The purpose of this research is to examine the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova's series of lyric poems collected under the title Requiem. The plan of the research will be to set forth the social, historical, and literary context for the creation of Requiem and then to discuss the pattern of ideas in the work and the means by which these ideas emerge through it.
The poetic significance of Requiem cannot be understood or appreciated without appreciation of the context in which the poems that make it up were created. That context, simply put, was the Stalinist terror in the Soviet Union and the precariousness with which individuals or groups might dare to oppose the regime. The vast majority of the poems were written between 1935 and 1940, the years during which Akhmatova's third husband, Nikolai Punin, and her son from her first husband, Lev Gumilev, were arrested and imprisoned by the Stalinist regime. Gumilev remained imprisoned between 1938 and 1945 (Akhmatova 218). Given the widely known, paranoid horrors and excesses of the Stalinist regime, together with the fact that she had been recognized as an important poet during the czarist period and had always refused to "write optimistic verse that glorified Soviet accomplishments" (Grolier), it may seem unclear why Akhmatova herself was never arrested. On the other hand, as Kelly points out, the fact is that Akhmatova rather cleverly avoided arrest, particularly with regard to Requiem: " It was too dangerous to write the poem down; over a period of five years verses scribbled on pieces of paper were memorized by trusted friends and then burned" (Kelly 46). Further Akhmatova's work appears to have been subject to formal and informal sanctions and censorship. She was not allowed to publish anything in Russia from 1922 to 1940, and in 1946 she was formally expelled from the Soviet Writers Union for producing "erotic and mystical" (Grolier; also see Kelly 46) verse--as opposed, presumably, ...