"This cycle of poems has been received from Russia and is published without the knowledge or consent of the author." This laconic absolvatur accompanied Akhmatova's Requiem when it was first published in 1963.1 Since then, the work has been translated into many languages, including English, and to that extent needs little introduction. This said, two points seem worth emphasizing here: one concerns the poem itself; the other, the present translation. If the unifying thread of the poems is intimate and personal-the arrest and imprisonment of Akhmatova's son, whose only discernible "crime" was to bear the name of his father, Gumilev-the real import of the work is, of course, far wider. It is, as the poet tells us, conceived as a testament, a dedication to her companions in misfortune, "those that shared [her] own two years of hell." In telling in her vivid, inimitable way of her own impressions and sufferings, she in fact speaks for all of them, as well as for countless others whom she never knew nor met-the "one hundred millions for whom [her] voice speaks"-in a word, for the same long-suffering Russian people with whom she is above all proud to have shared, in the spirit and in the flesh, those unforgettable years of arbitrary persecution and terror. This emerges very clearly from the introductory quatrain (added in 1961), in which Akhmatova reverts to an idea she expressed to perfection more than forty years before, in the poem beginning "Kogda v toske samoubiistva" (better known to some by the fifth line, "Mne golos byl. .")2 It might seem unnecessary to stress this aspect, were it not that so sensitive and perceptive a figure as Solzhenitsyn could