Notes of the Surviving. Blockade Diaries

To this day, several hundred diaries of residents of besieged Leningrad are known. However, despite the commonality of time, place, and the monstrous circumstances that gave rise to this unique collective text of the blockade city, each of them astonishes us in its own way. Behind the lines of each is the story of the collision of an individual with a catastrophe of historical scale, a catastrophe that stretched over years and was meticulously recorded by eyewitnesses in real time. "The pages of memories, letters, and documents sometimes resemble pages of the Apocalypse, creating an image of a city as an all-consuming grave, in the insatiable womb of which hundreds of thousands of children, women, and men have disappeared..."
Even more astonishing and truly life-affirming are those diary entries where, despite the horror of blockade everyday life, an unbroken and whole personality is clearly visible. Such are the diaries of Irina Dmitrievna Zelenskaya and the sisters Vera Konstantinovna Berkhman and Tatyana Konstantinovna Velikotnaya published in this book. Personal diaries are a special kind of literature: with few exceptions, the outside reader finds themselves allowed access to these texts by chance. But the value of blockade diaries is unique and timeless: in those terrible days, they served as a breath of fresh air for their authors, and in our days, they provide genuine examples of life resilience, affirming the thought that even in inhuman conditions it is possible to remain human.