Anna Akhmatova

Anna Akhmatova Museum, the Sheremetev Palace, St Petersburg.

A beautiful room, the Anna Akhmatova Museum in Petrograd/Leningrad/St Petersburg.  It was her apartment in the Sheremetev Palace, a 1750 palace that included a hospital, a theatre and orchestra and a formal, fountained estate.  Akhmatova's apartment was in the south wing, and she lived in it from 1925-1966. 

Akhmatova's second husband was a tutor to the Sheremetev family; they stayed on in the north wing after the family fled during the revolution.  Her third husband was assigned an apartment in the south wing and there she stayed.  

There is Akhmatova's history, her poetry, her modernism; there are her intellectual husbands – poets, art historians, artists; there is the trajectory of the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union: all was well with her poems and her affairs until 1921 when her then first husband was shot as part of the Kronstadt rebellion.  With the loss of Lenin and the ascendance of Stalin that hardened the Russian commune, all the promise of the Russian avant-garde was turned: the Suprematists, Malevich, el Lissitsky slid into a perceived counter-revolutionary bourgeois activity.  She lived through it all, biographies list her countless affairs – intellectual, political and physical.  She wrote, sometimes published, often not, she wrote against Stalinism, confusingly she was deemed a soviet poet with czarist leanings, a promiscuous classicist in revolutionary times; she lived on in her beautiful apartment.

Please, just give me a room with these proportions. I'd take out the fluorescent unit in the ceiling.