Petersburg of Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova spent a year of her life on Tchaikovsky Street (former Sergievskaya) in house number seven: from 1920 to 1921. Then she left her second husband Shileiko and moved from their apartment in Marble Palace. She was given new accommodation at her duty station, the first and only one in her life. That year, she got a job at the library of the Agrarian Institute, which opened in the former Imperial School of Law, graduates of which were P.I. Tchaikovsky and A.N. Apukhtin. From work, she was given an apartment in the former palace of the Volkonsky princes. A year later, she was fired on staff cuts.

When hungry, Akhmatova often went to Tsarskoye Selo to visit her friend Natalia, the wife of Commissioner Rykov, returned by train with bags of vegetables, and sometimes even brought coal for a samovar. That year, Akhmatova experienced several deaths of people close to her: her first husband Nikolai Gumilev was shot, her brother died, and AA Blok died of a serious illness, on whose death she wrote poems. In this house she saw Gumilyov for the last time, and as he walked away from her down the dark slippery stairs, she followed the prophetic words: “It is only for execution to walk on such stairs...” Five days later, he arrested, and less than two months later shot on the charges fabricated by the Cheka.

Now the former Volkonsky house houses a municipal hospital, and nothing here reminds us of the residence of the great poetess.