David Dvir

doll on wire

Even that description was an understatement, since Stalin forced Akhmatova and her friends to live in something that almost resembled an oral culture, reduced as they were to reciting words from memory. Almost, but not quite: Akhmatova had composed her poem on paper, not orally, and Requiem had none of the structures of oral literature, such as exchangeable building blocks, repeated phrases, and improvisation.

she taught it to her closest female friends who would remember the poem after her own death. She called this situation ‘pre-Gutenberg’ because state terror had forced her and other underground writers to live

revised her poem word by word, comma by comma, with the precision typical of literature crafted

Akhmatova had made a name for herself