Stalin had declared a genocidal war against his own people, and Leningrad was one of his most visible victims. And yet the terror wanted to remain anonymous, unnamed. “Enemies of the people” were harangued daily on the radio, in newspapers, at countless meetings, but it was forbidden to speak of where they were being sent as they disappeared. The words “terror,” “prison,” “camp,” and “arrest” were not spoken aloud and seemed not to exist in the everyday vocabulary. The infamous black vans that carried off the arrested had fake signs of their sides: “Meat” or “Milk.”117 People called them Black Ravens or Black Marias. Lydia Chukovskaya (daughter of Kornei Chukovsky) recalled that in the “prison lines women stood in silence or, whispering, used very impersonal forms of speech: ‘they came,’ ‘he was taken.’” The official slogan for the country, by which everyone allegedly lived at that time, was Stalin’s constantly quoted “Life has become better, life has become merrier.” In that atmosphere it took enormous inner strength for Akhmatova to violate that taboo and write about her officially “merry” times:
It was when only the dead
Smiled, glad of the peace.
And like an unnecessary bangle
Leningrad dangled around its prisons.
A mythos without names is impossible; every mythos demands that people, things, and events be named. Naming is an ineluctable part of mythos creation. The ritual importance of naming is confirmed by the principle Nomina sunt odiosa (“names are odious,” that is, they may not be spoken), prevalent in many ancient cultures. In Requiem, Akhmatova fearlessly named things:
The stars of death stood above us,
And innocent Russia writhed
Beneath the bloody boots
And the Black Marias’ tires.
The fifteen verse fragments of Requiem form a terrible mosaic of daily life in terror-stricken Leningrad: arrest, desperate pleas for mercy, endless lines by the prison wall, sentencing. The emotional culmination of Requiem are two stanzas called “Crucifixion,” in which Akhmatova compares the fate of her arrested son to the trials of the crucified Christ and she accents the suffering of Mary. Those two fragments are Akhmatova’s tour de force and the key to Requiem, which would be better called Stabat mater dolorosa.
Akhmatova had an old Russian musical model, the kondak, a liturgical song of Byzantine origin that relates in dramatic form episodes from the life of Jesus Christ and his mother, Mary. The epigraph to “Crucifixion” is taken from a kondak and indicates this connection. In her work Akhmatova even loosely followed the kondak structure: introduction—relating the drama—and a final edifying conclusion. Like the kondak, Akhmatova’s Requiem is a kind of mystery play, retelling the Passion of Christ for a modern audience.
Akhmatova’s use of traditional religious imagery echoed a similar experience of Stravinsky’s, who in 1930 composed his Symphony of Psalms, one of Akhmatova’s favorite musical works. But she was facing a task of extraordinary difficulty: she was the first to find the words and the art form to respond to a genocide unmatched in world history. Later attempts to describe and interpret the Holocaust showed how difficult it is to treat such a horrible theme artistically. Words, pictures, and music seem inadequate to depict simple, horrible facts. In addition, Akhmatova was working in total isolation against Stalin’s enormous propaganda machine, selecting grain by grain the needed words of grief, despair, and protest.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, meeting Akhmatova in the early 1960s when he was collecting material for his monumental work on the Stalinist labor camps, The Gulag Archipelago, said of Requiem, “It’s too bad that in your poetry you are talking about only one person.” Solzhenitsyn thought that the accent on the suffering of mother and son narrowed the scale of the national catastrophe. As if in response to him, Joseph Brodsky noted, “In fact Akhmatova was not trying to create a national tragedy. Requiem is still the poet’s autobiography, because everything it describes happened to the poet.”118
Requiem’s power lies in the way its mirroring of the fate of its author and her son reflects the tragedy of a city and a nation. Akhmatova’s talking about her personal experiences personalizes a tragedy that in its bare facts is beyond human comprehension. That is the key to the poem. Akhmatova says in Requiem that she is writing it
Listening to my delirium
That seems by now to be another’s.
As to the mechanism of Requiem’s creation and its emotional effect, Brodsky commented,
