Akhmatova : 28/08/06

One byproduct of my misspent youth as a UQ Arts student has been a lifelong love for the works of the great poet Anna Akhmatova:



She lived in St Petersburg for a great part of her life and the current Akhmatova Museum is in the apartment where she lived from 1924 to 1952, The Fountain House, (Fontanny Dom) Naberezhnaya Reki Fontanki, 34, St. Petersburg. Naturally I intend to visit it now that I have a Visa (only took 3 months) and can work out how navigate the underground while lacking any ability to read cyrillic.



Akhmatova lived and wrote through the frightening events of the terror, the death by execution of her husband and many of her friends, the seige of Leningrad and the imprisonment of her son. Her most famous sequence of poems is Requiem. I'll quote just a little bit here, which I think alludes to her son Lev:

THE SENTENCE
And the stone word fell then
On to my still living breast
Never mind - I was ready,
Somehow I'll stand the test

Today I am very busy;
I must see that my memory is quite dead,
And that my soul has turned to granite.
Learn once more to live ahead,

But that's not it.. as for some celebration
Outside my window summer rustles warm.
Long ago, somehow, I foresaw all this,
The bright clear day, the empty room.

Perhaps when I'm actually in her room these words will seem even more wonderful.