ABOUT THIS BOOK

For 872 days during World War II, the city of Leningrad endured a crushing blockade at the hands of German forces. Close to one million civilians died, most from starvation. Amid the devastation, Olga Berggolts broadcast her poems on the one remaining radio station, urging listeners not to lose hope. When the siege had begun, the country had already endured decades of revolution, civil war, economic collapse, and Stalin's purges. Berggolts herself survived the deaths of two husbands and both of her children, her own arrest, and a stillborn birth after being beaten under interrogation.

Berggolts wrote her memoir Daytime Stars in the spirit of the thaw after Stalin's death. In it, she celebrated the ideals of the revolution and the heroism of the Soviet people while also criticizing censorship of writers and recording her doubts and despair. This English translation by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum makes available a unique autobiographical work by an important author of the Soviet era. In her foreword, Katharine Hodgson comments on experiences of the Terror about which Berggolts was unable or unwilling to write.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Olga Berggolts (1910–75) was a Soviet poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum is a professor of history at West Chester University and the author of International Communism and the Spanish Civil War, Small Comrades, and The Legacy of the Siege of Leningrad, 1941–1995.

REVIEWS

"A lyrical memoir steeped in the world of the Russian/Soviet intelligentsia. Berggolts opens up to her readers the gray zones of Soviet life." —Benjamin Nathans, author of Beyond the Pale

“A compelling work and an interesting window onto a Soviet life, extending from a childhood during the civil war to the youthful revolutionary in Petrograd/Leningrad, from the terror of the 1930s and the siege of Leningrad to the present of the text, 1953–62.”—Emily Van Buskirk, author of Lydia Ginzburg's Prose

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Illustrations
Foreword: Finding Memory in the Margins
            Katherine Hodgson
Preface
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Daytime Stars as Historical Source
            Lisa A. Kirschenbaum

Part I
Chapter 1. Journey to the Town of My Childhood
            The Dream
            Papa’s Back
            Fairy Tale of Light
            Petrograd
            In My Memory
            The Knight of Light
            The Essential Book
            “It’s Mine!”
            Two Meetings
            Pen and Ink
            “Silver Night”
            Last Summer
Chapter 2. That Forest Clearing
Chapter 3. The Nevsky Gate Campaign
            Daytime Stars
            Day of Heights: Childhood
            Day of Heights: Flanders Chain
            Flowers Immortal
            Day of Heights: “Guzhovo Will Not Be Taken”
            Lenin
            “You’re Published at Our Factory”
            Day of Heights: Lermontov
            Day of Heights: “Defend the Revolution!”
            The Valdai Duga
            The Crop-Eared Bell
            The Path to My Father’s House
            “Anton Ivanovich Is Angry”
            Cigarette Break
            Little Steps in the Ice
            The Secret of the Earth
            Princess Barbara
            Glory of the World
            Return Path

Part II
Chapter 4. Good Morning, People!
            “Our Fritz Is Dying”
            Meeting at the Astoria
            “Guten Morgen, Fritz!”
Chapter 5: Blockade Bathhouse

Notes
List of Contributors
Index

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