“That was a time when only the dead
could smile, delivered from their wars,
and the sign, the soul, of Leningrad
dangled outside its prison-house…”

As translated by Stanley Kunitz
In those years only the dead smiled,
Glad to be at rest:
And Leningrad city swayed like
A needless appendix to its prisons.
Translated by D. M. Thomas
Requiem; 1935-1940 (1963; 1987), Prologue

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Anna Akhmatova 99
Russian modernist poet 1889–1966

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