One night in Leningrad, 1945, Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova find themselves alone in conversation. Though at first Akhmatova remained hesitant and restrained, and they obligingly engage in the mundane conversations on university and scholarship. Eventually, they come to discuss literature and poetry and the foundations of the poem Requiem. Requiem is one of Akhmatova’s most celebrated poems, yet it was a poem which was not written, but committed to memory. Akhmatova’s work is significant for she lost much to the Russian regime. Her first husband, the poet Gumilev was executed on what she believed to be false charges. And later, in 1938, her son was taken to the prison camps for 17 months, his only discernable crime – for bearing the name
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Akhmatova lost much to the political regime, yet by continuing to live in the country, she became a great liberator of the Russian people through her …show more content…
Individual matters and personal reflection are not utilitarian, they do not constitute work. Yet for Akhmatova, it was her responsibility to remember the events of Stalin’s terror. Akhmatova’s work was criticised by the Soviet regime for being too idealistic, too Romantic and strewn Religious jargon to be useful to society. And when her writing was banned from publishing, she found herself impoverished; unable to write (Berlin: 2004). In order to make ends meet, she explains to Berlin that she had found work translating famous books from Russian. Yet she denounced the work she translated and young poets who she saw to not speak from the soul, to only use their talents for the wrong purposes, to reify the regime which favoured them so. Akhmatova described them as ‘literary bandits; prostitutes of their gifts, and exploiters of public tastes. Mayakovsky’s influence has been fatal to them all…They are vulgar declaimers with not a true spark of poetry in them’ (Berlin 2004: 80). In contrast, Akhmatova became one of the great poets of the 20th century, for her work offered ‘indictment of the Russian Reality’ (Berlin, 2004: ). And despite her solitude, Akhmatova, unlike Gothes’ beautiful soul, managed to find a bridge back into ethical and political life. Thus while the work of art must always begin with the individual, it requires engagement with a wider audience
Akhmatova lost much to the political regime, yet by continuing to live in the country, she became a great liberator of the Russian people through her …show more content…
Individual matters and personal reflection are not utilitarian, they do not constitute work. Yet for Akhmatova, it was her responsibility to remember the events of Stalin’s terror. Akhmatova’s work was criticised by the Soviet regime for being too idealistic, too Romantic and strewn Religious jargon to be useful to society. And when her writing was banned from publishing, she found herself impoverished; unable to write (Berlin: 2004). In order to make ends meet, she explains to Berlin that she had found work translating famous books from Russian. Yet she denounced the work she translated and young poets who she saw to not speak from the soul, to only use their talents for the wrong purposes, to reify the regime which favoured them so. Akhmatova described them as ‘literary bandits; prostitutes of their gifts, and exploiters of public tastes. Mayakovsky’s influence has been fatal to them all…They are vulgar declaimers with not a true spark of poetry in them’ (Berlin 2004: 80). In contrast, Akhmatova became one of the great poets of the 20th century, for her work offered ‘indictment of the Russian Reality’ (Berlin, 2004: ). And despite her solitude, Akhmatova, unlike Gothes’ beautiful soul, managed to find a bridge back into ethical and political life. Thus while the work of art must always begin with the individual, it requires engagement with a wider audience