Excerpt 1: The Concert (Oct. 1)
This is an excerpt from my new book, The Concert. Based on a true story from World War II, The Concert traces the efforts of a group of musicians, writers and artists to defy Hitler’s invasion of their beloved city of Leningrad and attempts to starve them to death. Channeling creativity, showcasing hope, they summoned their strength, against the odds, to perform a symphony written by Dmitri Shostakovich, about the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union.
If you like this excerpt, please buy the book here. Audio book coming shortly.
Opening Quote
Whenever I walk on Nevsky Prospekt, I feel my city’s drama pulsing beneath my feet. Like a Greek chorus, Leningrad always wrenched between high culture and epic cruelty, as if drunk on history.
Once it was St. Peterburg, for it was Peter the Great’s city, and it was he who designed the broad avenues and imported the great Italianate architecture that centuries later I still admire. True, Catherine the Great contributed to the skyline with her stunning Winter Palace and her art collections, all of which cemented Peter’s legacy of “a window to the West.” But in my view it was Peter who in 1703 first saw the need to open the country to the cultural, political and economic trends of the day across the continent. In doing so, he helped Russia shed its Tatar heritage and become more European. The city flourished, becoming a cultural mecca where Tolstoy wrote, Tchaikovsky composed and Nureyev danced. A haven of intellectual thought, the city also attracted a school of Marxists whose bloody Revolution in 1917 toppled the Romanovs, promising a worker’s paradise but instead delivering a Gulag. As a child, I saluted the red flag, one of Lenin’s young disciples. Now, at 82, I sigh at my childish ardor, seeing behind St. Petersburg’s majestic landscape the ugly scars of tyranny. I am a poet. Sometimes I think only a poet could make sense of this place.
I have also come to understand, at the end of my life, what I wish I’d known at the start. History, despite all its clashing cymbals, all its sound and fury, is mostly irony. Memory is the thing.
— Olga Berggolts, Russian Poet