From Akhmatova’s memoirs: “I met Mandelstam especially often in 1917-18, when I lived on Vyborg Side with the Sreznevskys (Botkinskaya, 9, now 17) – not in an insane asylum, but in the apartment of the senior doctor Vyacheslav Sreznevsky, the husband of my friend Valeria Sergeevna.” On the Vyborg Side is one of the oldest medical institutions in Petersburg – the Medical-Surgical Academy, now the Military Medical Academy. In the house where the Academy’s staff lived, Anna was hosted by her childhood friend Valeria Sreznevskaya, wife of Professor, psychiatrist Vyacheslav Vyacheslavovich Sreznevsky. Anna Akhmatova lived here with short breaks from December 1916 until the summer of 1918.

Continuing to quote the memoirs: “Mandelstam often came to pick me up, and we rode in a cab over the incredible bumps of the revolutionary winter among the famous bonfires that burned almost until May, listening to the gunfire crackling from nowhere. That’s how we went to performances at the Academy of Arts, where evenings were held for the benefit of the wounded and where we both performed several times. Osip Emilievich was with me at the Butomo-Nezvanova concert at the Conservatory, where she sang Schubert. After some hesitation, I decide to recall in these notes that I had to explain to Osip that we should not meet so often, that this could give people material for a distorted interpretation of our relationship, and he unexpectedly took great offense at me and completely stopped coming to Botkinskaya.”

In this house on Botkinskaya, Akhmatova, together with Sreznevskaya, witnessed the beginning of Soviet history. They all faced the blockade, severe illnesses, and camps. But then they were observing the signs of the new revolutionary era that broke their lives – demonstrations, fires, street shootings.

“... On October 25, I lived on the Vyborg Side with my friend V. S. Sreznevskaya...” – Akhmatova recalls. – “I was walking from there to Liteyny, and at the moment I found myself on the bridge, something unprecedented happened: in broad daylight, the bridge was raised. Trams stopped, carts, cabmen, and pedestrians. Everyone was bewildered.

On the raised bridge

On the day that has now become a holiday,

My youth ended...”

On February 3, 1917, Amrep returned to Petrograd. He spent a week recovering, and when, crossing the Neva under fire, he entered the Sreznevskys’ home, Anna barely recognized the former victorious Boris in him: “And now you are heavy and gloomy, renouncing glory and dreams…” Like Gumilev, after two years at the front, Amrep was disgustingly tired of the senselessness of what was happening: not a military campaign, but a machine for grinding cannon fodder. In such an unusual depressed state of mind for him, maintaining chivalrous relations with a demanding and capricious lady was difficult, but even more troublesome was not maintaining them. Formally, the “romance” was still ongoing, but in essence, it was slowly fading. In conversations with Luknitsky, Akhmatova characterized her relationship with Amrep during the year of two revolutions as follows: “When the revolution began, he came to her on the Vyborg Side under fire – ‘not because he loved her, he just came like that. He liked to walk under fire.’ ‘He… no, of course, he didn’t love… It wasn’t love… But he could do everything for me – just like that.’”

It was there, in the Sreznevskys’ apartment, that in April 1918 Akhmatova asked Gumilev for a divorce.

Sources:

https://pnu.edu.ru/ru/library/projects/literary-review/issue10/about_mandelshtam/

http://ahmatova.niv.ru/ahmatova/about/verblovskaya-peterburg/dni-potryasshie-mir.htm

Marchenko Alla Maksimovna, Akhmatova: Life