Here in what were once the servants' quarters of the palace of the Princes Sheremetyev, Anna Akhmatova composed her magnificent poem, Requiem, between 1940 and 1941. The masterpiece, expressing the grief of millions of Russian women who had lost their men-folk to the gulags and the firing squads, was jotted down on numerous scraps of paper. Each was passed to a friend who memorised the fragment and then burned the paper on which it was written.
Born Anna Gorenko in Ukraine, she moved with her family as a child to the imperial village of Tsarskoye Selo, near Petersburg, where Pushkin had attended the lycee. Having married the poet Nikolai Gumilyov she travelled in Italy and France and was one of the founders of the Acmeist movement. Although Gumilyov was shot for treason by the Bolsheviks in 1921, Akhmatova did not flee Russia.
In the epigraph to Requiem she stressed her commitment to her land and people:
No, not beneath the arc of a foreign sky,
Not under the shield of foreign wings,
I lived then with my people,
There, where my people in their misfortune dwelt
She moved to the apartment at Liteyny Prospekt in a me-nage-a-trois with her lover Nikolai Punin and his wife, in 1924, and was moved to write Requiem by the arrest of her son Lev Gumilyov in 1935. She spent months in the prison queues of Leningrad and, as she wrote in the preface to the poem, on one occasion a woman behind her whispered: "Can you describe this?"
And I said: I can
And then a ghost of a smile slid across
What once had been her face
The six rooms of the apartment-museum are devoted to different stages in the poet's life and literary career. One is dedicated to her childhood, another to the tragic aspects of her life, another to the composition of Requiem, a fourth to the Leningrad of the terror. Another room contains her personal possessions including a sketch of her by Modigliani with whom she had an affair during a visit to Paris.
The sixth room marks her other great epic, Poem without a hero, which is dedicated to Leningrad during the Nazi siege, to her dead friends and colleagues and to Isaiah Berlin whom she met in Leningrad in 1945 when he was attached to the British Embassy in Moscow. On a visit to the old capital, Berlin encountered a literary critic and asked if Akhmatova was still alive. He was brought to the apartment on Liteyny Prospekt. It was to be a meeting which engendered a friendship between the two but which also caused severe trouble for Akhmatova.
Winston Churchill's son Randolph had followed them and, with an appalling lack of sensitivity, blundered into the courtyard and began to shout Berlin's name. Attention was thus drawn to the fact that Akhmatova was receiving foreign guests and she was, not long afterwards, publicly denounced by Stalin's literary sidekick, Andrei Zhdanov, as "half nun, half harlot." This infamous denunciation was not formally invalidated until 1988 when Mikhail Gorbachev's era of Glasnost was instituted.
Akhmatova was, however, published again after Stalin's death and was allowed to travel to Taormina in Italy to receive a literary award and to Oxford to receive an honorary degree. Her Oxford gown is one of the proud possessions on show in the apartment-museum.
The Anna Akhmatova Apartment Museum is at Liteyny Prospekt 51. It is open from 10.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m. daily, except Mondays and the last Wednesday of each month. The nearest metro station, paradoxically, is Mayakovskaya, named for the pro-Bolshevik poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Arrows guide the visitor through an archway to the courtyard of the Sheremetyev Palace and to the museum's entrance.
