Petersburg of Anna Akhmatova

In the outbuilding's apartment, without a toilet, running water, and almost without electricity (it was given infrequently and briefly in those years), the poetess settled with her second husband, a historian, a museum worker, a poet Vladimir Shileiko.

The hunger and cold of those years, the total desolation in the city, when the Field of Mars, which overlooked one of the two windows of their apartment, turned into a vegetable garden for the summer, fully affected the family. The most humiliating thing, as the poetess recalled, was to run out into the street and ask a passerby for a light - there were no matches... There were no food and dishes.

Someone you know noticed her in the market, selling stinky herring, which writers sometimes gave as rations. You could also see her digging trenches by order of the Bolsheviks. To this, we can add the husband's illness and morbid jealousy to everything, even to her poems, the manuscripts of which he melted the samovar. Naturally, this period of their life ended in divorce.

In the courtyard of the house you can now see a monument to the “peacemaker emperor” Alexander III. In Soviet times, there was an armored car on the site of the sculpture. There is a legend that Lenin spoke with his fiery speech from this armored car.