SOURCE: Amert, Susan. “Akhmatova's ‘Song of the Motherland’: Rereading the Opening Texts of Rekviem.” Slavic Review 49, no. 3 (fall 1990): 374-89.

In the following essay, Amert offers a close reading of the first two texts of Akhmatova's Requiem.

Pokoinyi Alig'eri sozdal by desiatyi krug ada. 

Anna Akhmatova

Hostias et preces tibi, Domine, laudis offerimus: tu suscipe pro animabus illis, quarum hodie memoriam facimus: fac eas, Domine, de morte transire ad vitam. 

the requiem mass

Anna Akhmatova's Rekviem is a deceptively simple piece. Compared to the opacity and self-conscious literariness of Poema bez geroia, Rekviem seems transparent, much like Akhmatova's early lyrics, and appears to demand little in the way of commentary or elucidation.¹ Its very form and scope, however, as well as the dates of its composition (1935-1961), identify it as a product of the “later Akhmatova”—the Akhmatova who resumed writing in the mid-1930s after a decade of...