Quotes About Leningrad

Gradually, like the emigration of an insidious, phantom population, Leningrad belonged more to the dead than to the living. The dead watched over streets and sat in snow-swamped buses. Whole apartment buildings were tenanted by them, where in broken rooms, dead families sat waiting at tables. Their dominion spread room by room, like lights going out in evening.

On the artillery shells produced in Leningrad, workers stenciled messages to the Germans: "For the blood of our workers," "For our children's anguish," and "For our murdered friends.

As historian Max Hastings wrote, "Both Hitler and Stalin displayed obsessive stubbornness about Leningrad. That of Stalin was finally rewarded, amid a mountain of corpses. A people who could endure such things displayed qualities the Western Allies lacked, which were indispensable to the destruction of Nazism. In the auction of cruelty and sacrifice, the Soviet dictator proved the higher bidder.

There are several problems with this passage in the Volkov memoir, though. For one thing, only one page earlier, Volkov has Shostakovich say the opposite: "I wrote my Seventh Symphony, the 'Leningrad,' very quickly. I couldn't not write it. War was all around. . . .

Shostakovich later said, Even before the war, in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family who hadn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under your blanket, so that no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else, and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. This requiem allowed them to mourn together, in public.

Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.

The criminal profile of corpse-eaters was surprising. Only 2 percent had a previous criminal record. They were primarily women, uneducated females with no employment and no local Leningrad address. They were, in other words, often refugees who had fled to the city and who therefore did not have ration books at all. They had to make a choice between eating those already dead or dying themselves.

Horror stories like this — and the issue of Leningrad cannibalism as a whole — could not be talked about openly during the Soviet period. Such an admission of the breakdown of society was considered demoralizing. Only in 2002 were NKVD files opened so academics could discover the gruesome statistical realities of person-eating.

In the light of recent scholarship, Shostakovich's anti-Stalinism no longer seems surprising or controversial, and was not unusual for the intelligentsia of Moscow and (in particular) Leningrad.

Zhukov was stunned. Unlikely as it might seem, most of the Leningrad tank force was made up of motionless decoys, nailed together by Shostakovich's colleagues in the set-design team at the Mariinsky Theater.

Collapsed roofs "hung at an angle and looked as if they were still sliding down, perpetually falling, like a waterfall." Leningrad now literally resembled one of the fractured Cubist landscapes of the 1920s avant-garde — or, as Ginzburg remarked, one of Vsevolod Meyerhold's stage sets.

Whatever his intentions for the piece might have been originally, this was the direction people were pushing him in: to understand the growing work as a testimony of Leningrad's struggles and strength.

As the bulb of black cloud, lit by both sun and flame, hovered above the storehouses, the people of Leningrad looked on in choked awe. "It was an immense spectacle of stunning beauty," wrote Lyubov Shaporina. The air smelled sweet as tons of sugar burned.

If music without words can have "characters," then Shostakovich's characters are like those in the absurdist stories of his Leningrad writer friends: broad and bizarre and almost cartoonish at times, full of vivid eccentricities.

Compulsion was a key element in Leningrad's survival, as in that of Stalin's nation. If the city's inhabitants had been offered an exchange of surrender for food in February 1942, they assuredly would have given

Oh,to be walking through Leningrad white night after white night, the dawn to dusk all smelting together like platinum ore, Tatiana thought, turning away to the wall, again to the wall, the wall, as ever. Alexander, my nights, my days, my every thought. You will fall away from me in just a while, won't you, and I'll be whole again, and I will go on and feel for someone else, the way everyone does. But my innocence is forever gone.

We'll meet again in Lvov, my love and I…" Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young.

Falling in love with you in the Summer Garden in the white nights in Leningrad is the moment that propels me through life.

It was a perfect day. For five minutes there was no war, and it was just a glorious Sunday in a Leningrad June. When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.

I walked into my dream and kept walking with my Leningrad in front of me and behind me and all around me. I wasn't carrying Russia with me. It was carrying me.

Light came through the window, trickling morning all over the room. Tatiana Metanova slept the sleep of the innocent, the sleep of restless joy, of warm, white Leningrad nights, of jasmine June. But most of all, intoxicated with life, she slept the exuberant sleep of undaunted youth. She did not sleep for much longer.