to heroically materialistic verse.
What all this comes down to is that Requiem was created but not (widely or publicly) disseminated at the height of the Stalinist purges, which proved to be physically dangerous and fatal to millions. There is, indeed, an especially strong element of danger in Requiem because the poems in the piece deal directly with the pain, fear, and uncertainty of an imprisoned loved one's absence. Knowing the background for the creation of the poems lends power to them, and indeed the untitled quatrain (written in 1961) and "Instead of a Preface" (written 1957), dated years after the death of Stalin, are plainly meant to set the context for collecting the various poems written when Stalin's power, or perhaps revolutionary excess, was at its height. As Reynolds puts it (210) in a review of an oratorio based on Requiem, the poems as a group provide "testimony to the rigors of the Stalin regime. The poems (as translated) are very harsh, and the imagery is at once beautiful and harrowing." However, by no means is it necessary to know the historical details of Gumilev's imprisonment to realize that the emotional content of Requiem turns on the poet's concern and longing love for a jailed son and that the son's imprisonment is occurring in revolutionary Russia at a specific--and savagely ironic and bleak--period of its history.
The pattern of thematic presentation in Requiem suggests that one of Akhmatova's principal objectives is to create a structure of meaning and emotion around the experience of politically enforced separation from the loved one. The introductory quatrain positions the poet as a loyal citizen, which is to say loyal to the homeland, though perhaps not necessarily the ruling regime. Indeed, the poet has disdained emigration to the protection of the "alien wings" (384) of, say, Paris, which was chosen by other men and women of Russian letters in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. Instead, the p...