Booth 1955-1966

In 1955, when Akhmatova's poems began to reappear in print, Litfond provided her with a small house in Komarovo, at 3 Osipenko Lane, which she herself called the "Booth." The dacha became a center of attraction for the creative intelligentsia. Dmitry Likhachev, Lidia Chukovskaya, Faina Ranevskaya, Nathan Altman, Alexander Prokofiev, Mark Ermler, and many others visited. Young poets who called themselves the "magic choir" also came: Anatoly Naiman, Yevgeny Rein, Dmitry Bobyshev, Joseph Brodsky. It was modest housing. In the workroom stood a narrow long table. When Anna Andreyevna sat down to write, an old patterned porcelain inkwell was placed on it. Nearby was also a narrow chest of drawers, a "coffin placed on its end." It would not have attracted attention if it were not adorned with blue porcelain candlesticks. The door to the other room was covered with some colorful piece of fabric. In that room stood a bed, made from an attic door and a mattress placed on several bricks. "My bed is on bricks," Anna Andreyevna liked to say. "And remember, Pushkin's was on birch logs."

There were many flowers on the dacha grounds. Anna Andreyevna loved to water them. Later, the artist Valentina Lyubimova managed to dig up maple cuttings from the garden of the Fountain House and planted them under the dacha windows. Anna Andreyevna brought soil for them from the forest in several trips. Nearby, a little further from the flower beds, lay the roots of once-cut trees. One root was especially remarkable. The wind would turn it over, and it seemed as if the root lived its own special life, understandable only to those who looked closely. She loved to sit in the "garden" in the evenings, and even more to wander around the village. But she did not dare to go alone. Some friends even pinned a poster to the wall of the room: "Guests, even if Anna Andreyevna does not want to, still go for a walk with her!"

Anna Andreyevna loved car rides, going to Pike Lake, to the bay shore. If the day was warm, Akhmatova would sit for a long time on her favorite stone, keenly gazing at the outlines of nearby Kronstadt, as if wanting to see something very important to herself. After all, she had once been to Kronstadt, where Gumilev took her. Akhmatova made such car trips more and more often. Sometimes Alexey Batalov drove her around the surroundings, sometimes Professor O. A. Ladyzhenskaya of Leningrad University fascinated her with a trip to Vyborg in the summer of 1964. After this trip, she wrote the poem "In Vyborg":

A huge underwater step,

Leading to Neptune’s domain, –

There Scandinavia freezes like a shadow,

Entirely – in a dazzling single vision.

Silent is the song, the music is mute,

But the air burns with their fragrance,

And on its knees, white winter

Watches everything with prayerful attention.

She loved to discover not only cities but also secluded places in all the forests we had walked. Akhmatova truly became a representative of Russian poetry abroad and simultaneously a pioneer for Russian readers of many foreign poets, in whom she saw like-minded souls from whom she accepted the baton to carry it further.

She was one of the first to engage in translations of classical Chinese poetry. Akhmatova first tested her translation abilities in her youth. In the 1910s, she translated poems by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke "for herself." But with her turn to the poets of ancient China and Korea, a new phase began in Akhmatova’s work. It is interesting today to reread the best translations made by Akhmatova. They are perceived as a continuation of her own poems.

Unfortunately, today the famous places where geniuses created and an incomparable aura was formed are in a suspended state. There is fierce competition for prestigious lands. Knowing this, writers have lived for many years in Akhmatova’s modest house, essentially guarding the famous "Booth."

Sources:

D.T. Khrenkov "Anna Akhmatova in Petersburg-Petrograd-Leningrad"