Russian literature. A short introduction

prison, Kresty. The statue would be a perpetual admonition to the city’s population of the tragedy that Requiem itself commemorated:

And let the melted snow stream Off the immobile, bronze eyelids,

And let the prison dove coo in the distance, And the ships peacefully sail down the Neva.

Akhmatova was also to allude in some of her work to the custom of naming streets after famous writers, as a way of raising the question of what traces her life would leave in the future. So too was the poet Osip Mandelstam in the bleak days of exile in 1935, when physical survival came to seem more and more unlikely:

Whichever street is this?

Mandelstam Street.

What sort of damn name is that?

However you turn it about

It sounds crooked, not straight.

The street was crooked, not straight,

And he was black, not white, in his ways,

That’s why this street,

Or, rather, this pit –

Has its name:

After that Mandelstam.

The fictional Mandelstam Street has acquired its name by a grotesque reversal of the usual process by which such names were assigned. A side-street instead of a main one has been picked, and instead of conferring immortality and transcendence, it recalls death and constriction. The word ‘pit’ (yama) is used for a communal grave, such as those in which prisoners in labour camps were buried, and is also a