Sixth Form lectures
This year Kilgraston is launching a series of Sixth Form lectures where our Sixth Formers will do an assembly in front of our Senior School. It is an opportunity for the Sixth Formers to present on a subject that is inspirational and important to them and recently Upper Sixth’s Anna looked at protest poetry and the cult figure of Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova.
Akhmatova was one of Russia’s most famous and influential female poets, using poetry as a mechanism to oppose the totalitarianism of Josef Stalin.
She was one of the very few members of the intelligentsia to survive Stalin’s terrors.
In her assembly, Sixth Former Anna said: “Anna Akhmatova was an inspirational women thanks to her bravery and talent and her strong patriarchal loyalty to her beloved Russia. She chose not to abandon her country, choosing instead to stand by Russia and her people. She decided to risk her life by continuing to write whether or not she was not going to be published.”
Akhmatova’s most famous poem, Requiem was distributed secretly, passed on by word of mouth, committed to memory, with any written records being burnt so as to avoid arrest.
Anna said: “We can continue to learn from her resilience today and her courage and talent will be remembered for many years to come.”
You can watch some of our other Autumn term 2020 assemblies here.
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