Requiem (A. Akhmatova)

Frontispiece of “Requiem” from the edition “Tovarishchestvo Zarubezhnykh Pisatelei” (1969).

Title:
Rekviem [Requiem]

Author: Anna Andreevna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

Years of writing: 1934-December 1962

Year of first publication: 27 November 1963

Publisher: Tovarishchestvo Zarubezhnykh Pisatelei

Place of publication: Munich

Description:
Anna Akhmatova wrote the first parts of Rekviem (Requiem) in 1934, with the intention of creating a poetic cycle, but by the early 1960s, when she made the work public in its final version, the text was perceived by most commentators as a single poem. The core of the work is linked to the most painful years of the poet’s life and was mainly written from 1938 to 1940. During the 1930s, Akhmatova’s family were victims of Stalinist repression. In 1934, her third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, was dismissed from the Russian Museum and in 1935 was arrested. Akhmatova’s son, Lev Gumilev, was also arrested in the same year, having been detained since 1933. Akhmatova went to Moscow and succeeded in getting her husband and son released thanks to the intercession of Boris Pasternak. Following the assassination of the Leningrad Party Secretary Sergei Kirov, the repressions of the ezhovshchina in Leningrad became harsher. On 13^th March 1938, Gumilev was again arrested and sentenced to five years in a Gulag in Noril’sk. In 1949, after the war, in which he fought on the front line, he was sentenced to a further ten years in a lager. He was released under the 1956 amnesty. Punin was also rearrested in 1949 and died in the Abez’skii camp in 1953. It was this series of painful and dramatic events that gave life to the verses of Requiem, although its narrative focus revolves around the first seventeen months of her son’s imprisonment in 1938-1939 while Anna waited in anguish with other women fearing for loved ones imprisoned in Kresty, the prison “of the Crosses”, in Leningrad. For a long time, at least until 1962, the work remained hidden among burnt verses, preserved only in the poet’s memory, (cf. Timenchik 1989: 3). At the beginning of the 1960s, Lidiia Chukovskaia was instrumental in the work’s rebirth and it began to circulate via the samizdat (cf. Vasil’evskaia 2012: web).
It should be remembered that Anna Akhmatova wrote only three works which she explicitly called poems: U samogo moria (Right on the Sea), Putem vseia zemli (All Along the Earth) and Poėma bez geroia (Poem without a Hero). Requiem was conceived as a cycle of poems and it was only in the last years of her life, largely as a consequence of the reactions of readers and critics following the work’s publication outside the Soviet Union, that she rethought the poem as a single text (cf. Struve 1969: 22-24). Boris Zaitsev, the first to publish the text in Munich in 1963, defined Requiem as a collection of several pieces of verse linked to each other in such a way as to appear as an organic composition (cf. Zaitsev 1964: web). The debate over whether Requiem is a cycle or a single poem was taken up by several critics, including Efim Ėtkind in the 1980s (cf. Riccio 2001: 183-184). There have been many translations into the main European languages. In Italy, thanks to Carlo Riccio, the work appeared in the first issue of the journal “Tempo presente” in January 1964 (pp. 3-9), with a brief introduction by Gustavo Herling. This version was corrected by Akhmatova herself, with annotations on C. Riccio’s typescript, and was republished in “La Fiera Letteraria” on 20^th December 1964 (cf. Riccio 2001: 180), to mark Akhmatova winning the Etna-Taormina prize (cf. Sabbatini 2016: 255-56). This was followed by publication in the collection published by Einaudi in 1966 (cf. Achmatova 1966: 24-55). While Poėma bez geroia was partly published in Beg vremeni (The Race of Time), in Leningrad by Sovetskii Pisatel’ in 1965, Requiem was not officially published in the Soviet Union for over twenty years (cf. Klots 2019: web), although it continued to circulate thanks to the samizdat. In 1966, immediately after Akhmatova’s death, 25 numbered copies of the typescript (partly preserved in the Fontanny Dom Museum in St. Petersburg) were circulating clandestinely in Moscow.
It was not until 1987, at the height of Gorbachev’s glasnost’, that Requiem was published in No. 3 of “Oktiabr'”, thanks to Zoia Tomashevskaia, and immediately afterwards, in No. 6 of the Leningrad magazine “Neva”, edited by Lidiia Chukovskaia. In Italy, reaction to the Soviet publication was immediate and gave new resonance to the name of Anna Akhmatova: Fiammetta Cucurnia, in “La Repubblica” on 21^st March 1987, defined Requiem as a work on the horrors of the Stalin era that focused attention on Soviet history and coming to terms with the age of terror. Shortly afterwards, two new Italian versions of the text appeared: one by E. Pascucci in 1990, and one by M. Colucci in 1992, included in the collection La corsa del tempo published by Einaudi. With the publication of Requiem in the USSR, Akhmatova entered the canon of writers considered to embody the conscience of the Russian people, reawakening the memory of suffering and injustice in an era of violent contradictions.

Marco Sabbatini
[30th June 2021]

Translation by Cecilia Martino

Bibliography

• Akhmatova A.A., Poema bez geroia (1965), it. transl. Poema senza eroe e altre poesie, a cura di C. Riccio, Einaudi, Torino 1966.
• Klots Ia., “Reqviem” Akhmatovoi v tamizdate. 56 pisem. K 56-letiiu pervoi publikatsii “Rekviema”, “Colta”, 24/06/2019, https://www.colta.ru/articles/literature/21637-rekviem-ahmatovoy-v-tamizdate-56-pisem?fbclid=IwAR3EFZmW1Vlg2UfNqzi1Bn22cOOSAIhvEj4l3kifmF_32ldJ7Gdhtch5_lc, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Riccio C., Il “Requiem” achmatoviano: poema o ciclo di poesie?, “Russica Romana”, 8 (2001): 177-185.
• Sabbatini M., Anna Akhmatova et la Communauté européenne des écrivains dans les années 1960, in T. Victoroff (ed.), Anna Akhmatova et la poésie européenne, Peter Lang, Bruxelles 2016: 243-264.
• Struve G., Kak byl vpervye izdan “Rekviem”, Anna Akhmatova, Rekviem, Tovarishchestvo Zarubezhnykh Pisatelei, Mjunchen 1969: 22-24.
• Timenchik R., Predislovie k knige “Rekviem”, Anna Akhmatova, Rekviem, Roman Timenchik, V 5 kn., Izd.vo MPI, Moskva 1989: 3-25.
• Vasil’evskaia O., ‘…Pod zvon tiuremnykh kliuchei’. Akhmatovskii “Requiem”: iz istorii sozdaniia i izdaniia, “Nashe nasledie”, 102 (2012), http://www.nasledie-rus.ru/podshivka/10214.php, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).
• Zaitsev B., ‘Dni’, “Russkaia mysl”, n. 2096, 07/01/1964, http://az.lib.ru/z/zajcew_b_k/text_1964_dni1.shtml, online (last accessed: 30/06/2021).