SOURCE: Bailey, Sharon M. “An Elegy for Russia: Anna Akhmatova's Requiem.” Slavic and East European Journal 43, no. 2 (summer 1999): 324-46.

In the following essay, Bailey defines Akhmatova's Requiem as an elegy of mourning, particularly giving voice to the grief of the women whose loved ones were imprisoned or executed during the years of Stalinist rule in the Soviet Union.

Introduction

In the final lines of Akhmatova's Requiem is the image of a bronze monument to the poet, standing motionless in front of the Leningrad Prison and crying with each spring thaw. Although this statue has not yet been erected, Requiem itself is nothing less than such a monument. Within the course of the cycle, Akhmatova reconstructs her experience of the Stalinist Terror. After the arrest of her son, the fabric of her life dissolves in grief, loneliness and despair. Reconciliation is, however, eventually found in the verbal commemoration of...