Book of the Decade

The poems in Requiem lived in memory for years before they were written down. Anna Akhmatova, whose ex-husband had been a counter-revolutionary, was prevented from publishing her work and saw her son arrested. Requiem was composed between 1935 and 1940, inspired by the many fruitless hours she spent outside Leningrad prison in the hope of seeing her son. Requiem expresses with simple humanity the suffering of so many during the Stalinist terror.