Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova wrote Requiem, the poem of Stalin's terror, and kept it unwritten for twenty years because writing it down would have killed people. She began before the revolution as a leading figure of Acmeism, a movement against symbolist vagueness, and her early love poems made her famous by 1914. What followed took almost everything. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921. Her son Lev Gumilev was arrested three times and spent more than a decade in the camps. Her friend Osip Mandelstam died in transit to Kolyma. She was unpublishable for long stretches, was denounced by Zhdanov in 1946 in terms deliberately obscene, and was expelled from the writers' union, which meant no ration card. Requiem was composed in the queues outside the Leningrad prisons where women waited to hand in parcels; she memorised it, and trusted friends memorised sections, and the paper was burned after each recitation. Its prologue records a woman in the queue asking whether she could describe this, and Akhmatova answering that she could. It was not published in Russia until 1987. She survived the siege of Leningrad, was evacuated to Tashkent, and lived to be honoured in Italy and Oxford in the last two years of her life. She refused every opportunity to emigrate, in 1917 and afterwards, and made the refusal a subject. Isaiah Berlin visited her in Leningrad in 1945 and the meeting was reported to Stalin, which she believed caused her denunciation the following year and her son's re-arrest. Requiem is now on the Russian school curriculum. A monument stands opposite the Kresty prison, at the spot she asked for in the poem's epilogue.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history