Dostoyevsky’s hat and his endless debt notices are displayed in the upstairs apartment, mostly a modern reconstruction filled with period objects and memorabilia. In the suite of six low-ceilinged rooms with mucky patterned wallpaper and dark petit bourgeois furniture, a claustrophobic domesticity reigns. After dictating all night to Anna, his fireball stenographer-biographer-executor-wife, Dostoyevsky would always take a nap on a tatty couch in his dowdily neat study, burrowing under a sheet, two blankets, and an old coat. On a tobacco box, his daughter Luba’s childish handwriting reads: “January 28, 1881—Papa died.” Heartbreaking.

But still. Compared to what the 20th century had in store for Russian writers, Dostoyevsky’s life seems a drizzly stroll in the park. At our hotel, the Angleterre, the lyric poet Sergei Yesenin hanged himself in 1925. Other suicides—or were they political murders?— followed: the writer and Futurist Vladimir Mayakovsky; the passionate Marina Tsvetayeva, a feminist icon; Osip Mandelstam, considered Pushkin’s heir, who perished in the gulag alongside countless others. Those who survived grieved—and none with more dignity and eloquence than Anna Akhmatova. Unpublished and destitute—all the men close to her were killed or otherwise victimized by Stalin’s terror—Akhmatova spent most of her creative life mourning St. Petersburg. She was her city’s Cassandra, its Keening Muse, as her disciple Joseph Brodsky described her.

It’s raining as we make our way through the sodden courtyard of Fountain House. The Soviets carved up this wing of the former Sheremetyevo palace, on the Fontanka River, into overcrowded communal apartments, where, from 1924 to 1952, Akhmatova shuffled about a small set of rooms. They’re now her movingly curated museum. Tall, regal, with a ballerina’s neck and a Roman emperor’s profile, Akhmatova was so stunning that visual and poetic tributes to her make up a subgenre of Russian studies. A copy of a sketch of her by Modigliani hangs on the walls of the monastically sparse room she called her own. Aside from the sketch, she owned virtually nothing.

In this room—a desk, a narrow bed, a few books—Akhmatova had her epic all-night encounter with a young Isaiah Berlin that got her denounced by the state and sent her son to prison again. Through her rainy window, we now look down at the bench from which the KGB watched her while she was under house arrest. On her desk sits the ashtray that has brought me to tears. Knowing that the apartments was bugged, Akhmatova and her friend and biographer Lydia Chukovskaya devised a scheme. Uttering trivialities in a loud voice—“Autumn is so early this year”—Akhmatova would scribble her new poem in pencil, and Chukovskaya would memorize the lines. Then they’d set the page on fire in the ashtray. 

“Hands, matches, an ashtray,” Chukovskaya wrote. “A ritual beautiful and bitter.” We leave in silence, carrying our tears out into the rain.

The first full edition of Akhmatova’s works wasn’t published in Russia until the 1980s. But by the time I was growing up, in the ’70s, she was acquiring a cult following. My aunt Yulia knew her and brought us a record of her reading Requiem. Mother would put it on in the dark, and I’d fall asleep to the sound of Akhmatova’s low, dignified voice and distilled classic rhymes. Her verses annealed suffering with nobility.

I also remember another voice from those nights—an angry voice, bringing Nabokov’s name to my hearing for the first time. A family fight was flaring up behind the tightly shut kitchen door of our house. My pro-Soviet grandmother screamed in outrage while my parents were explaining why this book that she called “muck” was great literature. Don’t mention the book to anyone, or we’ll get arrested, Mother warned me. I promptly stole the smuggled samizdat volume, read it cover to cover, and, being nine, had no clue what the fuss was about. Lolita, the book was called.