Fontanka River Embankment, 34litA, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 191014
Akhmatova seeks refuge for herself, understanding that it will be temporary and forced. In the city on the Neva, she lives in palaces, but in service quarters, wings; she enters the house not through the main entrance with the carpeted staircase and balustrade railings, but through the back door, because after the revolution, the main entrances mostly began to be closed. The staircase itself served as one of the measures of the apartment’s status: steep, unheated, dark, damp, black staircases with entrances to basement rooms became something ordinary.
The name “Fountain House” is often attributed to Akhmatova, but it is quite historical: this was the name given to part of the Sheremetev estate when a stone palace was erected there in the 1740s–50s. At the same time, the Fontanka Embankment and the Fountain House became especially significant for Akhmatova, turning into a mythologized center of her work, no matter what the subject was. The house was connected by numerous threads to her creativity and fate. Punin, back in 1923, before Akhmatova moved into his apartment, heard from her the wish to live in the Fontanka area, where “there is so much Petersburg,” but perhaps the Fountain House with its garden also resembled Tsarskoye Selo: both palace, trees, and the oval of the inner courtyard.
Akhmatova’s first address in the wing of the Sheremetev Palace was Shileiko’s apartment. He settled at Fontanka 34 in the Northern wing when he became a teacher and tutor of the elder grandchildren of Count Sheremetev. At that time, in this northern wing, besides service living quarters, there were a Dance Hall, Billiard Room, Dining Room, and Buffet. Shileiko worked as a freelance assistant at the Hermitage, although he never completed his university course. He and Akhmatova had known each other since the early 1910s, both were connected with the “Poets’ Guild,” liked to visit the “Stray Dog,” exchanged poetic messages, and married in 1918. Akhmatova lived with Shileiko in apartment number five from 1919 until spring 1921. According to Akhmatova herself, it was from autumn 1918 to autumn 1920, that is, only one year. The marriage of Shileiko and Akhmatova was registered by her husband in December 1918 at the notary office of the Liteyny district of Petrograd. Officially, the marriage lasted five years, until 1922, apparently at Shileiko’s initiative, who remarried on June 18 of the same year.
The apartments were remodeled, so today it is impossible to determine exactly where apartment number 5 was located; no plans of the reconstructions remain.
The common space connecting the palace and the wing in the garden was the front courtyard on the Fontanka side, decorated with an arch bearing the coat of arms of the Sheremetev counts with their famous motto “God preserves all.” She valued the rich opportunity to mark her poems with the Fountain House and loved its emblem—the coat of arms with lions, a crown, and the inscription DEUS CONSERVAT OMNIA, which adorned its facade and has now become one of Akhmatova’s symbols. In the way Akhmatova called the palace, the emphasis was on the word “house”; she wrote it with a capital letter, often noting the place of creation of a poem in manuscripts, sometimes using only two letters—“F. H.” However, under some poems in manuscripts, the abbreviation “Sher. House” is also found.
“For thirty-five years I lived in one of the most remarkable Petersburg palaces (the Sheremetev Fountain House) and rejoiced in the perfection of the proportions of this 18th-century building.”
Akhmatova loved old Petersburg houses, “with history,” as she called them. Indeed, settling in this “illustrious” house, she absorbed all its mythology, easily combining the irrational with the real, the mystical with the historical, starting from the story of the misfortunes of the “young mistress of the palace” Polina Zhemchugova who died here; the story of Emperor Paul I visiting the Fountain House; legends about the young ghost of a chamberlain killed in the White Hall of the palace by order of Count P. Zubov; A. Pushkin posing here for O. Kiprensky; to the poet P. Vyazemsky, who allegedly died in the room he shared with Shileiko. The space of the Fountain House was a repository of myths and a refuge for the shadows of its former inhabitants—five generations of Sheremetevs living in the palace.
The house stands somewhat apart from the embankment, separated from it by a heavy, elegant lacework of cast-iron fencing and a spacious front courtyard. “The cuneiform of the lanterns on the Fontanka,” Akhmatova once wrote in one of her draft notebooks, apparently recalling at that moment the subject of her second husband’s studies. Strangely enough, Akhmatova’s constant change of residence led to doubts about exactly where their apartment with Shileiko was located in the Fountain House. As already mentioned, Shileiko was initially given a room in the northern part of the palace, but when the palace came under the jurisdiction of the Archaeological Institute and became a museum, Shileiko and his wife were relocated. Most likely to the second Stable wing, which was opposite the Northern wing, and with a high degree of probability, one can determine where the apartment of interest was by counting the fifth window from the edge from the Northern gates. In the hungry and cold winter of 1919, the Orientalist Shileiko was confirmed as a professor at the Petrograd Archaeological Institute and began lecturing on the history of Sumer and Akkad, and the history of Babylonian literature. Akhmatova was interested in Vladimir Kazimirovich’s stories about the Ancient East. She was a grateful listener, understanding the music of the ancient language. Shileiko told her about kings and gods, read tablets in the original language, and then translated them into Russian.
K.I. Chukovsky recorded in his diary on January 19, 1920: “She and Shileiko in one big room—behind screens a bed. The room is damp, chilly, books on the floor… He is gentle with her—sometimes he approaches and brushes hair from her forehead. He calls her Anichka. She calls him Volodya.” Shileiko’s wild jealousy, his desire to rule absolutely, led her to understand that jealousy and tyranny have nothing in common with love.
After their separation, they remained close people: until Shileiko’s death, they corresponded, and until 1926 Akhmatova periodically lived in his apartment in the Marble House when he was in Moscow, and looked after the St. Bernard dog they had adopted, Tapa. Once Shileiko told the Mandelstams about the dog: “I always have a shelter for stray dogs—that was the case with Anichka too…”
Sources:
https://diletant.media/articles/45247896/
Irina Fedorchuk, The Fountain House in the Life and Work of Anna Akhmatova
