A sweeping sense of despair and hopelessness over the unjustifiable and heinous actions committed against the people and the intelligentsia of the times pervades the works of Akhmatova and the Mandelstams. The hopelessness comes from the systematic breaking down of the individual and their sanity, so that the persecuted are waiting for death to be granted to them as a kind of mercy and relief from their present reality.

In Akhmatova’s poems, as we have seen before, uses herself as her own muse and writes of herself in the third person, although to produce a different effect: here this intentional distancing and separation from herself allows for her to write about herself in more general terms, making her character able to encapsulate the plight of other individuals, artists or not. However on a deeper and physiological level, it is in itself a manifestation of trauma. Separating yourself from a traumatic incident is one coping mechanism, in which you are able to deny that it happened to you, imagining another separate entity to be victim of your history. This is exemplified in part III: “No this is not me – someone else suffers. / I couldn’t stand this: let black drapes / cover what happened…” However even this is confused throughout her writings, where her own identity bleeds through, making the identity of the victim unclear, proving that Akhmatova herself is the true inspiration for her works, in part II she writes:  “This woman is sick, / This woman is alone, / husband in the grave, son in prison, / pray for me.” The “me” at the very end betrays the woman’s identity.

A striking component of these writings was the separation of the individual from the outside world, and more specifically the separation from the family. As we see with Akhmatova, what haunts her throughout her imprisonment was the despair of knowing that the regime had killed her husband and had also imprisoned her son. The uncertainty of whether her son would live or die weighed greatly on her and brought her to the point of welcoming death. In Mandelstam’s writing, she wrote about the imprisonment of her husband and how the regime attempted to systematically break him down, by hindering his sleep patters, as well as potentially making him listen to the far off voice of a woman that in his delusional state thought was the voice of his wife. She writes this: “Methods like these are only possible when if a prisoner’s links to the world are broken from the moment of his arrest.” It was also shocking to witness the acceptance of their reality to the point where exiles were longer something to be afraid of since they were subject to them so frequently, and more surprising the attempt at committing suicide by slashing one’s wrist as “being the most natural thing in the world.” This, then is only one of the many effects of trauma produced by Stalin’s harsh regime.