As an exergue to the score, the composer placed the text of the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, which introduces the very short preface of her collection Requiem (Éditions de minuit), a series of poems describing the sufferings and humiliations of the great Stalinist purge.

No, it is not under a foreign sky,

sheltered by foreign wings that I was,

But in the midst of my people,

Where, for his misfortune, my people were

Anna Akhmatova