23 pages • 46 minutes read
Requiem
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Literary Devices
Form/Meter
Requiem is a cycle of lyric poems. It features variations in length and meter throughout the individual poems. They are united by a single overarching theme—the Terror. The form enables her to create a series of vignettes about multiple experiences and the experiences endured by Russians collectively, and to give each aspect of these experiences sufficient attention. Akhmatova traces the complicated variations of emotions she and the other Terror victims undergo: In some lyric poems she is overwhelmed with grief and desperation, in others she is resigned or apathic, and in still others she is proudly defiant. In depicting these emotional states in separate poems, she enables the reader to process the complicated dynamics at play.
The cycle has an almost novelistic quality. The poems that make up Requiem were written over several years. Many of them are charged with an emotional immediacy born of Akhmatova writing them “in the moment” when she was experiencing trauma and pain. Others are more retrospective and reflective, such as the poems written toward the end. The multi-year nature of these poems allows Akhmatova to both record her impressions during the Terror and to assess the Terror’s long-term legacy in the Russian national psyche.
Apostrophe
In Requiem, Akhmatova uses the literary device of the apostrophe—an address to someone or something who may not be literally present within the poem—in three different ways.
She addresses her younger self in “Poem IV,” describing her younger self as “[g]iggling, poking fun, everyone's darling” and “[t]he carefree sinner of Tsarskoye Selo” (Lines 1-2). She shows how large the contrast is between the younger and current versions of herself: “If only you could have foreseen / What life would do with you” (Lines 3-4). She addresses Death in the eighth poem of the cycle, “To Death,” as though Death were a person she could summon and negotiate with. She tells Death that she is waiting and even suggests ways Death could kill her off and end her suffering (Lines 5-13). Both of these forms of apostrophe create a dialogue that illuminates Akhmatova’s experiences and emotional states during the Terror.
Akhmatova also uses apostrophe to address the other victims of the Terror, both the living and the dead. In “Dedication” she asks rhetorically: “Where are you, my unwilling friends / Captives of my two satanic years?” (Lines 21-22). She offers the cycle as a tribute to them: “I send each one of you my salutation, and farewell” (Line 25). In the final part of the “Epilogue,” Akhmatova speaks to the dead, assuring them that they live on within her and will never be forgotten: “I see you, I hear you, I feel you” (Line 2), she tells them, offering her poetry cycle as a means of preserving what the state has attempted to destroy. During a time and place in which “everyone whispered” (Line 8, “Instead of a Preface”) Akhmatova uses apostrophe to emphasize that she is not afraid to raise her voice and reach other victims through the power of her words.
Symbolism
Akhmatova uses symbolism such as star imagery to indirectly allude to elements of the Terror and Stalin’s dictatorship while infusing the suffering of the Russian people with a transcendent and almost dignified quality, as she does in drawing upon biblical figures such as Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Akhmatova’s use of symbolism functions on both a literary and allegorical level. In literary terms, it adds dynamism and richness to the poem’s themes; on an allegorical level, it illustrates the nature of living and suffering under dictatorships and other unjust regimes, anywhere and at any time in history.
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