During the German bombardment of Leningrad, earlier and now St. Petersburg, the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, struck on the head by a falling brick, stumbles into a basement for shelter and finds herself unexpectedly back at the long abandoned site of the Stray Dog Café, where in the second decade of the twentieth century the most famous Russian poets, artists, actors, and dancers gathered to drink, sing, argue, and make love, and gradually the Stray Dog comes to life again, when