SOURCE: Wells, David N. “Stalinism and War: Works of the 1930s and 1940s.” In Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry, pp. 64-95. Oxford, England: Berg, 1996.

[In the following excerpt, Wells discusses structure, theme, and inspirational sources of Akhmatova's Requiem.]

Akhmatova's most sustained piece of overtly oppositional writing in the 1930s is the cycle Requiem (I, 359-70).¹ Although the epigraph and prose introduction to the cycle were both added later, the cycle as such was put together in 1940.² The poems which make it up appear to have been inspired by several different episodes in Akhmatova's biography. Although the most immediate impetus is clearly Akhmatova's experience, following her son's arrest in 1938, in the queues of women waiting outside prisons attempting to receive news of their imprisoned menfolk, there are also additional sources. The first of the ten numbered poems, ‘Uvodili tebya na rassvete’ (‘They took you away at dawn’, I, 363) is dated 1935, and according to Akhmatova's memoir of Mandelstam, refers to the arrest that year of Nikolai Punin (II, 181). Mandelstam, it appears, took this poem to refer to his own arrest. But the exact biographical referents are perhaps not important. Akhmatova, by combining them in her cycle has produced what is, in its own way, a comprehensive social history of the Terror, what Haight has called ‘an organic unit documenting a precise progression through all the stages of suffering’.³

Although Requiem has no plot in any conventional sense, the ten numbered poems which form its centre do represent a process of emotional change. They do this through a lyrical examination of a series of emotional states presented in a chronological sequence which is rendered coherent by the two unnumbered introductory poems entitled ‘Posvyashchenie’ (‘Dedication’) and ‘Vstuplenie’ (‘Introduction’). ‘Dedication’ in particular not only makes it clear that the poems which follow are written in the name of a large and anonymous group of women, but also specifies the time frame of the cycle:

Gde teper' nevol'nye podrugi
Dvukh moikh osatanelykh let?
Where now are the chance friends
Of those two demoniacal years?

‘Introduction’, on the other hand, focuses rather on place:

I nenuzhnym priveskom boltalsya
Vozle tyurem svoikh Leningrad.
And Leningrad dangled around its prisons
Like a useless appendage.

By later referring more broadly to the sufferings of ‘Rus'’, it affirms that the description of Leningrad is meant to stand also for the entire country.

The central section of the poem begins with an arrest, laconically described in the first line of poem No. 1: ‘They took you away at dawn.’ The scene is likened to a funeral, but a note of defiance is implied by the heroine's comparison of herself to the wives of the Strel'tsy in the last two lines:

Budu ya, kak streletskie zhenki,
Pod kremlevskimi bashnyami vyt'.
Like the wives of the Strel'tsy
I shall howl under the Kremlin towers.

In the poems which follow, however, this defiance gives way to passivity and to a gradual breakdown of personality. In the second poem the speaker sees herself partly as someone else:

Eta zhenshchina bol'na,
Eta zhenshchina odna,
Muzh v mogile, syn v tyur'me,
Pomolites' obo mne.
This woman is ill,
This woman is alone,
Son in prison, husband in the grave,
Pray for me.

And in the third poem the gap between mental processes that predate the arrest and the current reality is rendered explicit. The speaker is unable to believe that it is indeed her own actions that she is watching:

Net, eto ne ya, eto kto-to drugoi stradaet.
Ya by tak ne mogla
No, it is not I, it is somebody else who is suffering
I should not have been able to bear it.

The fourth poem marks a particular stage in the history of individual prisoners—their mothers and wives queuing outside the Kresty prison in Leningrad in order to hand over parcels, and shows the speaker, more resignedly now, contrasting her present fate with her life in earlier years. The fifth, explicitly situated seventeen months after the arrest, shows increasing disorientation:

Vse pereputalos' navek,
I mne ne razobrat'
Teper', kto zver', kto chelovek
Everything has been muddled for ever,
And now I cannot work out
Who is a beast and who is a human being.

This is also reflected in the sixth poem. The seventh, entitled ‘Prigovor’ (‘Sentence’), initiates a further new stage. Notification that her son has been sentenced—presumably to death—throws the speaker back into despair:

I upalo kamennoe slovo
Na moyu eshche zhivuyu grud'.
And the word fell like a stone
On my still living breast.

She is led into another round of denial and suppression of her emotions:

U menya segodnya mnogo dela:
Nado pamyat' do kontsa ubit',
Nado, chtob dusha okamenela,
Nado snova nauchit'sya zhit'
Today I have many things to do:
I must kill my memory off completely,
My heart must turn to stone,
I must relearn how to live.

The next two poems deal with different and more extreme manifestations of despair: in the first (‘No. 8’) the speaker invites death to come to her to release her from her torments; in the second (‘No. 9’) it is insanity which is seen as the only possible form of consolation even though it will remove all memories of the past, the welcome as well as the terrible.

Up to this point the numbered poems of the narrative sequence had been written almost entirely in the first person. (The exceptions are ‘No. 2’, which is written partly in the third person, and ‘No. 4’, which is written as a second-person address by the speaker to herself.) The tenth and final poem of the inner narrative, which represents the carrying out of the sentence passed in the seventh poem, that is the execution of the heroine's son, switches to the third person, discursively reflecting her inability to speak after this latest shock. In order to describe this culmination of the narrative, Akhmatova has recourse to Biblical history and finds a model in the crucifixion of Jesus, and particularly in the responses of female figures—Mary Magdalene and Mary the Mother of Jesus—to the crucifixion:

Magdalina bilas' i rydala,
Uchenik lyubimyi kamenel,
A tuda, gde molcha Mat' stoyala,
Tak nikto vzglyanut' i ne posmel.
Mary Magdelene beat her breast and sobbed,
The beloved disciple turned to stone,
But no one even dared to look
At where the Mother stood in silence.

Haight has suggested that the three figures here represent three different stages of suffering: Mary Magdalene the defiance of poem ‘No. 1’, John the beloved disciple the paralysis of, for example, ‘No. 7’, and Mary the Mother a deep understanding arrived at by passing through all stages.⁴ The silence of Mary the Mother at the moment of the crucifixion, however, may represent not so much wisdom as a state of catatonia induced in her, as in the first-person heroine of the narrative, by the finality of her son's death.

However, invoking the crucifixion is not merely a method for projecting the sufferings of women in Russia in the late 1930s on to a universal plane. In theological terms the crucifixion implies the resurrection, and the memorialising function of the Requiem cycle foreshadowed in ‘Dedication’ (and affirmed in the introductory prose passage added in 1957) is rendered explicit in the two poems which form its ‘Epilogue’. Having passed through the Terror documented in the ten poems of the narrative, the speaker finds she has survived and is able to record the experience of her sisters:

I ya molyus' ne o sebe odnoi,
A obo vsekh, kto tam stoyal so mnoyu,
I v lyutyi kholod, i v iyul'skii znoi,
Pod krasnoyu oslepsheyu stenoyu.
And I pray not for myself alone,
But for all those who stood there with me
In the bitter cold and in the heat of July
Under that blind red wall.

The final poem contains an affirmation of the power of words to recall the female, indirect victims of Stalinism and also an assertion that the act of recalling has its own therapeutic and protective effect:

Dlya nikh sotkala ya shirokii pokrov
Iz bednykh, u nikh zhe podslushannykh slov.
For them I have woven a broad shroud
From poor words, overheard from them.

Having established the power of such a monument, Akhmatova then, secure in the knowledge of its durability, turns to the question of a sculptural monument to herself as the author of Requiem. In considering where such a monument should be placed, Akhmatova rejects locations that have associations with her life and poetry before Requiem—the Black Sea coast and the park at Tsarskoe Selo—and insists that it should be outside the prison walls in Leningrad, so that even in death she should not forget the events of the 1930s. This choice too marks a partial rejection of the poetry of Akhmatova's youth now that her pen has found its vocation as public chronicler of the Terror.

The superficial clarity and simplicity of the Requiem cycle belie a considerable underlying complexity of imagery, allusion and compositional technique. As Michael Basker has argued, the disorientation of the heroine is mirrored stylistically in the cycle in many ways.⁵ Most obviously, there is no unequivocal link between the various poems that make up Requiem: they vary greatly in length, metrical format and rhyme scheme; they do not maintain unity of place—some are clearly set in Leningrad, while others are on the river Don (‘No. 2’) or in Biblical Palestine (‘No. 10’); they do not contain a consistent narrative viewpoint, changing abruptly, for example, between the first and third person (‘Dedication’, ‘No. 2’). Much of the imagery is similarly dislocated, even verging on the surreal, as in the opening lines of ‘Dedication’:

Pered etim gorem gnutsya gory,
Ne techet velikaya reka.
Mountains bend down before this grief,
The great river does not flow.

or the description of prisoners in ‘Introduction’:

Shli uzhe osuzhdennykh polki,
I korotkuyu pesnyu razluki
Parovoznye peli gudki.
Regiments of the already condemned were marching
And the whistles of steam engines
Sang brief songs of farewell.

This is much more nearly the Leningrad of Nikolai Zabolotskii than of Akhmatova's early poems. Expressions from different semantic registers are placed in juxtaposition. Thus ‘Rus'’ (‘Russia’) is made to rhyme with ‘chernykh marus'’ (‘black marias’); in ‘No. 8’ (‘To Death’) terms of Soviet realia—‘verkh shapki goluboi’ (‘the top of a pale blue cap’, alluding to the NKVD uniform), and ‘upravdom’ (‘house manager’)—appear in the middle of an otherwise broadly abstract invocation of death. The religious metaphors which abound in the cycle serve to highlight the enormity of events by their incongruity: ‘Kresty’ (‘Crosses’) is the name of a prison (‘No. 4’); the scene of arrest is compared to a funeral (‘No. 1’). Even the title of the work, Requiem, with its associations above all with Catholic Christianity and the civilisation of western Europe, sits uneasily with the Orthodox tradition evoked in the poems themselves by references, for example, to icons (‘No. 1’), to the ‘pominal'nye dni’ (‘remembrance days’) of the Orthodox funeral ritual (‘Epilogue’) and to the language of the Church Slavonic Bible: ‘Ottsu skazal: “Pochto Menya ostavil!” / A Materi: “O, ne rydai Mene …”’ (‘To the Father he said, “Why hast thou forsaken me”, but to his Mother, “Oh, do not weep for me …”’, ‘No. 10’). The numerous allusions to Old Russia further serve to set the work in an Orthodox historical context rather than in a more broadly European one.

At the same time, as with the early books discussed in chapter three, the architectonics of the cycle are calculated with deliberate rhetorical precision. Various schemes have been devised to show a symmetry of themes and images around a central poem operating as a pivot.⁶ While these are apt to overstate their case, at the very least it can be said that the ten ‘narrative’ poems are situated within a symmetrical framework of two introductory and two concluding poems which emphasise the courage and persistence of Russian women outside the prisons of the 1930s and lay great weight on the power of poetry to record their sufferings and to transcend them. The ‘narrative’ sequence is organised around three points of transformation, beginning with an arrest (‘No. 1’), ending with an execution (‘No. 10’) and articulating itself around the seventh poem, in which the sentence is pronounced.

As might be expected from a knowledge of Akhmatova's early poems, the superficially limpid poetry of Requiem is rich in evocations of other literary works. Allusions have been detected to a very wide range of authors from Euripides, Dante and Shakespeare to Tyutchev, Nekrasov and Mayakovskii.⁷ The most salient is highlighted by Akhmatova herself when she places quotation marks around a phrase from Pushkin which occurs in ‘Dedication’:

No krepki tyuremnye zatvory,
A za nimi ‘katorzhnye nory’
But the prison bolts are firm,
And behind them lie the ‘convicts' burrows’.

Pushkin's 1827 poem ‘Vo glubine sibirskikh rud’ (‘In the depths of the Siberian mines’), from which the quoted phrase is taken, is addressed to the participants of the abortive Decembrist uprising.

Pushkin's poem was designed to encourage the convicted Decembrists and to reassure them that the ideals of freedom which they had attempted unsuccessfully to uphold were still alive in the outside world and would eventually prevail. The poem concludes:

Lyubov' i druzhestvo do vas
Doidut skvoz' mrachnye zatvory,
Kak v vashi katorzhnye nory
Dokhodit moi svobodnyi glas.
Okovy tyazhkie padut,
Temnitsy rukhnut—i svoboda
Vas primet radostno u vkhoda,
I brat'ya mech vam otdadut.(8)
Love and friendship will reach you
Past the sombre bolts,
As my free voice reaches you
In your convicts' burrows.
Your heavy fetters will fall,
Your dungeons will collapse,
And freedom will greet you at the entrance,
And your brothers will give you back your sword.

The position in Requiem, however, is quite different. The prisons of the GULag are seen as impenetrable (‘But the prison bolts are firm’); there is no hope of Akhmatova's voice reaching them, and it is to the survivors that the cycle is addressed. The contrast with Pushkin's poem, as Basker notes, throws ‘into emphatic relief the utter bleakness of the modern period’.⁹

Similar effects are achieved by other references to external texts throughout Requiem. The pathos of the description of the woman crushed by the totalitarian state in poem ‘No. 2’ is increased by its overtly folkloric language, alluding to a pre-industrial world. The invocation of death in ‘No. 8’ achieves a particular intensification of emotion from its similarities to Pushkin's appeal to a dead lover in his poem ‘Zaklinanie’ (‘Incantation’) and from parallels in a poem by Chénier, ‘Vienne, vienne la mort!—Que la mort me délivre’ (‘Let death come!—Let death deliver me’), with its appeals to the notions of justice and truth.¹⁰ As Amert has noted, there are also ironic allusions to works of officially promoted Soviet literature which project a contented world grotesquely at variance with the one described by Akhmatova. In ‘Dedication’, for example, the lines ‘Dlya kogo-to veet veter svezhii, / Dlya kogo-to nezhitsya zakat’ (‘For someone a fresh wind is blowing, For someone the sunset is luxurious’) are a contemptuous echo of Vasilii Lebedev-Kumach's widely disseminated hymn to Stalinism, ‘Pesnya o rodine’ (‘Song of the Motherland’), written in 1935, and in particular the lines:

Nad stranoi vesennii veter veet,
S kazhdym dnem vse radostnee zhit'.(11)
A spring wind is blowing across the country,
With every day life is more joyous.

Another function of literary allusion in Requiem is to indicate and memorialise poets known personally to Akhmatova who became victims of Soviet repression. There are, for example, several more or less direct allusions to the work of Mandelstam and Gumilev, who were by this stage completely unable to reach an audience directly.¹²

Notes

1. The work has also, with some reason, been called a narrative poem (poema). For a discussion of its genre see E. Etkind, ‘Bessmertie pamyati. Poema Anna Akhmatovoi Rekviem’, Studia Slavica Finlandensia, vol. 8, 1991, pp. 100-3.

2. One poem, ‘Eto bylo, kogda ulybalsya’, although written in 1940, was not included in the cycle until 1962, see Chukovskaya, Zapiski, vol. 1, p. 65.

3. Haight, Anna Akhmatova, p. 100.

4. Ibid., p. 105.

5. M. Basker, ‘Dislocation and Relocation in Akhmatova's Rekviem’, in Rosslyn, The Speech of Unknown Eyes, vol. 1, pp. 5-25.

6. Etkind, ‘Bessmertie pamyati’; A. L. Crone, ‘Antimetabole in Rekviem: The Structural Disposition of Themes and Motifs’, in Rosslyn, The Speech of Unknown Eyes, vol. 1, pp. 27-41.

7. See M. Jovanović, ‘K razboru “chuzhikh golosov” v Rekvieme Akhmatovoi’, Russian Literature, vol. 15, 1984, pp. 169-81; Etkind, ‘Bessmertie pamyati’; M. M. Kralin, ‘Nekrasovskaya traditsiya u Anny Akhmatovoi’, Nekrasovskii sbornik, no. 8, 1983, pp. 74-86.

8. Pushkin, PSS, vol. 3, p. 7.

9. Basker, in Rosslyn, The Speech of Unknown Eyes, p. 14.

10. Ibid., pp. 17-18; Pushkin, PSS, vol. 3, p. 193; Etkind, ‘Bessmertie pamyati’, pp. 114-15.

11. See S. Amert, In a Shattered Mirror: The Later Poetry of Anna Akhmatova, Stanford, Calif. 1992, pp. 42-3.

12. See Basker, in Rosslyn, The Speech of Unknown Eyes.

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