In the poetry of Anna Akhmatova the nineteenth-century myth of Petersburg, as the accursed, unreal city, is filtered through the vision of a poet born in Imperial Russia and destined to confront the terrors of Soviet rule. The city that emerges embodies loss and dislocation, continuity and miraculous survival. This "scholarly and imaginative study" (New York Review of Books) convincingly demonstrates that a good part of Akhmatovas verse could never have been written but for the Petersburg environment.