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Requiem is an elegy by Anna Akhmatova about suffering of people under the Great Purge. It was written over three decades, between 1935 and 1961.
1935-1940
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
- 1961
INSTEAD OF A PREFACE
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this ?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
- Leningrad, i April 1957