As you know, the biographical basis for Akhmatova's Requiem (1935-1961) was the arrest of her third husband Nikolai Punin and her son Lev Gumilev. But the suffering shadow of Nikolai Gumilyov also casts a shadow on the readers ' perception of the cycle. Here is a characteristic passage from the memoirs of Lydia Zhukova, who in 1935 once found herself next door to Akhmatova in an endless prison queue: "Here is her turn, she went to the window-crack,-there are some buttonholes and an impregnable mannequin; quietly, without opening her mouth, she said the usual: "Akhmatova-Gumilev" (...) The names echoed through the frozen queue like a wave. Lev Gumilyov, the son of two poets, was punished for the sins of his fathers, perhaps only because they were poets" (Quoted in: Akhmatova A. A. Requiem / Comp. and ed. by R. D. Timenchik with the participation of K. M. Polivanov. Moscow, 1989. pp. 155-156).

Judging by the diary of N. N. Punin. Akhmatova herself was also inclined to look for the reason for her son's arrest in her father's surname:"...What has he seen, my boy? He was never in any way a counter-revolutionary... Capable, young, full of energy - they envy him and now use the fact that he is the son of Gumilyov... How they made me the widow of Gumilyov" (Ibid., p. 194).

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But even in Akhmatov's Requiem, the mention of Gumilyov as a son is juxtaposed with the mention of Gumilyov as a father:

Quiet flows the quiet Don,

The yellow moon enters the house.

He enters with his hat askew.

Sees the yellow moon shadow.

This woman is ill,

This is a woman alone,

Husband in the grave, son in prison,

Pray for me.

In addition to the obvious roll call with the children's rhyme about the month "who took a knife out of his pocket", this poem contains a reference to the famous Akhmatov "Prayer" of 1915:

Give me the bitter years of sickness,

Shortness of breath, insomnia, fever,

Protect both your child and your friend,

And the mysterious gift of song -

So I pray at Your liturgy

After so many weary days,

To cloud over dark Russia

Became a cloud in the glory of the rays.

Almost everything that was asked for came true: illness, insomnia, and the loss of "both a child and a friend" were "granted". Only now, instead of the sun, which flooded Russia with rays of glory, an ominous "yellow month" came out of the fog "with a hat on one side". Therefore, Akhmatova's fervent "Prayer" about Russia is now replaced by the poetess's appeal to the people of Russia: "Pray for me..."

The poem "The Quiet Don flows softly..." in the mini-cycle "Introduction", which opened "Requiem", is placed second. The fourth is the poem " I would like to show you, the scoffer...":

I would like to show you, the scoffer And favorite of all your friends, the merry sinner of Tsarskoye Selo, What will happen to your life - Like a three-hundredth, with a message, You will stand Under the Crosses And burn the New Year's ice with your hot tear. There the prison poplar tree sways, And not a sound - and how many Innocent lives end there...

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It seems more than likely that these lines are deliberately focused on Nikolai Gumilev's poem " Memory "(which Akhmatova in her later notebooks called" the most remarkable " of the poet's works. See: Notebooks of Anna Akhmatova (1958-1966). M.-Torino, 1996. p. 639).

"Memory", we recall, is built as a catalog of portraits of the author of the poem in different years of life ("The very first: ugly and thin...";

"And the second one... he loved the wind from the south..."; " I love the chosen one of freedom, / Navigator and gunslinger..."). Akhmatova's poem is also built on the initial contrast.

An additional signal indicating the presence of Gumilev's theme in the poem "Show it to you, scoffer..." can serve as a reference to Tsarskoye Selo in its third line.

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