Notes From the Blockade

Most Leningraders had suffered enough for one lifetime (the first world war, the civil war, the winter war, two famines and two major waves of political terror) when in June 1941 the Nazis blockaded all supply routes to their city. Some 750,000 civilians died of cold and hunger. Lidiya Ginzburg's Notes from the Blockade is a classic account of the siege * Guardian *
Much more than just an 'historical documentary'. It has a universal applicability. Hard not to weep as one reads; impossible - because she writes with such lucidity - not to feel ourselves actually present in these terrible scenes... This small book is a major work - a worthy memorial to a great woman, and a truly horrible period of Russian history -- A.N. Wilson * Evening Standard *
An account of the 900-day siege of Leningrad by a member of the Russian literary generation of Akhmatova, Pasternak and Mandelstam. Ginzburg writes with splendid imaginative particularity--never tragically, though--about how bombs and starvation work. And she writes--how could someone of her heritage and generation not write?--about the nobility of the human spirit so as to make it as tangible as cardboard shoes * Los Angeles Times *
Tells more of the experience of life in twentieth-century Russia than many multi-volume novels -- Alexandr Kushner
A startling and moving description of what it's like to slowly starve to death. * Independent on Sunday *