What city resonates in the lines of Anna Akhmatova - a strict imperial one or a fragile personal one? In Nina Popova's lecture, we will discuss how Petersburg, Tsarskoye Selo, and the Fountain House become full-fledged heroes of poems, connected to the Pushkin tradition and preserving the memory of love, war, and the tragic experience of an entire century. For Anna Akhmatova, Petersburg is not a decoration or a set of postcards. The city enters her poetry as a living space of memory, where streets, houses, and embankments have their own voice. In the lecture at the Mayakovsky Library, the conversation will focus on how the image of the city changes in the poetess's verses and why it becomes a key to her biography and time. The starting point is the early years and first publications. Petersburg and Tsarskoye Selo appear in poetry on the threshold of the 1910s and are closely linked to the Pushkin tradition, the intonation of high style, and the personal geography of growing up. Listeners will see how in early texts the city sounds both bright and cautious, how love, pride, and a sense of change coexist within it. Next, the discussion will move to the tragic decades - war, revolution, the blockade of meanings and human fates. The city becomes a place of prayer, a witness to losses, and a point where the personal inevitably collides with history. In this context, it will be mentioned how "Requiem" arose and why the Leningrad queues at the "Crosses" turn into an experience that demands language and precision. A special chapter is the Fountain House. Almost thirty-five years of life in this space shape the feeling of historical time: nearby are the living and the departed, family legends and urban myths. The lecturer will draw attention to the motto "God preserves everything" and how it resonates with Akhmatova's view of Petersburg's dramatic history and the fate of man. The lecture is delivered by Nina Ivanovna Popova - the founder and first director of the charitable foundation of friends of the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House, co-author of books about Akhmatova. Her narrative connects biographical details, museum memory, and attentive reading of poems, so...