LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Anna Akhmatova: St Petersburg
built 606 days ago
One of St. Petersburg's most eloquent and prolific chroniclers, Akhmatova watched her city survive revolution, civil war, political terror, and world war. From the 1920s to the 1950s, she lived in this apartment in the "Fountain House" (Fontanny Dom), a former palace with a history as troubled as her own. The four-room museum is rich in detail despite its small size, and English-language printouts in each room provide the depth and context you need to make this a worthwhile visit. The audioguide provides more ambience but not much more information. The museum is hard to find: Enter through the arch on Liteiny Prospekt and head for the small park; turn left and head to the apartment entrance at the southwest corner of the park. Akhmatova struggled here to write freely under the budding Soviet state while avoiding arrest.
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"The two Akhmatovas got on very well": Indeed, Anna Akhmatova got along with everybody. In her old age a thyroid condition made her "catastrophically fat" and destroyed all traces of her youthful beauty; still she was surrounded to the end of her days by young admirers, including Joseph Brodsky. In the words of Nadezhda Mandelstam: "Hordes of women and battalions of men of the most widely differing ages can testify to her great gift for friendship, to a love of mischief which never deserted her even in her declining years, to the way in which, sitting at a table with vodka and zakuski, she could be so funny that everybody fell off their chairs from laughter."
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These words are from Anna Akhmatova's poem "The Sentence," translated from the Russian by Judith Hemschemeyer. Akhmatova was a remarkable woman whose deeply felt poems chronicled Stalin's Terror, World War II, and what is called the Thaw in Russia after Stalin's death. She ... explored her own local fame, her fall from grace, and her international renown shortly before her death.
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As Akhmatova tells it, she was asked to describe the experience of waiting in lines, in the cold, for the opportunity to speak with her son who was imprisoned in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) by a fellow mother who was ... waiting in line at the prison.
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Olga's apparition hovers over Akhmatova in Poem Without a Hero, a fluttering black and white fan in her hand, whispering of springtime, and evoking a dream of their lost youth together. Akhmatova called Olga her "double" but the two women did not much resemble each other physically. Olga had long golden braids, "like Melisande," as Artur Lurye put it. Whatever Olga's charms, Akhmatova's beauty was of another kind. She was elegantly slender to the point of angularity, with a straight back and haughty bearing. Her face had high cheekbones, huge grey eyes and a soft mouth. Her black hair was caught back severely at her neck and cut into a fringe over her forehead.
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Akhmatova, who often had to learn her poems by heart rather than commit them to paper, found people murmuring the lines along with her on the rare occasions when she was permitted to recite in public. Punin died in the camps in 1953. Lev Gumilyov, freed at last in his forties, exacted a dreadful price in bitterness and rancour for the many years of hard labour he served for being his mother's son. She paid with everything she had in human terms for the fearless, pitiless poems finally published and sold by the million in the thaw after Stalin's death.
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