Notes from the Blockade / A Story of Pity and Cruelty

The 900-day siege of Leningrad (1941-44) was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. Some 750,000 civilians died of cold and hunger.

Lydia Ginzburg, a respected literary scholar, survived. Using her own diary records, along with conversations and impressions collected over the years, she distilled the collective experience of life under siege. Through painful depiction of the harrowing conditions of that period, Ginzburg created a paean to the dignity, vitality and resilience of the human spirit.

This original translation by Alan Myers has been revised and annotated by Emily van Buskirk. This edition includes 'A Story of Pity and Cruelty', a recently discovered short story translated into English for the first time by Angela Livingstone.

Lidiya Ginzburg (1902-1990), a respected Russian literary critic, was often at odds with the Soviet literary establishment and much of her writing had to be confined to the "desk drawer." She was born in Odessa in 1902 and moved to Leningrad in 1922 where she studied at the State Insitute for Art History. She survived the purges, the blockade, and the anti-Semitic years of the 1950s to become a friend and inspiration to the postwar generation of Petersburg poets, including Joseph Brodsky and Alexandr Kushner. Eventually in 1960s and 1970s she was able to publish her literary criticism and theory, but it was not until 1984 that Ginzburg published Blockade Diary in the journal Neva. Alexander Kushner is a Pushkin Prize-winning Russian poet.