SOURCE: Basker, Michael. “Dislocation and Relocation in Akhmatova's Rekviem.” In The Speech of Unknown Eyes: Akhmatova's Readers on Her Poetry, edited by Wendy Rosslyn, pp. 5-25. Cotgrave, Nottingham, England: Astra Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Basker examines aspects of Akhmatova's Requiem that project qualities of disorientation and dislocation.

The American critic Sam Driver has described Rekviem as ‘an amazingly powerful statement which requires no elaboration or “explanation”’.¹ A ‘public’ work, woven, we are told, from the ‘poor words’ of the ordinary victims of the events described,² Rekviem indeed seems readily accessible and intensely moving. In lines such as:

Я zdu tiby—mni оcins trudnо 

it achieves a pathos-laden directness, and an absolute simplicity at the very limits of poetic art, which make the critical elucidation vital to an appreciation of so much of Akhmatova's later poetry appear lamely redundant. This, as much as previous political constraints, perhaps accounts for...