Death and oppression function as linked motifs. There are two forms of death in the cycle: literal death, and a metaphorical “living death” that the Russian people experience due to living under an oppressive dictatorship.

Akhmatova frequently depicts literal death as a release from suffering. She writes in the “Introduction” poem that during the Terror, “only the dead / Were smiling, glad of their release” (Lines 1-2), as the dead are now beyond the reach of Stalin and his forces. In Poem VIII, “To Death,” Akhmatova describes feeling tempted by death as the only form of escape from suffering available. She writes that she is “wait[ing] for you [Death]” (Line 2) because “things have become too hard / I have turned out the lights and opened the door / For you, so simple and so wonderful” (Lines 2-4). In other words, Death appears “so simple and so wonderful” in comparison to the ongoing nightmare she and the other victims of the Terror are experiencing.

Akhmatova also describes life under Stalin as a form of living death, in which life has become so surreal that the boundaries between the living and the dead are blurred. When describing her son’s arrest, she mentions a funereal