SOURCE: Driver, Sam. “Anna Akhmatova.” In European Writers: The Twentieth Century, vol. 10, edited by George Stade, pp. 1521-42. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1990.

In the following excerpt, Driver provides a brief overview of Akhmatova's Requiem.

Now that Akhmatova has been for so long fixed among the premier poets of Russia, it is difficult to recall that in the middle to late 1950's she was very nearly forgotten in the West and that in the Soviet Union she was considered to be an obscure figure, certainly not one who was very “relevant.” Older readers typically remembered “the left-hand glove drawn onto the right” and often a good deal more, but most were surprised that Akhmatova was still among the living. As individual poems found their way into print both in the Soviet Union and abroad, it became clear that Akhmatova not only had retained both a high level of...