NPR Visits Anna Akhmatova's St. Petersburg Apartment

At "Weekend Edition Sunday," Corey Flintoff visits the St. Petersburg apartment where Anna Akhmatova resided for 30 years. Interest in the Russian writer has surged, partially as a result of a new Iris Dement album ("The Trackless Woods") which sets some of the poet's words to music. More:

In the 1920s, Akhmatova moved into the apartment that ultimately became her museum. She lived with her lover, Nikolay Punin, a noted teacher and art critic. It was a communal flat by then, with multiple families and little space.

Near the entrance, Nisnikova points to a small window with a view of a stairwell. It's the window of the former bathroom. When unexpected strangers appeared at the door, the adults in the apartment would ask their children to climb up on the bathtub, peer out the window and describe the visitors.

This is, Nisnikova says, "the real evidence of the total fear that lived in the hearts of people in our city during the very severe period of mass terror, Stalin's repressions."

The fear was that the strange visitors might be secret police, coming to take someone away.

That fear was realized when Punin was arrested and jailed, along with Akhmatova's son, Lev Gumilyov. The poet became one in a long line of women who waited outside the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) prison to catch a glimpse of their loved ones or bring them bread.

She later wrote about the experience as one that gave her a new artistic purpose: to be a witness to history. She spent 17 months waiting in prison lines.

One day, someone approached her.

"On this occasion, there was a woman standing behind me, her lips blue with cold, who of course had never in her life heard my name," Akhmatova recalled. "And then she asked me, 'Could one ever describe this? I answered her, 'I can.'"

Akhmatova kept her promise with the cycle of poems called "Requiem." She composed it in secret, and at one point was even afraid to keep a manuscript. She wrote down fragments for her friends, who memorized them. The fragments were then burned. "It was like a ritual," her friend Lydia Chukovskay recalled. "Hands, matches, an ashtray. A ritual beautiful and bitter."

Continue at NPR.