Requiem
A cycle of short poems out of the seventeen months Akhmatova spent in the queue outside the Leningrad prison where her son was held, prefaced by a woman in that line who recognizes her and asks in a whisper whether she can describe this. The sequence moves from an arrest at daybreak through a sentence that falls like stone, an invitation addressed to death, and a section that sets Mary at the cross alongside the mothers on the prison steps. Written under a regime in which keeping the manuscript was itself lethal, it was held in the memories of a few trusted friends and reached print abroad long before it reached Russia.
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Lineage
- alludes to ↑ The Gospels
Attributes
Archetype (Jung / Campbell)
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Closest analogues
- 56% · 9 shared
- 54% · 11 shared
- 52% · 11 shared
- 52% · 11 shared
- 51% · 10 shared
- 49% · 10 shared