SOURCE: Driver, Sam N. “Later Works.” In Anna Akhmatova, pp. 125-55. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1972.

In the following excerpt, Driver offers a thematic overview of Akhmatova's Requiem.

Unlike the Poem Without a Hero, Requiem is not a private poem. It is not so much a new experiment in Akhmatova's poetry as a culmination of a style perfected over the decades preceding; Akhmatova organizes her characteristic devices and techniques into an amazingly powerful statement which requires no elaboration or “explanation.”

Neither is the Requiem a private poem in the sense that the subject, unlike that of the “Petersburg Tale,” is immediately accessible to anyone with a knowledge of Russia's recent history—and all too well-known to those who lived in Russia during the late 1930's. The poem is, if not private, deeply personal: but Akhmatova is able to generalize her own shattering experience into an epic cry for her...