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John Russell (essay date 1 January 1995)

SOURCE: "The Smallest Museum in Russia: Akhmatova Lived Here (and Lives Here Still)," in New York Times Book Review, January 1, 1995, p. 10.

[Russell is an author and writes for art and culture for the New York Times. In the following essay, he describes the museum in St. Petersburg dedicated to Akhmatova.]

The most moving of all the museums in Russia, right now, is also the smallest and the most unlikely. Niched with no fuss whatever in what was a communal apartment high in the annex of the former Sheremetyev Palace in St. Petersburg, it is devoted to a great Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). A quiet and almost secret place, it has in it virtually no object of intrinsic value. Its installation is rudimentary. But it is her own room, with her belongings all around, nothing added or subtracted. The linden trees outside the window are the ones whose agitated shadows she remembered in...

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1. Introduction
2. Criticism
   1. Stanley Kunitz (essay date 1935)
   2. Yelena Byelyakova (essay date April 1990)
   3. Susan Salter Reynolds (21 March 1993)
   4. John Bayley (review date 13 May 1993)
   5. Simon Franklin (review date 14 May 1993)
   6. Sonia I. Ketchian (essay date Summer 1993)
   7. Rosette C. Lamonte (review date Summer 1993)
   8. Sonia I. Ketchian (review date Fall 1993)
   9. John Simon (essay date May 1994)
   10. Ervin C. Brody (essay date Summer 1994)
   11. John Russell (essay date 1 January 1995)
   12. Michael Specter (essay date 28 June 1995)
   13. Clare Cavanagh (essay date Spring 1996)
   14. Roberta Reeder (essay date Winter 1997)
3. Further Reading
4. Copyright