SOURCE: Wells, David N. “Stalinism and War: Works of the 1930s and 1940s.” In Anna Akhmatova: Her Poetry, pp. 64-95. Oxford, England: Berg, 1996.

In the following excerpt, Wells discusses structure, theme, and inspirational sources of Akhmatova's Requiem.

Akhmatova's most sustained piece of overtly oppositional writing in the 1930s is the cycle Requiem (I, 359-70).¹ Although the epigraph and prose introduction to the cycle were both added later, the cycle as such was put together in 1940.² The poems which make it up appear to have been inspired by several different episodes in Akhmatova's biography. Although the most immediate impetus is clearly Akhmatova's experience, following her son's arrest in 1938, in the queues of women waiting outside prisons attempting to receive news of their imprisoned menfolk, there are also additional sources. The first of the ten numbered poems, ‘Uvodili tebya na rassvete’ (‘They took you away at dawn’, I, 363) is dated...