THE WAR OF THE TWO HERODS.
For V-E Day, Book Review No. 10 offers Brian Moynahan's Leningrad: Siege and Symphony: The Story of the Great City Terrorized by Stalin, Starved by Hitler, Immortalized by Shostakovich. With that many levels of sub-title, you effectively have a Shrink Lit in free-form summarizing the plot. The two Herods are invoked in a lament by stage designer Liubov Shaporina, "The horrors of [Stalin's terror] and [Hitler's siege] were a punishment that the intelligentsiya deserved," (page 90). Some of those intelligentsiya were attempting to hold body, soul, and Stalinism together in Leningrad; some awaiting torture and execution by NKVD, which kept up its work rooting out wreckers, saboteurs, and enemies of the people even as the Stukas were diving; and some, including Shostakovich himself, were contributing to the war effort in far-away Kuybyshev (once again, Samara) where there was a Secret Tank Factory, where it was a criminal offense to remark on the resemblance of the local military trucks to Studebakers, and where a few protected writers and composers could offer their support to the war effort.
Author Moynahan begins with two chapters on the Terror and the Invasion, then organizes the subsequent events month-by-month. Much of the siege writing parallels Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days (in what other siege did the restoration of streetcar service demoralize the besieger?) We conclude with the Leningrad performance of the symphony (which had been performed, to mixed reviews, elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom and the States) followed by yet another Stalinist purge, and author Moynahan raising the possibility that composer Shostakovich was an ambivalent comrade, at best.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)
Author Moynahan begins with two chapters on the Terror and the Invasion, then organizes the subsequent events month-by-month. Much of the siege writing parallels Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days (in what other siege did the restoration of streetcar service demoralize the besieger?) We conclude with the Leningrad performance of the symphony (which had been performed, to mixed reviews, elsewhere, including in the United Kingdom and the States) followed by yet another Stalinist purge, and author Moynahan raising the possibility that composer Shostakovich was an ambivalent comrade, at best.
(Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.)