Reading Notes W13: Akhmatova, Part B

Anna Akhmatova (565-574)

  • Anna Akhmatova was one of the great Russian poets of the 20th century
  • she expressed herself in an intensely personal, poetic voice, whether as lover, wife, and mother or as a national poet commemorating the mute agony of millions
  • she was born in a suburb of the Black Sea port of Odessa
  • she was the daughter of a maritime engineer and an independent woman of revolutionary sympathies 
  • took the pen name Akhamotova from her maternal great-grandmother, who was of Tatar descent
  • in 1910, she married Niolai Gumilyov
  • although they divorced, his arrest and execution for counterrevolutionary activities in 1921 put her status into question
  • during WWII, her interest in larger musical forms motivated her to develop cycles of poems instead of her accustomed individual lyrics
  • Requiem (1940) is a lyrical cycle, a series of poems written on a theme, but it is also a short epic narrative
  • the "I" of the speaker throughout remains anonymous, in spite of the fact that Akhomotva describers her personal emotions in the central poems
  • Requiem is both public and private: a picture of individual grief linked to the country's disaster, and a vision of community suffering that extends beyond contemporary national tragedy into medieval Russian history and Greek mythology (567)
  • Akhmatova recounts the growing anguish of a mother as her son is arrested and sentenced to death
  • the grieving speaker returns from religious transcendence to earth and current history
  • it is their memory she perpetuates by writing Requiem, and it is in their memory that she herself lives on

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