AKHMATOVA, Anna.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Requiem. A samizdat printing of Akhmatova's masterful poetry cycle, begun in 1935 and recording the horrors and anguish of Stalinist terror through her experience of the arrests of her son, Lev Gumilev, and her common-law husband, Nikolay Punin.Unpublishable in Soviet Russia, Requiem was absent from Akhmatova's collected works. She continued revising it into the early 1960s, preserving it in memory and reciting it only to a small circle of trusted friends. Once committed to paper in 1962, it circulated clandestinely in samizdat. The first book edition appeared in West Germany in 1963, its publisher stating that the work was "received from Russia and published without the consent of the author". Samizdat copies rarely survive, since their possession could expose their owners to prosecution. This example was probably produced in the 1970s and testifies to the cycle's continuing clandestine circulation long after its publication in the West.

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