Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

Fear and the Muse
A Review by Michael Scammell

One day in the fall of 1939, a tall middle-aged woman dressed in black slowly shuffled forward in a long line of hundreds of other women outside the Kresty prison in Leningrad. It was freezing cold, and like the others she was holding a package of food for an imprisoned relative, in this case her only son. He had already served a term of hard labor on the White Sea Canal, and was now in another part of the gulag in the far north of Russia. Suddenly someone in the line called the tall woman by name, causing a blue-lipped younger woman behind her to start with surprise. "Can you describe this?" asked the younger one. "Yes, I can," said the tall woman. "I can."

The tall middle-aged woman was Anna Akhmatova, one of Russia's greatest modern poets, and Requiem 1935- 1940, the work she wrote about her experiences during those years, became one of the greatest Russian poems of the twentieth century. It stands beside Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, a very different kind of work, as a precious monument not simply to the ordeal of a single individual, but also to the unparalleled suffering of a whole people, the Russian people under the communist yoke, and especially during the worst excesses of the Stalinist terror:

At first light, they led you away,
and like
a mourner at a funeral I followed
your bier.
Children were crying in the
front room.
The candle guttered under the icon
and your lips were cold, as if painted,
your forehead deathly wet.
These moments I shall never forget.