Akhmatova, "Requiem": interpretation of the poem

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

A truly iconic figure in Russian literature is Anna Akhmatova.

"Requiem" researchers call the pinnacle of her lyrics. All themes are organically intertwined in the work of the poetess: love experiences, a poet and history, a poet and power, the culture of the 19th century, the “silver” age, Soviet realities … Akhmatova lived a long life: a spoiled girl born in pre-revolutionary Russia, a young poetess from the beau monde was destined to know the full weight of the Soviet stone den. It is therefore natural that the breadth of her creative range can be called comprehensive: love lyrics, civil poetry, folklore elements, antique themes, biblical stories.

"Requiem", Akhmatova: summary

Work on the poem lasted from 1935 to 1940, in the most difficult, bloody and terrible time. In it, the poetess managed to organically combine the chronicle line and the genre tradition of funeral lamentation. From the Latin language "Requiem" is translated as calm. Why did Akhmatova give this particular name to her work? Requiem is a funeral service traditional for the Catholic and Lutheran churches. Later, this term acquired a broader meaning: they began to designate the commemoration of the deceased. The poetess, as it were, singsand myself, and my friends in misfortune, and all of Russia.

Akhmatova, "Requiem": semantic plans

Modern literary scholars distinguish four layers in the poem: the first is obvious and is, as it were, “on the surface” - the grief of the lyrical heroine describing the night arrest of a loved one. It should be noted here that the poetess relies on personal experience: her son L. Gumilyov, her husband N. Punin and fellow writer O. Mandelstam were arrested in the same way. Fear, confusion, confusion - who can know more about this than Akhmatova? "Requiem", however, is not limited to this: the tears of the lyrical heroine in the text merge with the weeping of thousands of Russian women who suffered from the same misfortune. Thus, the personal situation expands, becomes more global. In the third semantic layer of the poem, the fate of the heroine is interpreted as a symbol of the era. Here, the researchers point to the theme of the “monument” arising in this connection, which goes back to the work of Derzhavin and Pushkin. However, for Akhmatova, the monument is not a symbol of glory, but rather the embodiment of intravital and posthumous suffering. That is why she asks to put it near the prison, where the woman spent so many terrible hours with her unwitting "girlfriends". The image of a monument made of stone merges with the motif of "fossil" - this epithet is one of the most frequent in "Requiem". In the epilogue, the monument becomes, as it were, the visible embodiment of the metaphor of "petrified suffering". The image of the suffering poetess merges with the image of the perishing Russia torn to pieces, a terrible era - this is Anna Akhmatova.

"Requiem" has a fourth semantic plan. This is the grief of a mother whose son was repressed. It corresponds to the torment of the Mother of God, watching the ascent of Jesus Christ to Golgotha. According to the poetess, the torment of every mother who loses her son is comparable to the suffering of the Virgin Mary. So the personal tragedy of one woman and one child becomes universal.