At first glance, Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem appears to be straightforward artistic representation of unimaginable pain and oppression. Joseph Stalin’s purges killed and imprisoned a huge percentage of creative individuals during the 1930s, and his harsh policies remained until his death in 1953. Many artists, writers, and political dissidents were imprisoned in Gulag work camps, and many died or were executed there. Millions were interned in the gulags at different times, and the conditions were unimaginably harsh. With little knowledge of Akhmatova’s life, and reading Requiem for the first time, I imagined it to be a tale of her time in the Gulag. Lines such as “We don’t know, we are the same everywhere. / We only hear the repellent clank of keys, / the heavy steps of soldiers” bring to mind the frustration of a prisoner driven mad by the routine and banality of unjust and cruel captivity. Akhmatova’s unusual use of point of view clued me in to Requiem’s real background: it is not story of Akhmatova’s time in the Gulag, but her experiences when her loved ones suffer that fate. It is an easy inclination to read the poems as 3rd person, with Akhmatova addressing herself as “You”, but the frequent mention of her son gave me pause, and I eventually recognized the true narrative behind the cycle.

Another assigned work, Nadezhda Mandelstam’s Hope Against Hope immediately illuminates any obscured or ambiguous sections of Requiem, as the female Mandelstam gives her personal account of Akhmatova’s association with the Gulag and other forms of the Purges. We learn that the “son” (I flung myself at the executioner’s feet. / You are my son and my terror.”) in Requiem is Akhmatova’s son Lev, who was imprisoned in a Leningrad-area Gulag camp. This took an enormous emotional toll on Akhmatova, as she visited Lev and witnessed his pain firsthand. She writes, “If I could show your former ironic self, / that once carefree sinner of Tsarkoye Selo, / so popular in your circle of friends”. The sentiment offered here is universal: humor (specifically irony) before tragedy is often hard to comprehend as existing, and is portrayed as unimaginable in writings after the event. To offer a current instance of the phenomenon, I must turn to the recent election. There was much disgust among liberal thinkers and comedians at the irony prevalent before the surprise of November 8th. “How could we have acted like this”,  and “How could we be so oblivious to the possibility of catastrophe” were themes repeated often on social media as a collective post-mortem began after the results were finalized. This is an almost direct analog to Akhmatova’s nostalgia and regret for her son’s once “Ironic, carefree, [sinning]” past, when all were oblivious to the tragedy that would soon become fate and reality for so many of their friends and family.

As revealed by Nadezhda Mandelstam, the other subtext of Requiem becomes apparent. Akhmatova’s husband, Nikolay Punin, would meet his death in the Gulag. Her poems, which may be viewed as suicidal when lacking this knowledge, deal intimately with the concept and theory of death, presumably after Punin passed. As she writes in the epilogue of Requiem, “The hour of remembrance has grown close again. /  I see you, hear you, feel you.” Although Lev made it out of the camp alive, Akhmatova would live the rest of her life with the loss of Punin. As is evident in Requiem, Akhmatova also believed that Lev would most likely die in captivity, and this fear greatly influenced her poetry. Helpless against a brutal regime and powerless to save her husband and son, Akhmatova turned to the only area where she could have a voice: art. Her poetry in Requiem attests to the brilliance that emerged from this period of tragedy and loss.