Tuchka 1912-1914

Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev got married in 1910. Two years later, to live closer to the University, where Gumilev was enrolled in the Faculty of History and Philology, the couple rented an inexpensive apartment on Vasilievsky Island.

…I was quiet, cheerful, I lived

On a low island, like a raft,

Stopped in the lush Neva delta

Oh, mysterious winter days,

And dear work, and light fatigue,

And roses in a washbasin pitcher!

The lane was snowy and short,

And opposite the door, by the altar wall,

Stood the Church of St. Catherine.

They began to call the house “Tuchka” between themselves. It was one room with windows facing the lane. The lane led to the Malaya Neva… This was Gumilev’s first independent address in Petersburg; before that, he lived with his parents. In 1912, when they settled at “Tuchka,” Anna Andreyevna published her first book of poems, Evening, which the literary Petersburg public received with great interest. In it, she replaced the symbol of eternal femininity, common in the intellectual society of that time, with a sensitive and tender “earthly” heroine. That same year, the poetess gave birth to her son Lev Gumilev — a future scholar. Anna Andreyevna would leave this place. And in the autumn of 1913, leaving her son in the care of Gumilev’s mother, she would return here, to “Tuchka,” to continue creating. “The lane was snowy and short,” Akhmatova would write about Tuchkov. By the way, before becoming Tuchkov, this lane was once called Nameless. Akhmatovian coincidences! After all, her first parental home in Tsarskoye Selo also stood at the corner with Nameless Lane, and the Fontanka, where she would live at different times in three houses, was also once called Nameless Creek...

At “Tuchka,” in this house, Lozinsky helped Akhmatova proofread her second book. “He did it impeccably, like everything he did,” Akhmatova writes. “I was capricious, and he gently said: ‘She was working with her secretary and was out of sorts...’” Although it was really Osip Mandelstam who amused her here, then a thin boy with a lily of the valley in his buttonhole and eyelashes on his cheeks. “We made each other laugh so much that we fell onto the springy singing sofa at ‘Tuchka’ and laughed until we were faint, like the confectionery girls in Joyce’s *Ulysses*... I never laughed so well with anyone as with him!” What were they laughing at? For example, at how Mandelstam translated a line by Mallarmé: “And the young mother, nursing from sleep.” When recited, it really sounded funny: the mother came out not as a mother, but as some nursing pine!.. However, sometimes Mandelstam joked cruelly — hinting at her thinness, he liked to repeat: “Your neck is made for the guillotine...” Well, in a certain sense, the joke would prove prophetic.

Finally, from here, from “Tuchka,” on December 15, 1913, Akhmatova went to Blok’s place on Pryazhka (Officer Street, 57). “I came to visit the poet...” About three months earlier, she and Blok had read poems together at the Bestuzhev Courses. “A student came up to us with a list,” Akhmatova later recalled, “and said that my performance was after Blok’s. I begged: ‘Alexander Alexandrovich, I can’t read after you.’ He replied reproachfully: ‘Anna Andreyevna, we are not tenors.’ Not tenors... Maybe that’s why she would later say about him: ‘The tragic tenor of the era’? That would be later. But for now, from here, from ‘Tuchka,’ she took Blok’s books with her so that he could inscribe them. A few days later, he brought them back to ‘Tuchka’ already inscribed, but, by his own admission, did not dare to ring Akhmatova’s doorbell and handed the books to the doorman, mixing up the apartment number. On weekends, the couple left the apartment, preferring to spend time at Gumilev’s mother’s place in Tsarskoye Selo. Two blocks from “Tuchka,” at the corner of Bolshoy Prospect and 1st Line, was the Kinshi restaurant, where Gumilev and Akhmatova sometimes went for breakfast. They were joined by the poet Osip Mandelstam, who rented a room on the Cadet Line. On weekends, the couple left the apartment, preferring to spend time at Gumilev’s mother’s in Tsarskoye Selo.

From “Tuchka,” she saw Nikolai Stepanovich off to the theater of military operations of the First World War. He would come on leave and stay no longer at “Tuchka,” but at 10 Fifth Line, in Shileyko’s apartment.

Sources:

https://uznayvse.ru/znamenitosti/biografiya-anna-ahmatova.html

https://www.sobaka.ru/lifestyle/travel/44624

http://ahmatova.niv.ru/ahmatova/about/nedoshivin-progulki/tuchka-dlya-poetov.htm