Anna Akhmatova, widely regarded as the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, survived the Stalinist terror, the siege of Leningrad, and various epidemic diseases including typhus to write Requiem (1935–1940), her monument to the suffering of those whose relatives were imprisoned or killed under Stalin. Akhmatova committed the poem to memory and that of close friends because written texts were too dangerous to preserve, and it was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. She witnessed louse-borne typhus in wartime Leningrad as one of the many biological horrors of the period.

Akhmatova's survival of typhus, war, and political persecution to produce Requiem demonstrates how poetry — born from the same world of bodily suffering and epidemic disease as the literature of Celan and Levi — can become an act of resistance and memorial. Her example influenced subsequent poets writing under conditions of political and biological catastrophe. Requiem stands alongside 'Death Fugue' and 'If This Is a Man' as one of the great twentieth-century literary monuments to the intersection of insect-borne disease, political horror, and the endurance of the poetic voice.