Anna Akhmatova Requiem Poem Summary

Written between 1935 and 1940, Anna Akhmatova’s “Requiem” follows a grieving mother as she endures the Great Purge. Joseph Stalin, the Soviet Union’s General Secretary, unabatedly pursued eliminating dissenters and, consequently, accused or killed hundreds of thousands who allegedly perpetrated political transgressions (“Repression and Terror: Kirov Murder and Purges”). Despite the fifteen-year censorship, Akhmatova avoided physical persecution, though she saw her son jailed for seventeen months (Bailey 324). The first-person speaker in “Requiem,” assumed to be Akhmatova due to the speaker’s identical experience of crying aloud “for seventeen months” (Section 5, Line 1), changes her sentiments towards deaths as reflected in the poem’s tone

Instead of mourning, she focuses on the consistent, unchanging events in her life. Despite her reluctance to accept her son’s imprisonment – “I doubt that it occurred” (Section 6, Line 2) – she eventually confesses that “I [she] was prepared, am somehow ready for the test.” (Section 7, Lines 3-4). Akhmatova becomes more brooding and subdued, as she is “prepared” “for the test” that the Purge will bring. Likely, she believes this “test” will be her son’s death, since section seven is titled “The Sentence;” Lev’s trial took place in 1939, the same year in which “The Sentence” was written, and the trial ended in an execution sentence that was later replaced with exile and forced labor (Bailey 324). By declaring she has “so much to do today [the trial day]: kill memory, kill pain, turn heart into a stone,” (Section 7, Lines 5-7), she catalogues tasks to show that her sorrow remains, but that her feelings are adapting. She will become more prepared for death through “kill[ing] memory” and “kill[ing] pain.” Most importantly, she will figuratively “turn [her] heart into a stone,” an impossibility that she employs to underline her newfound somberness. This sentiment is reinforced in section eight’s title “To Death” and its first line, “You will come in any case” (Section 8, Line 1), as she recognizes death will arrive

Despite the Purge, she sees her country rising out of the oppression. When discussing the possibility that “a gag” will “bind my [her] tortured mouth” (Epilogue, Part 2, Lines 13-14), she asserts that she would be “proud to have my [her] memory graced” as a monument (Epilogue, Part 2, Lines 17-18). The “gag” is an implicit metaphor for censorship, and the adjective “tortured” exacerbates the extent to which she has been stifled. Imaging that her “memory” will be “graced” as a monument assumes that her homeland will have freedom restored, so the tone she has towards death, including her own, is that of sacrificial triumph. She describes death as “blissful” (Epilogue, Part 2, Line 27), although she fears others will “lose the clangor of the Black Marias” (Epilogue, Part 2, Line 28) and forget what happened during the Purge. Nevertheless, the last couplet cements her optimism, as she describes “a prison dove