Memoirs of a Revolutionist and Requiem share the central theme of parent-child grief resulting from incarceration. Vera Figner’s memoir tells the story of her twenty years as a political prisoner, and the grief she experienced for her mother whom she refers to as her “dearest loved one.” Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem is a poetic cycle about the grief she experienced at her son’s incarceration. These personal tales of grief paint a devastating picture of the violent breaking of communal bonds inherent to incarceration. The texts in tandem demonstrate that the violence of incarceration is not only contained within the walls of the prison, but can infect the incarcerated’s loved ones with grief as well.

Figner was arrested and sentenced to death (later reduced to life, then twenty years in solitary confinement in the Shlisselburg Fortress) in 1884 for her involvement in the assassination of Emperor Alexander II as a member of People’s Will Party. Figner describes her mother as the person closest to her, and the forced removal from her as the harshest punishment. During her first years at Shlisselburg Fortress, Figner writes, “We had been deprived of everything: of our native land and humanity; of our friends, our comrades and families; we were cut off from every living person and thing” (184). Here Figner begins to articulate the grief of her imprisonment and the psychological consequences of being physically removed from society. Conjugal visits and contact with the outside world were prohibited in Finger’s first years of incarceration, completing her severing from the outside world.

Requiem centers the theme of grief. Akhmatova’s son was imprisoned in Russia during Stalin's reign of terror. Akhmatova wrote this poetic sequence in response to her son’s incarceration, during which she stood in a line outside of the jail every day for seventeen months trying to figure out what was to happen to him. Because Figner’s book is a memoir, we only see her story from a first-person account defined by the prison border. Requiem adds the layer of the effects of incarceration on the outside community and challenges the idea that the pain of incarceration is confined by walls. Though Akhmatova herself was never imprisoned, her life was controlled and she was confined through her son's incarceration. Akhmatova’s son's incarceration cost her physical and emotional health. She was suicidal, dangerously cold, and hungry. Akhmatova writes, “At dawn they came and took you away/You were my dead: I walked behind” (103). Akhmatova’s son has been taken out of her life, and though he is alive, she is powerless to help or protect him in any way. Out of love for her son, she must follow him in an attempt to make any possible contact. Akhmatova is now driven to stand in line at the whim of the state. She writes,

Such grief might make the mountains stoop, reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe. . . .(101)

From Akhmatova’s standpoint we see the devastation of incarceration from a mother who is willing to do whatever it takes to make contact with her son. Not only is she emotionally confined by grief, but physically bound to the prison institution through her attempt to save him.

Though on opposite sides of the prison border, Figner and Akhmatova describe feeling immense dehumanization at the hands of the state. Both women have had their autonomy removed causing severe trauma and subsequent grief. While Figner is being held against her will in a cell, Akhmatova is being denied the ability to cross a fabricated border between the outside and inside. A key feature of these authors' grief is that their loved one isn’t physically dead, but the state has separated them, causing the connection to be severed. In describing this feeling Figner writes, “My relatives seemed dead to me. Is not a long, hopeless separation similar to death?” (249). Their separation from their family members isn’t natural but caused by state intervention and violence. Their loved one is alive but inaccessible, causing Figner and Akhmatova to be tortured by their inability to know the conditions of the other. They cling on to the painful hope that they may reunite while having no autonomy to ensure that becomes reality.

Akhmatova and Figner’s situations mirror each other: Figner being incarcerated and grieving her mother, Akhmatova grieving her incarcerated child. They describe the same process of surviving their grief. In Figner’s thirteenth year at Shlisselburg Fortress she is granted the right to correspond with her relatives twice a year through typed censored letters. Figner does not experience excitement about this new ability, but rather discomfort. To survive her overwhelming grief for her mother and other relatives, Figner had to attempt to forget them and kill the idea that they might someday reunite. Figner writes, “It was the painful agitation of people who had better forget, and whose peace of mind was disturbed by the intrusion of a reminder from the outside world” (250). Figner, having no bridge to the outside world for thirteen years, retreated from it to protect herself from the grief of her removal.

Akhmatova describes a similar survival tactic, but by the fact that she arrives at the prison every day, she expresses hope to see her son again. Having to hold the dichotomy of grieving her son and taking action every day in hopes to see him again causes her pain. Akhmatova writes,

So much to do today:
kill memory, kill pain,
turn heart into a stone,
and yet prepare to live again (109)

To survive the separation from their parent/child, Figner and Akhmatova attempt to numb themselves from the overwhelming trauma of state-sponsored violence. The fact that their relatives are accessible but they are being denied the right to access them causes the need to let hope die to retain their sanity.

Holding the contradiction between hopeless grief and the need to resist inspires Figner and Akhmatova to attempt to articulate extremity and trauma. Caroline Forché, in writing about Requiem, asserts that language breaks in the face of trauma. State violence strives to rob its victims of communicating their experience, rendering them passive in their inability to articulate. Figner and Akhmatova resisted this state violence and their grief through the act of writing. Figner articulates not only her own grief, but that of those sharing the same experience. Similarly, to heal the rupture of her separation from her son, Akhmatova resists state violence through writing about the community of grieving mothers with whom she waited. Requiem can be understood as Akhmatova trying to describe the experience of losing her son to Stalin’s prisons and living through physically torturous conditions to see him one more time. Akhmatova writes,

"Can you describe this ?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face. (99)

In this poem an unnamed woman is asking Akhmatova if she has the language to describe such trauma and grief, and Requiem does just that. Akhmatova is therefore articulating a kind of communal grief.

Requiem and Memoirs of a Revolutionist allow us to see the effects of incarceration from within and outside the prison. Figner has been ripped from her community by the state as punishment for crimes. In the Shlisselburg fortress she assimilates into a new society for survival. When Figner is given the opportunity to make contact with her mother and larger community through letters it causes her discomfort because bridging the gap between the interior and exterior world requires her to merge the two societies and remember her relationships with people who have been functionally dead to her for thirteen years. Figner’s incarceration robs her of her relationship with her mother not only through physical removal but an incommunicable transfer of worlds and the removal of language to describe extremity. From the reversed perspective, Akmhatova’s son has disappeared across a physical border into a space that is unimaginable to her. Not only is he inaccessible to her but his world has become unintelligible, and she is physically contained outside the prison border. Requiem and Memoirs of a Revolutionist allow us to see that incarceration opens a wound in all of society. Every incarcerated person leaves behind a grieving community.

Bibliography
Akhmatova, Anna. Requiem. In Poems of Akhmatova. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1973.
Figner, Vera. Memoirs of a Revolutionist. Northern Illinois University Press, 1991.
Forché, Carolyn, and Duncan Wu. Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500-2001. W.W. Norton & Company, 2014, pp. 159–74.