Requiem

There were, broadly speaking, two literary movements in Soviet Russia. The first was the “official” literature cultivated and sanctioned by the regime itself, a movement that came to be known as “Socialist Realism.” Writers willing to comply with the state’s directives belonged to the Writers’ Union and enjoyed considerable benefits, such as nice living accommodations in major cities such as Moscow or St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), decent access to food and other amenities, and free visits to summer retreats in the Russian countryside. In return, writers produced works that valorized communist ideology and extolled the supposed virtues of the Soviet regime. These “Socialist Realist” works often featured heroic factory or agrarian workers and revolutionary heroes, who fought for justice and equality against the reactionary forces of aristocracy and capitalism. In these works, what mattered most was emphasizing the justness of the communist cause and the power of the revolutionary movement as a whole.

A dissenting literary movement continued underground during the years of censorship and oppression. While these dissident writers adhered to different literary styles and sometimes grouped into small sub-movements, they shared a loyalty to art that refused to bend to the Soviet regime. Akhmatova was one of these dissident writers: She chose to remain loyal to the prerevolutionary Russian literary tradition, and continued to write her intensely personal lyric poems while watching with alarm as her country descended further and further into tyranny.

Akhmatova was both feared and hated by the Stalinist regime. She had already enjoyed considerable popularity and acclaim in literary circles before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and the regime felt she wielded a dangerous influence on Soviet readers. Anxious to sideline her, the regime blacklisted her works from publication and had critics viciously attack her work: One critique branded her “half-nun and half-whore” (Feinstein, Elaine. Anna of all the Russians: A Life of Anna Akhmatova. 2005. Weidenfeld & Nicolson) and derided her signature first-person poetic perspective as hopelessly outdated and bourgeois.

Akhmatova faced serious hardships for decades as a result of this persecution. Since she was unable to publish her work, she lived in poverty and often had to rely on the charity of others to survive. The regime targeted those closest to her, such as arresting her son Lev and her partner. Akhmatova lost many individuals she personally knew during the Terror and afterwards, including her close friend and fellow poet, Osip Mandelstam, who died en route to one of the Gulag camps during the Terror. As someone with direct personal experience of the Terror, Akhmatova wrote Requiem as both a testament to those who perished and as an act of memory and defiance against the regime that had tried so hard to silence her.