[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 times of trouble. How could her presence not be felt to an almost overwhelming degree?

From 1925 to 1952, it was the nearest thing to a permanent home she had. Here between 1935 and 1940 she composed Requiem, a sequence of poems from which posterity will know what it was to be in St. Petersburg during the Stalinist terror and to live in dread from day to day. And in this apartment she later wrote much of the long Poem Without a Hero, a phantasmagoric and often cryptic or coded autobiography into which people, places and incidents from her past come crowding.

During much of her life, the Soviet regime did everything in its power to disgrace and discredit Akhmatova and her work. One of her husbands was executed, another died in a prison camp, her only son was repeatedly arrested and then sent to the gulag. After she was expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers in 1946, her room was bugged. The K G B forced the domestic help to report on the company she kept. She was routinely tailed in the street. If she came back home after dark, cameras were trained on her and pictures were taken by the light of magnesium flares.

To find the strait little cabins that make up the museum, we must take the "tricky back staircase" that her friend Lidia Chukovskaya first climbed in 1938. "Each step was as deep as three," she writes in her published diaries. Once arrived, she was led through "a kitchen hung with washing on lines, its wetness slapping one's face."

Today that entrance is bright and clean and dry. And the museum begins with an aspect of Akhmatova that has nothing to do with her status as the conscience of a great city and the spokeswoman for wives, mothers and lovers suffering through the terror. The memorabilia give us an unforgettable notion of Akhmatova's life in St. Petersburg before and just after the Revolution. The pioneer travels of her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, in Africa on behalf of the Academy of Sciences are mapped and recorded, as are his dandified good looks and his impact as a gifted young poet. Invitations, playbills and vintage photographs document the era in which Akhmatova was free to travel and to publish whatever she pleased. She was hugely admired. In 1911–12 she went to Paris, where every head turned as she walked by and where she made friends with Modigliani and watched an early season of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In the museum we get a sense of her living a high-styled life in a great cosmopolitan capital. We see country outings, uproarious evenings in the Stray Dog cabaret, snatched moments a deux and the comings and goings of a major dancer, Tamara Karsavina, a major poet, Aleksandr Blok and a major theater director, Vseyolod Meyerhold. Photographed in the likeness of a very young Hamlet, she would have bewitched Shakespeare himself.

Readers who know her for a famous passage or two from Requiem think of her primarily as an elegist of genius. But she never lost a gift for candor, concision and a conversational fluency in her poems. What other poet would sum herself up as "the most faithful mate of other women's husbands, / and of many the sorrowing widow"? In seven lines she could sum up a failed marriage with Attic finality

     He loved three things in life
     Evensong: white peacocks
     And old maps of America.
     He hated it when children cried.
     He hated tea with raspberry jam
     And women's hysterics
     … And I was his wife

The whole of life was her subject. At 18, she delivered the essence of insomnia in two lines, "Both sides of the pillow / Are already hot." When she was in Paris in 1911 she wrote a short poem beginning, "It's so much fun when you're drunk / And your stories don't make sense."

It is easy to document the Akhmatova of later years in the museum because her room is so minutely re-created. And it is also impossible because there is no way to replicate the generational and matrimonial horror scene set up in 1925 when Akhmatova was taken by her third husband, the art historian Nikolai Punin, to live in the apartment with his former wife and daughter. What became a domestic inferno is now hushed and pristine. Vanished is the primeval phonograph that the neighbors cranked up and played by the hour. Nor does a taped docudrama picture the scene in which Nikolai Punin would glare at his family and say, "Too damn many people get to eat here!"

The place has been cleaned up, not prettied up. Looking at how she lived, we recall that she never learned to cook or sew. She could look very grand, if she wanted to. But often her clothes were torn, top to bottom, unminded for years. It was nothing to her to sleep in a coarse nightshirt under a thick blanket without a sheet. She was content if someone brought her for supper one boiled carrot, long gone cold. Eyeing her few belongings, we remember how the Punins "borrowed" her kettle and went out on the town, locking their door. We also remember how often she was left without, or perhaps did not think of, a knife, a fork or a spoon for guests.

If there are gaps in what we see, and in what she had, that is because this was a communal apartment in which people pilfered. Sometimes a soap dish vanished, sometimes a rare Egyptian brooch. (Modigliani's drawing of Akhmatova, done in Paris, is still there, but in reproduction.) Noting that there is no big desk, we remember how she said that most of what she wrote in the Soviet years was done while sitting on someone else's window ledge. Noting that there are no bookshelves and no books, we remember that she kept her Dante, Pushkin and Shakespeare out of sight in a Florentine chest or credenza.

Through her window, we look down on the garden; it was fenced off in her time. Punin had a key, but she did not. "How is that possible?" someone asked her. "A professor is always a professor," Akhmatova said "But what am I? Carrion."

The offhand use of that disconcerting noun should remind us that no one ever had a finer instinct for the unexpected word that leaves nothing more to be said. When that one word was "no," in relation to the Soviet regime, she never hedged. Her friend Nadezhda Mandelstam says in her memoir Hope Abandoned that "Akhmatova's strength lay in her refusal to accept the untruth of the times in which she lived. The manner in which she uttered her 'No' was a real feat of nonacceptance." After she had been married to Punin for 15 years, he brought a mistress to live in the apartment. Akhmatova lost no time. She said simply, "Let's exchange rooms." This was forthwith agreed to.

If there are no manuscripts in the museum, it is because it was so dangerous for her to keep them, she would invite one or two trusted friends to memorize her poems. Then she burned the manuscripts. While her little iron stove crackled ("peacefully and cozily," according to one witness), she sat and talked about the weather.

If there are no marks of esteem from colleagues abroad, it is because Akhmatova was not allowed to receive letters from them. It was a dangerous day for her when in 1945, she was visited by Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford philosopher and historian of ideas. He was only the second foreigner to whom she had spoken since World War I. His visit was undertaken in all innocence. In no way could it have been a threat to the Soviet regime. The many hours that the two spent talking together—he had perfect Russian—could have led to a friendship that would have done honor to our century. Yet what came of this visit, as of the following day, was a long period of heightened harassment of her.

It is therefore, in many ways, a racked and complicated presence that reigns over this museum. Akhmatova the goddess of mourning and the intransigent unbeliever in Soviet ways is a major component. But there was yet another Akhmatova—one who could describe herself in later life as "written by Kafka and acted by Chaplin." She could make her friends laugh till they fell off their chairs. When I met her in London in the 1960's, we were speaking about Shakespeare and she declared firmly that her favorite character was Falstaff—no high heroics for her. Nadezhda Mandelstam did not hand out superlatives easily, but she said of Akhmatova that she had never known "such a wonderful madcap woman, poet and friend."

The annex in which she lived is not at all like the ancestral Sheremetyev Palace to which it is attached. But Akhmatova did not fail to take note of the family motto, "Deus conservat omnia," which says that it is the role of God to preserve all things, without exception. In that context, God had a sworn enemy in the Soviet regime. But when we are all through with the Akhmatova museum, and with the feast of reading by or about her that is now available, we may well decide that in respect of Anna Akhmatova God did a very good job.