I first heard about this book from a review by
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chestnut_pod, and I'm super glad I did, because this was great! Remarkably more-ish kind of book, which is unusual in nonfiction like this, in my experience. Too often the material is interesting but the prose is dry, but this one did not have that problem.
The main thing the book is about is Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, also known as the Leningrad Symphony, but to talk about the symphony you need to talk about its composer and about its cultural context. So it's also a biography of Shostakovich, and a history of Communist Russia from its origins through WWII with particular focus on the city of St Petersburg/Petrograd/Leningrad.
And it was honestly like....a perfect level of historical overview for me on this era of history, giving me a much better sense of the political situation, both between countries and within Russia/the USSR, and how exactly the beginning of Communism in that part of the world played out. History class in Canadian schools mostly just teaches you about the rest of the world as it relates to Canada, so it was more like "Canada's role in the Cold War" and less "so who actually was Stalin and how did he end up in power."
So although I knew this history kinda piecemeal through being a modern citizen of the world who hears things, having it all laid out for me in a clear manner was really nice.
And one of the things the book makes clear is just how much....you can't actually even trust primary sources from the era. Writing a biography of Shostakovich is hard because so little can be confirmed to be what he actually thought or said! Articles he "wrote" with his opinion were often written for him and presented to him for his signature (with underlying threats if he didn't comply). A memoir that's supposedly his thoughts and words is of pretty dubious provenance. Things he said on the radio or to people he was close to might not have reflected his actual opinions because TPTB were always watching and were well known for murdering anyone who didn't perfectly live up to the Correct way of doing communism, and denouncements were common (and then you died).
Anyway: lots of horribleness! And then the siege of Leningrad happens and the horribleness levels just get to a whole other level of horrible. The book does not shy away from discussing the realities of the experience of the Leningraders during the multi-year siege, and it's just like. Gosh. Literally every single person in that city who didn't die must have left that experience just so very traumatized. (Well okay except the rich people who still miraculously had access to food and eventually went to the effort of escaping the blockaded city because nobody was going out dancing anymore and it was boring. Wtf.)
But I really appreciated how the book talked about the horrors of the experience and the horrible thing some people did in their efforts to stay alive, but also talked about how the main way most people survived was through their experience of community, of people taking care of each other and doing what they could for each other despite everything.
And the other thing is that the book makes it clear how important art is to survival. Shostakovich's symphony made had literal actual impacts on people's lives. It's part of what helped inspire the USA to feel okay contributing relief supplies to Russia, and it's part of what gave some Leningraders the strength of mind to carry on living despite everything. The description of the performance in Leningrad, by musicians who were dying of starvation with an audience ditto, and how much it meant to them all, brought me near tears.
Olga Berggolts was another artist in Leningrad at the time of the siege, and her poetry was similarly vital to morale -- even to her own. And the heroic efforts of the librarians to keep the library open and available to Leningraders throughout everything, because of how important books were to people, was also amazing. Art: it matters!
When I finished this book I went to bed a little haunted by the things I'd read about, so tread cautiously if you're not in a good headspace for reading about starvation and death and murder and cannibalism and fascism and war and all that. But it's a great book and I'd definitely recommend it.
The other thing I did when I finished this book was go to the wikipedia article for the siege of Leningrad, because I was curious, and then was promptly hit in the face with the reminder that a certain kind of WWII-obsessed history buff cares a LOT about like...timelines and numbers and battles and all the little nitpicky details about the Military Experience, and not about anything else, and that kind of person clearly spends a lot of time on wikipedia. The very bones of the article are designed around that particular perspective on history to such a degree that the article couldn't really be anything else without a complete overhaul, and it's just SO completely opposite to the kinds of priorities of the book I just finished reading that I was kind of flabbergasted. It is not an approach to history that I find interesting or understandable at all. To me that data is relevant for how it informs you about the lived experiences people had, and what it meant to people/communities/countries/the world -- how it contextualizes the human story -- rather than the data being interesting in its own right.
