Leningrad Under Siege (Chtenia: Readings from Russia) - Softcover

There is much talk these days about a "creative class." Yet what was it like to truly be a member of the creative class, in the Soviet Union, in Leningrad for that matter. Where everything you wrote, everything you thought, everything you believed, was the province of the state. This amazing collection of memoirs (and a few poems and sketches) is about people who did not give in, who were not only intelligent and gifted writers, but also conscientious, willful, humane. Needless to say, this often led to heartbreak and anguish, exile and the camps. Or just a bullet in the back of the head. At a time when Russia is again clamping down on cultural and literary freedoms, it is instructive to look back at how it all went last time. Authors include Korney Chukovsky, Lydia Ginzburg, Kobra, Izrail Metter, Olga Bergholz, Alexander Kushner, Lydia Chukovskaya, Vladimir Britanishsky, Arseny Berezin, Konstantin Azadovsky and Evgenia Shcheglova, who is also issue curator.