Requiem (Akhmatova)
레퀴엠 (아흐마토바)
A cycle of poems written by Anna Akhmatova during the Great Terror of the late 1930s. In the voice of a mother queuing at the prison with parcels for her arrested son Lev Gumilyov, it speaks for the mothers and wives of that time. Because of the danger she burned the manuscripts after reading them to trusted friends. The full text appeared in the USSR only in 1987.
In depth
What kind of poem is it?
A short cycle, with brief lyrics between a prologue and epilogue. A few lines of prose set before it explain the work best. One day in the queue outside the prison someone recognises the poet. A woman behind her, lips blue with cold, stirs from the common torpor and asks in a whisper (everyone whispered there): "Can you describe this?" "I can." And then something like a smile passes over what had once been her face.
The poet's voice soon becomes that of all women. Earlier sections carry voices of mothers from the past, a woman of the time of the Streltsy revolt and a scene as if from Shakespeare. Sections V and VI are the culmination of suffering: "For seventeen months I have been crying out, / calling you home." And: "I can no longer tell / who is beast and who is man."
At the end she turns to a monument to herself. If this country ever thinks of raising one, let it not be by the sea or in the tsars' garden, but here, where I stood for three hundred hours and where the bolt was never drawn for me. She would like to name them all, but "they took away the list".
What did she live through as she wrote?
The first sections date from 1934-1935. On 24 October 1935 her common-law husband Nikolai Punin and her son Lev Gumilyov, by the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, were arrested; she petitioned Stalin and they were freed on 4 November. Worse came in 1938, when Lev was arrested again. She spent 17-19 hours a day in the queue outside the Kresty prison with parcels, working on the poem in the passageways. Lev went to the camps and then to the front, was arrested again in 1949 and got ten years, and was freed in 1956.
How did it survive?
The poem was a dangerous object. Akhmatova read it to people she trusted, especially Lydia Chukovskaya, and burned the manuscripts. She wrote most of it in 1938-1940 and returned to it in the late 1950s. In the 1960s it began to circulate in samizdat, and a copy that reached the West came out as a booklet in Munich without her consent. The emigre writer Boris Zaitsev marvelled that the elegant lady of the Stray Dog cabaret could utter such a cry. The full text appeared during perestroika, in 1987, in Oktyabr no. 3 and Neva no. 6, and it is now on the Russian school curriculum.
What followed?
John Tavener's Akhmatova Requiem (1980), Boris Tishchenko's Requiem (1966) and other settings draw on it. It is a record of those who waited, rather than of those who were arrested.