Forschungsstelle Osteuropa

Die Forschungsstelle Osteuropa (FSO) ist als An-Institut eine außeruniversitäre Forschungseinrichtung an der Universität Bremen. Sie wird gemeinsam von der Kultusministerkonferenz und dem Land Bremen finanziert. Im Jahre 1982 mitten im Kalten Krieg gegründet, versteht sich die FSO heute als ein Ort, an dem der Ostblock und seine Gesellschaften mit ihrer spezifischen Kultur aufgearbeitet sowie aktuelle Entwicklungen in der post-sowjetischen Region analysiert werden.
 

Archivale des Monats

Akhmatova’s Requiem Abroad, 60 Years Later

Two Versions of the Poem and Two Ways of Reading Contraband Manuscripts from the USSR

Anna Akhmatova. Archive of the Research Centre for East European Studies. Photo: Lev Poljakov.
 

 
Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem – a monument to the victims of Stalinism composed over decades during the tyrant’s lifetime and after his death (1935-1961) – first saw the light of day abroad in November 1963, a year after it was finally written down on paper, submitted for publication but rejected at home. The poem was brought out in Munich by a relatively modest émigré press, its real publisher being Gleb Struve, an émigré of the First Wave and professor of Russian Literature at Berkeley. Several months earlier, Struve received the typescript of Requiem from Moscow via the diplomatic pouch, with a note on the last page: “The manuscript of these poems was submitted to Novyi Mir in January, 1963, but the editors refused to print them.” The typescript was, thus, clearly, authorized. But the popularity of Requiem in Russia during the Thaw was such that ever since it was rejected by Novyi Mir, the poem began circulating in samizdat in thousands of stray copies, some of which, too, were bound to leak abroad. The documents of the month are two versions of the exterritorial publication of Requiem sixty years ago, laying bare the inextricable entanglement of art and politics in tamizdat during the Cold War. 
A year after the poem’s authorized typescript was published by Struve in Munich, one stray copy of Requiem appeared in Frankfurt in the émigré journal Grani, which can be found in the library of the Research Centre for East European Studies in Bremen. In a letter from the FSO archive, dated December 24, 1964, Struve wrote to the editor of Grani, Natalia Tarasova, highlighting discrepancies between her version and the Munich edition. Most of these discrepancies were so out of tune that there was no doubt they were merely “errors or personal inventions of the scribe.” Tarasova, in turn, explained that she had faced a difficult choice:
 
“Either to edit the manuscript based on your version […], or to print it as we received it from Russia. […] Each of us, you and I, have fulfilled our own respective functions: to register the Russian contemporaneity in all its fullness. That is how history will judge our editions of Requiem: yours as the classic example, the one in Grani – as ‘half-folklore’.”
 
Symptomatically, Tarasova treated contraband manuscripts from the USSR as “barometers” of the political climate behind the Iron Curtain, rather than works of art with their own unchangeable text, structure and composition. But Struve’s exasperation with seeing Requiem published in Grani also had to do with the journal’s overt anti-Soviet orientation and affiliation with the National Alliance of Russian Solidarists (NTS), the most ominous émigré organization in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. Not only was it rumored that the NTS was financed by the CIA, but it also had ties with the Nazi regime in the relatively recent past. Both publishers were perfectly aware that authors in the USSR, whose collaboration with the NTS or contributions to its periodicals, whether or not authorized, were exposed, were likely to face grave consequences.
 

Émigré journal Grani. Library of the Research Centre for East European Studies. Photo: Muriel Nägler.
 

Indeed, while the Munich edition, despite Akhmatova’s and her friends’ apprehensions, seems to have gone virtually unnoticed or ignored by the authorities, the publication in Grani entailed an unpleasant conversation between Akhmatova and a Soviet literary official, who, in the poet’s own words,
 
“came and said: ‘Anna Andreevna! What is this?’ And showed me the issue of Grani where my Requiem was printed. On the last page, there was God knows what: instructions on how to smuggle manuscripts abroad, whom to address them, some appeals.“
 
Ironically, the visitor’s name was Daniil Granin, at the time the second secretary of the Leningrad branch of the Writers’ Union. He visited Akhmatova on May 10, 1965, a month before she was scheduled to depart for England to receive the honorary degree from Oxford. According to Peter Norman, Granin (whose name Akhmatova chose not to disclose) had cautioned her against “committing anything anti-Soviet” while in England and, in general, to “be careful”.

Anna Akhmatova’s poem Requiem in Grani. Library of the Research Centre for East European Studies. Photo: Muriel Nägler.
 

This story from sixty years ago may have only recently seemed to be distant past. But in the past ten years, and especially since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, numerous Russian writers, artists, journalists, and intellectuals have emigrated, fleeing state censorship or political persecution for their antiwar stance. Dozens of independent media, journals, and publishing houses have appeared outside Russia as well. Many of them have been proclaimed “foreign agents” or otherwise “undesirable” by Putin’s regime. And while a new Iron Curtain is hardly possible in the age of the Internet, will these publishing houses, and today’s Russian literary diaspora in general, remember their émigré predecessors’ both breakthroughs and biases? Is the epigraph to Akhmatova’s Requiem, which shocked Russian émigrés 60 years ago, – 
 
Нет, и не под чуждым небосводом,
И не под защитой чуждых крыл –
Я была тогда с моим народом,
Там, где мой народ, к несчастью, был.
 
No, not under foreign skies,
Nor under the protection of foreign wings –
I was then with my people,
There, where my people, unfortunately, were.
 
– still relevant nowadays?
 
 

Yasha Klots

Further reading

Adamovich, Georgy: Meetings with Anna Akhmatova, in: Polivanov, Konstantin (ed.): Anna Akhmatova and Her Circle, Fayetteville Ark. 1994, pp. 62–76.

Klots, Yasha: The Way Back. Kathryn Feuer’s and Gleb Struve’s Letters on Academic Exchange, Yulian Oksman and Crossing the Soviet-Finnish Border (June 1963), in: Fleishman, Lazar; Poljakov, Fedor (eds.): Across Borders: 20th Century Russian Literature and Russian-Jewish Cultural Contacts. Essays in Honor of Vladimir Khazan, Berlin 2018, pp. 557–584.

Tamizdat Project - Online Archive of Documents: https://tamizdatproject.org/en, [03.01.2025].

Yasha Klots is Associate Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center. He is the author of “Tamizdat: Contraband Russian Literature in the Cold War Era” (Cornell UP, 2023; NLO, 2024), as well as other works on Russian and Eastern European émigré cultures, urban spaces, and Gulag narratives. He is the founder and director of Tamizdat Project, a public scholarship initiative for the study of banned books from the former USSR and the Eastern Bloc.