Anna Akhmatova wrote *Requiem*, a song of mourning, between 1935 and 1940, during a period when waves of arrests, executions and disappearances kept thousands of families standing in long queues outside Leningrad’s prisons.

Mothers and wives waited for hours and days for news of their loved ones. No one knew how many people had been killed or disappeared. Many of those names were never recorded on any list.

Akhmatova herself stood in those same queues, and the poem she composed became an elegy for collective mourning in an age when there was no way to know the full extent of the crime that had occurred.

She said that she wanted to name every person who had died in Stalin’s killings, but there was no list of names and the number was never stated. So she decided to weave a vast shroud of words and poetry for the missing names and bodies, using the same broken words she had secretly heard from waiting and grieving families.

I wanted to call them all, one by one, by name,
but the list has been stolen, and there is no way of knowing.
So for them I wove a vast shroud,
from the broken words I secretly heard from grieving families.