Anna Akhmatova's Lyric Poems in "Requiem"

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 dow

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ends / Of those two diabolical years" (385) who were presumably too frightened to be associated with someone held in disrepute by the regime. In "Prologue," the line of thought seems to be a look at the progressive steps of despair. The poet suggests that all Russia was caught up in the phenomenon of a regime administered "Under bloody boots" (386), then identifies herself with the many nameless others, whether prisoners or prisoners' loved ones, who are undergoing the terrors of both certainty and uncertainty about the likelihood of execution at the hands of a man-made state, even as nature, according to Stanza II--the quiet river Don, the moon--almost perversely continues its ordinary, familiar course, impinging on human experience. Such perversity, indeed, explains the evocation of alienation in Stanza III: "It is not I, it is somebody else who is suffering" (387). In Stanza IV of "Prologue," the image of the bending poplar (388) can be compared to the bent angles of a gallows, and the poet ponders "how many / Innocent lives are ending now" (388). Stanza V has a despairing tone that can only be associated with specifically maternal agony: "For seventeen months I've been crying out, / Calling you home . . . And it's not clear t
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Approximate Word count = 2322
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)