Totalitarianism Akhmatova s Requiem []

1. Totalitarianism Akhmatova’s “Requiem” [???????]

2. What is Totalitarianism? Fascism and Stalinism Cult of personality Dictatorship: One party rule Fanaticism of adherents Mobilizing massive numbers of people Rejection of individualism. Terror Propaganda Ritual

3. Socialist Realism “Socialist Realism is the basic method of Soviet literature and literary criticism. It demands of the artist the truthful, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary development. Moreover, the truthfulness and historical concreteness of the artistic representation of reality must be linked with the task of ideological transformation and education of workers in the spirit of socialism.” (First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, 1934)

4.  “Beloved Stalin is the Happiness of the People” “Roses for Stalin”

5.  Stakhanovite Worker The Worker and the Collective Farm Girl[??????? ? ??????????]

6. “For some the fresh breeze may blow,/ For somethe sun sets at its ease” (Dedication, p. 100) Komsomolets working at a paper factory, 1931 First ride on the Moscow metro by its builders, 1935

7. Circus [????], 1936

8. Propaganda Posters Don’t Chatter! Be vigilant/ In such days as these/ The walls are listening in/ It’s a small step from chattering and gossip/ To treason. The Blabbermouth is a great find for the enemy!

9. On Western tourists buying Soviet memorabilia in Prague: “The sight struck me as odd . . . All would be sickened by the thought of wearing a swastika, none objected, however, to wearing the hammer and sickle on a T-shirt or hat. . . While the symbol of one mass murder fills us with horror, the symbol of another mass murder makes us laugh.” Terror

10. “Where are they now, the unwilling girlfriends/Of my two hellish years?/What appears to them in the Siberian snowstorms,/What haunts them in that lunar circle?/ To them I send this farewell greeting.” (Dedication. p. 101)“It’s all the same to me now. The Yenisei swirls,/The Polar Star shines./ And the blue luster of beloved eyes/Is clouded over by the final horror.” (8. p. 111)

11. Akhmatova Before the Terror

12. The Choice to Stay • “I heard a voice —/ It called soothingly!/It said: ‘Come here,/leave your deaf and sinful corner,/Leave Russia forever. . . . /But indifferently and calmly/I blocked the sound with my hands. . . “ (1917) “I am not one of those who left this land . . .” (1922) “It’s not too late, you can still look back/At the red towers of your native Sodom. . .” (1924) “No, it was not under a foreign sky,/And not under the protection of foreign wings, — / I was, at that time, with my own people,/ There, where my people, unfortunately, were.” (Requiem, 1961, p. 99). 

13. Tsarskoe Selo They should have shown you — joker, Beloved of all your friends, Tsarskoe Selo’s cheerful sinner, What would happen in your life . . . (4. p. 105) p

14. Akhmatova and Gumilev Nikolai Gumilev, Lev Gumilev, Anna Akhmatova (1913) This woman is sick, This woman is alone Husband in the grave, son in prison, Pray for me. (2. p. 104) ??? ??????? ??????, ??? ??????? ????, ??? ? ??????, ??? ? ?????, ?????????? ??? ???.

15. At Dawn they came and took you away/I went after you, as when they carry out the dead./Children cried in the dark room,/The holy candle spilled over./ The cold of the icon on your lips./ The deathly sweat on your brow . . . Never to be forgotten! — /I will be like the Strelsty wives/Howling under the Kremlin towers” (1. p. 103) Nikolai Punin Punin and Akhmatova in the courtyard of the “Fountain House”

16. The Fountain House (Sheremetyev palace)[????????? ???]

17. “Seventeen months I’ve been crying out,/Calling you home./I threw myself at the executioner’s feet,/You, my son and my horror.” (5. p. 107)“Magdalene beat herself and sobbed/The beloved disciple turned to stone,/And there, where the Mother stood,/Nobody dared to glance.” (10. “Crucifixion.” p. 113)

18. The Crosses [??????] Before this grief the mountains bend The great river does not flow, But the prison bolts are strong And beyond them the “convict lairs‘’ And deathly sadness. (Dedication. p. 101) That was when only the dead smiled Glad for the peace and quiet And Leningrad, like an unneeded limb Swung about around its prisons. (Prologue. p. 103) How for three-hundred or more You would stand by The Crosses And with your hot tears Burn the New Year’s ice. There the prison poplar sways, And not a sound — and there how many Innocent lives end.” (4. p. 105)

19. And if some day, in this country They think to raise a monument to me, I give my consent to this celebration, But only on one condition — that it be placed Neither by the sea, where I was born: My last tie with the sea has been broken, Nor in Tsarskoe Selo by the sacred tree stump, Where an inconsolable shadow seeks me, But here, where I stood for three hundred hours And where they did not unlock the bolts for me. Because I fear, even in blessed death, Forgetting the rumble of black marias, Forgetting how that hateful cold door slammed And how an old woman howled like a wounded beast. And from my immobile and bronzed eyelashes May the melted snow stream down like tears, And may the prison dove coo in the distance, And the ships move quietly along the Neva. (Epilogue, II, pp. 115, 117)