Neither Requiem, nor Stabat Mater: Anna Akhmatova’s Mother as a Figure of Collective Defiance in Requiem

Abstract

In her long poem Requiem Anna Akhmatova addresses her most horrific years during the Stalinist regime, when her son was imprisoned and she was waiting, along with hundreds of grief-stricken women, to learn what sentence her loved one would receive. But Akhmatova employs voice to stage a seemingly compliant muted figure of maternal suffering that, most importantly, talks back. While acknowledging the private suffering of a bereaved mother, the poet expresses the need to write about the experience. Indeed, the aim of Requiem was to offer testimony, rather than a consolation, in the form of an active gesture of voice against silence and voicelessness.