A young girl offers bread to a host of eager pigeons in the courtyard of the Anna Akmatova museum.
And who was Anna Akmatova? One of Russia's most important 20th century poets, who knew hardship and tragedy and how to write about them. Her husband was shot by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s (the reprieve issued by Lenin arrived too late to stop the bullet) and her son endured several lengthy imprisonments under Stalin's brutal repressions, during which it was unclear whether he would survive the arduous ordeals. Akmatova described the unendurable horror of this situation in her wrenching poem Requiem ("husband dead, son in jail, pray for me"), which because of its sensitive topic was not allowed to be published in the Soviet Union until 1987. Surely Russia has become a better place if her apartment is now a museum-shrine and pigeons feast in her courtyard.
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