the most popular poets of her day with *Evening* (1912) and *The Rosary* (1914). Her first husband Nikolai Gumilev was executed by the Cheka in 1921, and her son Lev Gumilev and common-law husband Nikolai Punin spent years in the Gulag; in secret she composed *Requiem* between 1935 and 1940, recording the experience of the terror. Denounced by Zhdanov and banned from print in 1946, she refused to emigrate, later completed *Poem Without a Hero* and received the Etna-Taormina prize in 1964.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1912Published *Evening*
- 1935–1940Composed *Requiem* in secret
- 1946Denounced by Zhdanov, banned from print and expelled from the Writers' Union
- 1951–1965Readmitted to the Writers' Union, returned to print and received late recognition
Related historical events
*Requiem*: The Poem Written at the Prison Gates
Akhmatova's masterpiece Requiem is a poetic monument to the terror of the Stalinist purges. Russian Wikipedia's infobox dates its composition 1934–1963, while English Wikipedia describes it as written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961. In 1935 her son Lev Gumilev and her common-law husband Nikolai Punin were arrested on counter-revolutionary charges, and after her petition to Stalin both were released on 4 November that year. When her son was arrested again in 1938 and sentenced to five years of corrective-labour camps, Akhmatova spent seventeen to nineteen hours a day in the queue outside Leningrad's Kresty pre-trial detention centre, carrying parcels for him and revising the manuscripts in the entrance rooms. In 1949 he was arrested once more and received a second ten-year camp term, and in 1956 he was released as innocent.
The poem opens with the famous prose piece 'Instead of a Foreword', which records that she spent seventeen months in Leningrad prison queues during the Yezhov terror; a woman behind her, her lips blue with cold, whispered 'Could one ever describe this?' and the poet answered 'I can.' Beyond the prose foreword the core of the work consists of ten short numbered poems, moving from personal grief (the arrests of Punin and her son) to the collective grief of the other women waiting outside the prison. The later poems turn outward to the voices of others who suffered, and the work ends as a memorial to the dead. Under the theme of a 'poem without a hero', the women had to endure together rather than be saved. It is regarded as the best-known work of poetry about the Soviet Great Terror.
Akhmatova often burned her manuscripts of Requiem after reading them to people she trusted; Lydia Chukovskaya described the ritual: 'Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter.'
Requiem circulated in samizdat and was first published without the author's consent by the 'T-vo zarubezhnykh pisatelei' in Munich. Sources disagree on the year: Russian Wikipedia's infobox and its book-photo caption give a 1963 edition, while the prose of the same article states that in 1964 a copy of the poem reached abroad and was first published in full in a Munich edition of that year, and English Wikipedia likewise reports book publication in Munich in 1963. The full text was first legally published in the USSR only in 1987, during perestroika, in the journals Oktyabr (No. 3) and Neva (No. 6). Today the poem is part of Russia's mandatory school curriculum.