Saint Petersburg: Sacrifice and Redemption in the City That Defied Hitler

Historian McKay (The Hidden History of Code-Breaking) offers an elegiac chronicle of the three-year siege of Leningrad. In September 1941, the Nazis surrounded the city with the express purpose of starving its inhabitants to death. But Leningraders maintained their poetic spirit throughout the hardships, McKay shows, including during the siege’s first weeks, when city residents persevered in enjoying the White Nights social season, “a time of studied elegance and grace” during the far north city’s twilit summer evenings. Even years into the siege, “pared down” performances continued at the city’s Philharmonic Hall and other venues, and “encouraging” poems were “declaimed from loudspeakers.” Most famously, the composer Shostakovich labored over his Seventh Symphony, playing it in the “rare moments of silence” between air-raid warnings and bombs. McKay’s re-creations of the highs and lows of the siege are striking and vivid, and include horrible scenes of cannibalism alongside piercing profiles of famous denizens like poet Anna Akhmatova. The author also astutely dips into the city’s past and future, from its 1703 founding (as Saint Petersburg) by Peter the Great through Vladimir Putin’s birth there in 1952, looking for insights into what in the city’s character allowed it to endure the siege’s horrors. Lyrical and arresting, it’s a kaleidoscopic account of a population pushed to the edge, but still enamored of life’s splendor. (Jan.)