🎬 Olga Berggolts and the siege of Leningrad.
A city suffers an 872-day Nazi siege. It's the longest in recorded history. Their survival, and ultimate victory is led by a poet, in a testament to the ⚡️ of art.
I’ve been reading Symphony for the City of the Dead.
It’s about Dmitri Shostakovich, and the impact of his 7th Symphony, which he composes and presents in the midst of the most brutal siege in world history1.
Bombs fall, and the people of Soviet St. Petersberg starve for two and a half years. Their tenacity, and ultimate victory against a concerted attempt at total annihilation is one of the most moving things I’ve ever read. Perhaps it’s because the victory ultimately belonged to the artists of the city.
Their determination to create and present music, theatre and poetry throughout the siege, to study at the library every day, under conditions so dire that a lead actor starves to death halfway through a public performance of The Three Musketeers (to give just one example), is inseparable from the political and military actions required to liberate the city.
In fact, the efforts of the artists to maintain the morale and humanity of the citizens are arguably the cornerstone of that victory.
Peppered throughout this tale of a great composer, is the story of a possibly greater poet. It’s her story, told in a few short paragraphs peppered throughout the book, that I can see as a film.
Let’s begin where we’re at, right now.
A few miles to the north of [St Petersburg] through Soviet-era suburbs of massive, weather-beaten apartment blocks and cracked car parks, lies [Piskaryovskoye] Memorial Cemetery, where many of the dead of besieged Leningrad were buried anonymously in ditches.
Between September 1941 and January 1944, some 800,000 residents of Leningrad will die. Most of cold and hunger.
Above the dead stands a statue of Mother Russia raising her garlanded arms in mourning…
Inscribed in granite is a poem by Olga Berggolts, which defiantly declares
Let no one forget.
Let nothing be forgotten.
Let’s return to a time before the siege. Before World War II.
It’s the 1930s. The Soviet Terror is laying its own kind of siege on the people of Leningrad.
During the torture of her ex-husband, the poet Olga Berggolts was dragged in for questioning. She was pregnant. The NKVD thugs beat her so brutally that she miscarried on the torture-room floor.
A few years late Olga finds herself trapped with up to 3 million fellow citizens, as the combined might of German, Finn and Italian forces lay waste to their city.
Poet Olga Berggolts described the sensation of hearing the bombs falling above while crouched in a basement: “everyone thinks, this one’s for me, and dies in advance. You die, and it passes, but a minute later it comes again, whistles again, and you die, are resurrected, sigh with relief, only to die again over and over. How long will this last?… Kill me at once, not bit by bit, several times a day!”
She survives, and broadcasts her poems regularly from Radio House. She lives at the radio station.
She officially was still living at the city’s block of writers’ apartments, a building called the “Tears of Socialism,” but she rarely went home. (It was not all selfless: she was having an affair with a coworker.) Though she had suffered greatly at the hands of the regime, she now turned her poetry to supporting the efforts of the city to remain strong in the face of the enemy. In her poems, she described and broadcast what people experienced all over the city - and so her poetry became, in many ways, the voice of the people.
Leningrad’s radio station also kept broadcasting. No one had much strength, so for many hours of the day, they broadcast only the ticking of the metronome. The poet Olga Berggolts, now yellow with jaundice and swollen with edema, spoke to the city of the dead about “human brotherhood.”
“Through the hallucinations of hunger, [Olga Berggolts’] compassion and love broke through to people” two soldiers at the front remembered. “This came from a woman who was undergoing the same agonies, was also starving, who understood everything, felt everything herself.”
The siege becomes interminable.
I learn that in Russian, there are two words for cannibalism. One refers to eating the dead. The other refers to killing people to eat. Both words are used regularly to describe the actions of the besieged citizens.
One night, faint with hunger, Olga Berggolts set out from Radio House to see a friend, who told her she’d found a bottle of cod-liver oil they could feast on. It was only a walk of two blocks, but Berggolts felt overwhelmed by the mounds of snow, the ruts of ice. She doddered like a old woman - tripped over something, and fell. As she lay there, she realised she had stumbled on a dead body, frozen into the slush in front of Philharmonic Hall. She did not think she could get up. The night, the darkness, the snow, the cold, the silence covered her, and it seemed as if she should just lie still and give up.
At that point, all round her, disembodied, she heard her own voice, speaking softly to her of hope. She could no longer understand what was happening. She wondered whether the corpse she’d tripped over was her own, whether she was already dead.
Then the voice in the air stopped reciting her poetry, and an announcer for Radio Leningrad came on. She had been hearing her own program, broadcast from a loudspeaker on the corner of the Hotel Europa.
Shaken, she slowly climbed to her feet and continued the walk to her friend’s apartment. Her poetry had saved many others in moments of despair: now, strangely, it has saved her own life, too.
January 18, 1943… the blockade is over
“the cursed circle is broken”
Olga Berggolts
She walks around her city with fresh eyes
“Suddenly Leningrad emerged from the gloom before our gaze, “ wrote Olga Berggolts. “To the last crack in its walls, the city was revealed to us - shell-pitted, bullet-riddled, scarred Leningrad, with its plywood windowpanes. And we saw that despite all the cruel slashes and blows, Leningrad retained its proud beauty. In the blueish, roseate, green and white of the lights, the city appeared to us so austere and touching we could not feast our eyes enough on it.
People were overwhelmed by their joy. It rained that day, but no one cared: the Great Patriotic War was over.
Poet Olga Berggolts wandered in the burned ruins of the Peterhof Palace. to the west of Leningrad. Before the war, it had been famous for its formal gardens; its terraced fountains had glittered with gold and spray.
The Nazis left nothing but a blasted shell. They had stolen the statuary, blasted through the floors, delighted in desecrating Russia's proud history.
Berggolts, walking there after the war, felt a strange sense of hope.
Again from the black dust, from the place of death and ashes, will arise the garden as before.
So it will be. I firmly believe in miracles.
You gave me that belief, my Leningrad.
M.T. Anderson (2015)
Some people’s spirit is truely remarkable. V interesting Arthur, thanks. Yes, it does sound the stuff for a good movie- or documentary. Xx