Leningrad: Siege and Symphony
The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
The "gripping story" of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city's morale (The New York Times Book Review).
For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike.
Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled "Leningrad" in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra's hundred members had survived.
With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony "brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment" (Booklist, starred review), in "a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
"He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan's descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting." —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Veteran international journalist Moynahan (Claws of the Bear) artfully weaves four interrelated stories set in the great Russian metropolis from 1934 to 1942: the start and continuation of Stalin's purges; the siege of the city by German forces during WWII; the dire huger and cold within the city; and the near-miraculous and triumphant Russian premiere of Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony ("the Leningrad") in August 1942, with German guns only seven miles away. Moynahan reveals the extent to which Stalin decimated his army's leadership up to and after the June 1941 German invasion and how the purges encompassed a growing number of civilians accused of defeatism. Meanwhile, during the terrible winter of 1942, desperate citizens resorted to cannibalism. Discussing the symphony's performance, Moynahan notes that most of the musicians "were substitutions due to illness and death," and yet, he notes, if the Leningrad premiere of Shostakovich's masterwork was "perhaps the most magnificent... moment ever to be found in music," the music "hid the camps and interrogation chambers." Moynahan occasionally loses steam, but his vivid political, military, and artistic vignettes and the deft way he links them make this an exceptional, memorable work. Maps.
