Requiem

Epilogue to Requiem by Anna Akhmatova

1.
I have learned how faces fall,
How terror can escape from lowered eyes,
How suffering can etch cruel pages
Of cuneiform-like marks upon the cheeks.
I know how dark or ash-blond strands of hair
Can suddenly turn white. I've learned to recognise
The fading smiles upon submissive lips,
The trembling fear inside a hollow laugh.
That's why I pray not for myself
But all of you who stood there with me
Through fiercest cold and scorching July heat
Under a towering, completely blind red wall.

2.
The hour has come to remember the dead.
I see you, I hear you, I feel you:
The one who resisted the long drag to the open window;
The one who could no longer feel the kick of familiar
soil beneath her feet;
The one who, with a sudden flick of her head, replied,

'I arrive here as if I've come home!'
I'd like to name you all by name, but the list
Has been removed and there is nowhere else to look.
So,
I have woven you this wide shroud out of the humble
words
I overheard you use. Everywhere, forever and always,
I will never forget one single thing. Even in new
grief.
Even if they clamp shut my tormented mouth
Through which one hundred million people scream;
That's how I wish them to remember me when I am dead
On the eve of my remembrance day.
If someone someday in this country
Decides to raise a memorial to me,
I give my consent to this festivity
But only on this condition - do not build it
By the sea where I was born,
I have severed my last ties with the sea;
Nor in the Tsar's Park by the hallowed stump
Where an inconsolable shadow looks for me;
Build it here where I stood for three hundred hours
And no-one slid open the bolt.
Listen, even in blissful death I fear
That I will forget the Black Marias,
Forget how hatefully the door slammed and an old woman
Howled like a wounded beast.
Let the thawing ice flow like tears
From my immovable bronze eyelids
And let the prison dove coo in the distance
While ships sail quietly along the river.

[March 1940. Fontannyi Dom]





















Background:

Requiem, Akhmatova's poem-cycle, was a literary monument to the victims of Stalin's Terror. The earliest poem dates from 1935 and the remainder was apparently written in 1938-40. In 1957 Akhmatova added a prose foreword. The work was first published in 1963 in Munich. In Russia it did not appear until 1987. The central core of Requiem consists of ten short, numbered poems. Originally the first reflected the arrest of her husband Nikolai Punin in 1935 and other close friends, but primarily the poems deal with the author's experiences and her agony following the arrest of her son Lev Gumilyov in 1938. Lev had been arrested first time in 1935 and released after Akhmatova wrote a letter to Stalin, ending with the words, "Help, Iosif Vissarionovich!"