from the Erisman to the conference venue, in normal times a pleasant stroll from the Petrograd Side to Vasilyevsky Island, took two hours, during which she passed snowed-in trams, a building that had been burning, unattended, all night, and a street flooded by a broken fire hydrant, the unexpected water giving off twists of vapour that caught the pink dawn light. At the end of a day of readings, reports and speeches she retired to a bunk set up behind a curtain in the tobacco-fugged conference hall. In the early hours she was woken by the sound of smashing wood. ‘It was Z, who was using an axe to demolish the chair on which he had been sitting during the presentations. I watched him throw the pieces into the stove — helpless Leningrad chairs! I grew warm again and went back to sleep.’
At the Academy of Sciences Georgi Knyazev, confined more than ever to his ‘small radius’ because the cold had seized up his wheelchair, watched helplessly as his subordinates — to whom he had so recently given pep talks — died around him. ‘Shakhmatova Kaplan and her sixteen-year-old son Alyosha’, he wrote on 5 January, ‘have died of dystrophy. The boy was extremely gifted and loved astronomy. He would undoubtedly have made a name for himself, perhaps even have become an Academician. The news greatly affected me and all our staff.’ The following day a Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences went ahead with a scheduled meeting, at which Knyazev presented a report (‘perhaps my last’) titled ‘The History of the Heads of the Academy’s Departments Throughout its Existence (1925–1941)’. As he read a ‘poor wretch’ lay outside in the courtyard, already stripped of his boots. Keeping up a confident facade, Knyazev admitted to his diary, was now almost impossible:
I try to smile when I’m with other people, to sound cheerful and optimistic, to raise their spirits. . Only here, on these pages, do I permit myself to relax my self-restraint. Here I am as I really am. I saw Svikul, who has just lost her fifteen-year-old son Volodya, a modest youngster. Inconsolable grief, despair — these are pitiful words in comparison with what is expressed in her eyes, her sunken cheeks and quivering chin. I put my arms around her, hugged her, and that was all I could do.25
At the Hermitage, staff and their families — about two thousand people altogether — had moved permanently into twelve air-raid shelters in the palace vaults, where they slept on plank beds incongruously mixed with ancient Turkmen rugs and gilded palace furniture. Area-level windows having been bricked up, the rooms were almost pitch-black even in daytime. One, the office of museum director Iosif Orbeli, was supplied with electricity via a cable led in from Tsar Nicholas’s old pleasure yacht the
One of the most famous blockade-defying events of the winter was a symposium held by the Hermitage in mid-December, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Timurid poet Alisher Navai. A display was put together of porcelain decorated with scenes from Navai’s verse (an artist from the old Imperial porcelain works, Mikhail Mokh, painted a small bowl in the style of a Mogul miniature); Boldyrev gave a paper and his fellow Persianist Nikolai Lebedev (so weak that he had to remain seated) read his own new Navai translation. The audience included Boldyrev’s elderly mother, who insisted on contributing a small piece of bread with pork fat to the official lunch. It didn’t matter, one attendee remembered, that there was not a single Uzbek amongst them — the event was ‘a challenge to the enemy. Light was fighting darkness.’26 Boldyrev, ever the realist, thought his old friend Lebedev’s presentation ‘bad and disorganised’, but the translation itself ‘wonderful — the bright clear language of Pushkin’s fairy tales’. His own paper had been worth the effort too: ‘In work lies the only happiness and satisfaction of our days. The worse the situation physically — up to a point — the brighter and fresher the workings of our minds.’27
Two months later Boldyrev heard of Lebedev’s death, from starvation combined with dysentery. He had last seen him a fortnight earlier, in the Hermitage cellars:
He and his wife were lying in cold and complete darkness, in the underground hell of the basement (shelter no. 3). He recognised me by my voice, and grabbed me like a drowning man clutching at a straw. They gave me 250 roubles, imploring me to buy bread and candles for them in the market. . His last words to me were ‘How I want to live, Sandrik, how I want to live!’ He spoke with that amazing, melodious voice of his, with which he so inimitably read his marvellous, musical translations. . At that point I was too squeezed myself to give real help, and couldn’t buy him anything. Rather Galya, who did occasionally go to the market, didn’t make it, not having the strength. And bread was hardly being sold for money anyway.28
Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre — the
At the time, however, many Leningraders were cynical. As one diarist noted of a concert given by the great violinist David Oistrakh (flown in from Moscow for the occasion), the audience were not the usual intelligentsia types, and appeared unusually healthy. He and his wife were by far the most ‘dystrophic-looking’ present.29 Even a fervent Stalinist, watching crowds jostle for tickets to an operetta (
Since in April it became necessary to portray the rebirth of the city at the hands of the half-dead, L.S.T. [the school’s director] got the vain idea that our school — or to be more accurate, what was left of it — would give the first [springtime] public performance at the Philharmonia.
Some of the girls had stayed relatively healthy, thanks to fortunate conditions at home, but they all had scurvy. The most talented of them, Lyusa Alekseyeva, couldn’t dance the classics — her legs, covered with blue blotches, gave way and wouldn’t obey.
I informed L.S.T. of the situation.
In reply there came a furious shout and threats to deny those who refused to dance their ration coupons for the next month. .
The performance took place. We even had the ‘dying swan’ and other balletic nonsense. Petya, made up by me to look like a living person, ‘danced’ two numbers. To keep him going, the girls had brought him bread and
There was no public audience at the concert, for there was none in the city. The first two rows were taken by arts administrators and representatives from the Smolniy and Party organisations. With her hair dyed red and dressed up like a model, L.S.T. shone during the
Petya died soon afterwards, in an orphanage, and L.S.T. — one Lidiya Semenovna Tager — continued to flaunt a succession of new hats and fur coats, bought with food that she was able to obtain in her position as wife of the Leningrad Front’s head of provisioning.31
Oddest, viewed from a utilitarian perspective, of the institutional stories is perhaps that of the Leningrad Zoo, a small and charming establishment, dating back to the 1860s, located behind the Peter and Paul Fortress on the Petrograd Side. The zoo had evacuated fifty-eight of its more valuable animals to Kazan before the siege ring
