Hands, Matches, an Ashtray: Whispered Posts of the Peoples' Poet

In the terrible years, the time of Stalin's psychotic reign of terror, a women named Anna Akhmatova wrote poetry. 

So suppressed were the free people in those years that Anna could not publish her words, not even keep them safe on paper. So the words were whispered, a few phrases were written, committed to memory, and then burnt. 

"Somehow ready for the test"Anna Akhmatova chose to stay in Russia in the 1920s and 30s, a time “when only the dead could smile.” Despite the end of a good life, reduced freedoms, war, starvation, political threats, and many losses, including imprisonment and execution of loved ones, she documented this generation “fed without honey.” (De profundis)

“No foreign sky protected me,

no stranger’s wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,

survivor of that time, that place.”

Requiem 1935-40

Her work survives to document and honour a people who survived a time and a life so harsh “we were not saved by God.”

"We aged a hundred years, and this happened in a single hour," wrote Anna.

I am touched by Anna. Her Russisa is mine. My mother's parents lost everything after the Russian Revolution. They escaped through the Red Gate at Riga. My grandfather's father was removed from the train. He died in a Gulag. It's hard to explain his crimes--he did not actually do anything "wrong." My father was born in 1934, in Stalinist Ukraine. His mom's mother, a widow, mid-wife and bone-setter with four daughters, was jailed, I cannot say why. She survived, and here we are.

"Today I have so much to do: I must kill memory once and for all, I must turn my soul to stone, I must learn to live again…"

Akhmatova performed a powerful task, documenting the "terrible years" when the world "lost its wonder."

 Her work is a testament to the resilience of our human spirit. 

Today I have so much to do:

I must kill memory once and for all,
I must turn my soul to stone,
I must learn to live again—
Unless ... Summer's ardent rustling
Is like a festival outside my window.