“I know that it’s impossible to write like that”: the first volume of the collection of blockade diaries of Leningraders was published in St. Petersburg

The publishing house of the European University in St. Petersburg has published the first volume of a new scientific series “I know that it is impossible to write like that”: The Phenomenon of the Siege Diary, reports a Rosbalt correspondent. The book contains seven blockade diaries of Leningraders – from schoolchildren and teachers to middle-level party members – and is designed to show the very phenomenon of the blockade diary, its features, its significance for authors, historians, and people of subsequent generations.

Historian Anastasia Pavlovskaya, the compiler of the first volume, said that in a year the second volume of the series, dedicated to the evacuation, should appear. It is planned to collect a volume on the “pre-blockade” by publishing the diaries of 1940-early 1941. In addition, there are plans to create a book of diaries of cultural figures of the besieged city, but not well-known, those who are still well-known – Olga Berggolts, Vera Inber and others, and people, albeit of a “second plan”, but their entries are no less interesting and reflect the life of this stratum of the population of besieged Leningrad.

More than 500 blockade diaries are known, about a little more than two hundred have been published. As the researchers of the Center for the Study of Ego-Documents note, “It was lived, people of various ages kept diaries during the blockade – from younger schoolchildren who had recently learned to write, to the elderly. In general, the diary as a form of self-expression, self-observation and assessment of reality was more characteristic of men than women. During the blockade, the gender difference practically disappears – the authors are approximately equally divided. In the book of the European University, each publication of the diary is preceded by introductory and final texts – information about the author, the features of the text and its existence and storage. The afterword, prepared by Anastasia and Alexei Pavlovsky, is dedicated to the place of the blockade diary in the structure of the cultural memory of the blockade.

The compilers of the series reproduced the only diary of the seven diaries in the collection in facsimile – “The Diary of a Hungry Time” by a teenager Volodya Tomilin. The boy led him into the time of death – from November 14 to December 31, 1941. “Visually, this is a very strong artifact,” says Anastasia Pavlovskaya. “The teenager monotonously lists what he ate every day, and when he ate nothing at all, and also gives plates of bread norms and his short remarks about life, where he tries to discipline himself as best he can.”

Party agitator and journalist, employee of the city committee of the CPSU (b) Alexander Grishkevich in his diary leaves not only daily entries, but short notes about what he saw, in fact, “reports from the field”:

“In the gateway of a house on Sovetsky Prospekt (now Suvorovsky – ed.), a middle-aged man was found, frozen with his arm pulled up. Death came, apparently, instantly”; “In mid-January (1942 – Rosbalt), M. Gordon flew in from Moscow and spoke about his dispute with an Izvestia employee who had arrived from Sverdlovsk. He complained about the poor living conditions in Sverdlovsk and told Gordon: “We have worse food than in Leningrad.” To this, Gordon asked the question: “Do you have dogs and cats running around the streets? -Certainly. “Well, then everything is clear – who is better and who is worse.”

The book “I know that it’s impossible to write like that”: The Phenomenon of the Siege Diary” will be presented on January 27, the Day of the Complete Lifting of the Siege of Leningrad, at 18:30 at the Anna Akhmatova Museum in the Fountain House.