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'Can you describe this?' And I said: 'I can.'

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem

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Akhmatova spent seventeen months in the queues outside a Leningrad prison during Stalin's terror of the late 1930s, waiting for news of her son. One day a woman with blue-tinged lips recognised her, leaned in and whispered the question; everyone in those queues whispered. Akhmatova put this exchange at the front of 'Requiem', her poem cycle about the terror, as a short prose preface written in 1957. For years the poems existed only in the memories of a few trusted friends, who learned them by heart so that no page could be found. The full cycle was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987.

Türkçe oku
“Bunu anlatabilir misiniz?” Ben de “Anlatabilirim” dedim.
Anna Ahmatova, Requiem

Ahmatova, 1930'ların sonundaki Stalin terörü sırasında oğlundan haber alabilmek için Leningrad'da bir hapishanenin önündeki kuyruklarda on yedi ay bekledi. Bir gün dudakları morarmış bir kadın onu tanıdı ve eğilip kulağına bu soruyu fısıldadı; o kuyruklarda herkes fısıltıyla konuşurdu. Ahmatova bu kısa konuşmayı, terör yıllarını anlatan şiir dizisi “Requiem”in başına, 1957'de yazdığı kısa bir düzyazı önsöz olarak koydu. Şiirler yıllarca yalnızca birkaç güvenilir dostun belleğinde yaşadı; bir aramada ele geçecek tek bir kâğıt kalmasın diye onları ezberlemişlerdi. Dizinin tamamı Sovyetler Birliği'nde ancak 1987'de yayımlanabildi.

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