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Abstract: The article presents a ballad interpretation of Anna Akhmatova’s poem V tu noch my soshli drug ot druga s uma … [That night we drove each other wild …] from the poetic series Tashkent Pages. Due to the fact that ballad becomes one of the most popular genres subject to a dramatic metamorphosis in the 20th century, many poets write “variations” on the theme. In her work, Akhmatova turns genres into meta-genres, and the ballad acquires both the features of a novel and of a lyric poem. The urgency of the study consists in the attempt to identify natural transformations and modifications of the acmeist ballad, which may help to clarify the ideas about acmeism as an artistic system. The historico-literary, phenomenological, typological and comparative approaches become a methodological basis of the work, founded on the theoretical writings of the acmeist poetry researchers – V. M. Zhirmunskiy, Yu. N. Tynyanov, B. M. Eykhenbaum, D. M. Segal, R. D. Timenchik, T. Venclova and others. There are many “psychological” ballads among Akhmatova’s early lyrical poems in which the conflict is based not on fantastic events but on tense relationships between the characters and on unexpected twists and turns of romantic plot introduced into her poems. However, Akhmatova of the later period goes away from experiments with emphasis on the plot; lyricism predominates in her texts, but the ballad touch with elements of mysticism appears almost always. The article points out the links between Akhmatova’s ballad-like poems and the classics of romanticism, such as V. A. Zhukovsky and M. Yu. Lermontov, and with Akhmatova’s “followers” – O. Sedakova, E. Schwartz, and A. Achair. The author enumerates the ballad motifs of the poems from the poetic series Tashkent Pages: a mysterious night walk through an unfamiliar city; mystical sounds accompanying the characters; “dead bride” leading her companion to another world, etc. The ballad meter of the poem is also noted – the alternation of amphibrachic tetrameter with a male clause and amphibrachic trimeter with a female clause. The ballad world is created by Akhmatova on the primeval land, and the distant constellation Serpens, creating spatial vertical and infinity, opens up a new space. “Smoky Song” brings to mind Solomon’s “Song of Songs”, emphasizing the uniqueness and irrevocability of this walk beyond the time and reality. The purpose of the study is to show the experiments with the ballad genre which Akhmatova carries out in her later creative work.