getting help for Igor she didn’t even listen to what I was saying. She was tormented by one fear — that he would get his hands on her card, or eat her bread. She categorically stated, ‘I’m hungry, I want to live. I don’t care about Igor and his hunger. He lost his card, let him deal with it himself.’ She’s not going to give him anything. She must survive and she’s not interested in anything else. She hates and envies anybody who’s still on their feet. . Igor just stood there, not saying anything, and devouring a piece of bread which the neighbours had given him out of pity. She was shouting angrily, ‘Don’t believe his complaints! Look what a huge piece of bread he’s stuffing down his throat, while I lie here hungry and weak!’ Igor, despite the horror and tragedy of their situation, is calm and never complains. He may no longer be of sound mind.17
For those living in communal flats, whose kitchens, bathrooms and hallways were shared, neighbours’ breakdowns could be very close indeed. Igor Kruglyakov, kept alive by the iron discipline of his mother and grandmother (no talk of death was allowed, and he and his sister were forced to stand outdoors in the snow for ten minutes each day to get light and air), heard the couple in the next-door room first quarrelling, then fighting, then thumps on the wall as the wife killed their baby.18
A consummate siege survivor was the Persianist Aleksandr Boldyrev. Good-looking, egotistical and possessed of a mordant wit, he had dodged the purges of 1936–7 by spending long spells in hospital with ulcers, or on research trips to remote parts of Central Asia. When war broke out he avoided the draft with the help of his lover, a colleague at the Hermitage, who interceded for him with the museum’s director via her long-suffering husband. Though not a Party member, Boldyrev continued indefatigably to work his contacts through the siege, inscribing himself at the Scholars’ Building and the Eastern Institute as well as at the Hermitage, and eating a daily ‘lunch’ at each. From the Hermitage he also managed to squeeze a manual worker’s card and, remarkably, 1,417 roubles in compensation for his lost summer holiday. He also delivered historical lectures — on ‘Peter’s Fleet’, ‘The Literature of the Fraternal Peoples of Central Asia’ and ‘Today’s Afghanistan’ — to sailors on Leningrad’s ice-bound ships. Sometimes these commissions meant a long walk across the city for no return, but usually they earned him a meal and a few Little Star cigarettes. His siege diary reads like an ever-changing to-do list of officials to be petitioned, debts to be called in and barter deals to be followed up — shifts he describes as like ‘leaping from tussock to tussock through a bog’.19 He managed, too, not to lose hope (the siege was always about to be lifted; England always about to open a second front) or his sense of humour. ‘All the time’, he wrote on 10 February, ‘sitting, standing or lying, I am reminded of my extreme emaciation. Especially striking is the disappearance of my buttocks, the one really distinguished aspect of my person, of which I was very proud. Now I have no bottom at all; my pelvis and hip bones clink against the chair.’
Though his family was far from harmonious (his wife quarrelled relentlessly with his mother, and he with his wife), they continued to operate as a team, Boldyrev bringing home ‘yeast soup’ and ‘jelly’ from his various cafeterias, his wife donating blood (for which extra rations were given) and his mother queuing for bread. Most of all they were fortunate in having inherited valuables to trade. As well as the usual clothes and shoes, in the course of the winter they sold three watches — Boldyrev’s own, his late father’s and his wife’s Longine — for ten kilos of flour and five of beef fat; an amber cigarette holder (for 200 grams of bread), two sets of silver dessert spoons (for two kilos of bread and 700 grams of meat), a silver cream jug and sugar bowl, porcelain teacups (sold to the old Faberge shop on the Morskaya for 670 roubles, which bought a litre of sunflower oil) and his mother’s wedding ring. This combination of perseverance, cooperation and luck just saved Boldyrev, his wife and daughter, but not his brother-in-law, uncle or mother, all of whom died of starvation between December and May.
At night, lying on a sofa next to a stove stoked with furniture and picture frames, Boldyrev read novels. On 19 December he finished
That the blockaded Leningraders escaped confinement by reading is a siege cliche. (‘I mostly read Balzac and Stendhal’, a Kirov Works foreman is said to have told the Party hack Aleksandr Fadeyev, ‘reporting’ from the city in the spring.) It is, however, borne out by the memoirs and diaries. At the start of the war, according to Ginzburg, ‘everyone’ avidly read
Leningraders also wrote — Knyazev his catalogues, Inber poetry, Likhachev a history of medieval Novgorod, and Olga Fridenberg a paper on the origins of the Greek epics, until the contents of her inkwell congealed into a violet lump. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, remarkably, never lost her appreciation of beauty, describing in detail the look of bare, frost-covered branches against the sky even in the depths of February. She tried to animate her increasingly lethargic teenage nephews, Petya and Boba — ‘pale and thin as paper’ — by setting up a still life for them to draw (Boba died, Petya survived). Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky, a folklorist and friend of Boldyrev’s, studied Greek grammar and strove to convince himself that he had ‘been presented with a singular opportunity to observe life at its most strange and remote’. He had often tried to imagine medieval Russia in time of plague or famine; now he could see it for himself. No wonder that the chroniclers had described a dragon swooping over the land, snatching children and breathing fire.24 The archaeologist Boris Piotrovsky, living in the Hermitage basement, wrote a history of Urartu, a lost seventh-century kingdom on the shores of Lake Van. ‘Terribly cold’, he scribbled in the margins, and ‘Cold, it’s hard to write’.25 At the zoo, Nikolai Sokolov wrote up different species’ reactions to artillery fire. Baboons and monkeys, he noted, became hysterical during shelling, but quickly became used to barrage balloons and showed only ‘normal curiosity’ towards searchlights and flares. Completely unruffled was the zoo’s bear, which ‘lay peacefully, sucking on its paw’. Similar sang-froid was displayed by a Siberian mountain goat: when a high-explosive shell landed in its enclosure it was found peering with calm interest into the resulting crater. The emu was ‘completely unresponsive to anything’ — thanks, Sokolov thought, to its ‘limited intellect’.
As well as being read or written, books could, of course, be used as fuel. ‘We warm ourselves’, wrote Fridenberg, ‘by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils the kettle to make our tea.’26 Boldyrev sorted his books, like his furniture, into three categories —‘keep’, ‘sell’ and ‘burn’. One by one Likhachev dismembered and fed into his
