Commentary on Anna Akhmatova's poem "Requiem".

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Anna Akhmatova

Background 

  Considered Russia's finest female poet, Akhmatova is known for her accessible style and concrete images. Her poems deal with personal issues of love and suffering, but are often interpreted as “metaphors for the plight of the Russian people as a whole”. Her work, considered “subversive during the Stalinist era”, was banned for many years. After Stalin's death in 1953, her reputation was gradually restored and she was able to resume publishing original verse.

  Akhmatova was born Anna Andreevna Gorenko on June 11, 1889, near Odessa, on the coast of the Black Sea. She began to write poetry when she was eleven, and her first poem was published in 1907.

  Her work is often considered part of the Acmeist movement, and is generally divided into two periods: the first, associated with the love lyrics she produced in her youth, and the second, linked to poems composed during and after her long period of silence.

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  Her death in March 1966 marked the end of a “long, illustrious, and eventful career”.

Requiem - an elegy of mourning

“Requiem” is structured as a complex cycle of fifteen poems and one prose paragraph, written during the height of the Stalinist Terror, in which as many as 40 million people were arrested, exiled or executed. Within the course of the cycle, Akhmatova reconstructs her experience under the repressive regime. After the arrest of her son, the “fabric of her life dissolves in grief, loneliness and despair.” “Reconciliation is, however, eventually found in the verbal commemoration of the grief”. ...

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