- Published: 15 September 2016
- ISBN: 9780099583387
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 240
- RRP: $32.99
Notes From the Blockade
- Published: 15 September 2016
- ISBN: 9780099583387
- Imprint: Vintage Classics
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 240
- RRP: $32.99
Tells more of the experience of life in twentieth-century Russia than many multi-volume novels
Alexandr Kushner
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
A startling and moving description of what it's like to slowly starve to death.
Independent on Sunday
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
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
Her journal, though acutely and poetically observed, is not mainly a record of the horrors themselves, but more of a rumination on their psychological and moral implications. Evoking the daily details of the siege, Ginzburg captures them and transforms them
Newsday