Play Guide

It's peculiar to come home at last and find your mother has written your perfect epitaph.

Anna recites a poem in a dim, cold room. She exists only in the imagination of her son Lev, now middle-aged himself. Lev remembers Anna - or imagines he does - as he speaks with Alan, a young American academic who has travelled to the Soviet Union to interview him.
It is 1968. Alan is the first person to speak to Lev since his mother Anna's death.

ALAN: Nervous. Nervous! (laughs) I'm-yes. Yes. I'm nervous. Your mother-her poem, Requiem, that poem has been a guiding force of my life. And you inspired it. It was for you.

Lev's mother was no ordinary woman: she was Anna Akhmatova, a poet who wrote her greatest poem, Requiem, at the height of Stalin's Terror. She wrote it for Lev, who was jailed as a dissident, and whom she believed dead.
Writing Requiem was the ultimate act of defiance: Anna composed it piece by piece, memorizing and burning it as she went. It was a testament to the Terror she and her fellow Russians endured, and an indictment of a brutal regime. In Alan's eyes, this makes Anna a great dissident, but Lev sees it differently:

LEV: A dissident. Well, as you know, as you must know, I was formerly what you would call a dissident. Dissident. To you, it means a hero, yes? It is not, if I may remind you, a Soviet concept. But whatever it means, I believed-the things which she believed. And now-now-well. I think very differently now. I understand things I did not understand when, as you say, I inspired that poem. To me, now, Requiem is a terrible distortion of reality. It is full of deceit and illusion and I hate every word.

Alan is stunned. He counters that Requiem is the greatest expression of truth that he knows and resolves to convince Lev of that - but what can he tell Lev about his own mother that he doesn't already know?

Notes

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