Anna Akhmatova’s Complicity

This examines Anna Akhmatova's two great late poems Requiem (1935–62) and the famously difficult Poem without a Hero (1940–65). In Requiem, Akhmatova embraces her role as a “world-historical personage.” In a sequence of ten lyrics and various supplementary texts, she challenges Soviet historiography and, as a result, the Soviet Union itself. Requiem, as this chapter shows, is continuous with both the Stalin epigram and Nadezhda Mandel'shtam's memoirs. Meanwhile, Poem without a Hero considers if complicity is always a condition of dissent and if there is a way to oppose totalitarianism without replicating its worldview. The poem attempts to realize a different kind of dissent—one that does not promote Soviet utopianism or the Mandel'shtams' utopian anti-utopianism.