| Abstrakt: |
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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
