She was called the Leningrad Madonna. Olga Berggolts became one of the symbols of the blockade; her poems emphasized the resilience of Leningraders and their love for their city.
It is Olga Berggolts who owns the lines “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”
The war came, and with it the blockade.
She was supposed to be evacuated along with her husband, but in 1941 her husband, Nikolai Molchanov, dies, and Olga Fedorovna decides to stay.
And something amazing happened. From a little-known poetess emerged the Leningrad Madonna, the muse of the besieged city! At this time, Berggolts created her best poems dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: “February Diary” (1942), “Leningrad Poem”
Bergholtz could not sit idly by. In the very first days of the blockade, she came to the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union and asked where and how she could be useful. Olga was sent to the literary and dramatic editorial office of Leningrad Radio.
It was on radio that Bergholtz became famous.
Exhausted and hungry, but unconquered Leningraders were waiting for her voice. Her voice became the voice of Leningrad. It was Bergholz who wrote the famous words: “No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.”
During the blockade, Bergholz did not have any special privileges or additional rations. When the blockade was broken and Olga Fedorovna was sent to Moscow, doctors diagnosed her with dystrophy. But then, according to Bergholz herself, a “well-fed” life began for her.
Unfortunately, this woman was never truly happy. Maybe only... during the blockade, when she felt like a mother and protector of all Leningrad children.
Poems about the siege of Leningrad
The Nazis failed to take
Leningrad by storm.
They closed
there is a ring of blockade around it.
**** **********
I'm talking to you amid the whistling of shells,
illuminated with a gloomy glow.
I'm talking to you from Leningrad,
my country, sad country...
Kronstadt evil, indomitable wind
The thrown thing hits my face.
Children fell asleep in bomb shelters,
the night guard stood at the gate.
There is a mortal threat over Leningrad...
Sleepless nights, hard days.
But we have forgotten what tears are,
what was called fear and prayer.
I say: us, citizens of Leningrad,
the roar of cannonades will not shake,
and if tomorrow there are barricades -
we will not leave our barricades.
And women and fighters will stand next to each other,
and the children will bring us cartridges,
and they will bloom over all of us
ancient banners of Petrograd.
Hands squeezing the charred heart,
I make this promise
I, a city dweller, the mother of a Red Army soldier,
who died near Strelna in battle:
We will fight with selfless strength,
we will defeat the rabid animals,
we will win, I swear to you, Russia,
on behalf of Russian mothers.
August 1941
************
...I will talk to you todaymy comrade and friend from Leningrad,
about the light that burns above us,
about our last joy.
Comrade, we have had bitter days,
unprecedented troubles threaten
but we are not forgotten with you, not alone, -
and this is already a victory.
Look - full of maternal melancholy,
behind the smoky ridge of the siege,
the country does not turn its sore eyes away
from the defenders of Leningrad.
So once, sending a friend on a hike,
for a difficult and glorious feat,
sobbing, looked for centuries
from the city walls of Yaroslavna.
Through the flames and the wind they fly and fly,
their lines are blurred by tears.
A hundred languages say the same thing:
"We are with you, comrades, with you!"
How many parcels arrive in the morning?
here, to the Leningrad units!
What do mittens and sweaters smell like?
forgotten peace and happiness...
And the country sent us planes, -
let us be even more tireless! -
their measured, booming song can be heard,
and you can see the shine of their wings.
Comrade, listen, stand up, smile
and tell the world with a challenge:
“We are not alone in fighting for the city,”
and this is already a victory.
Thank you. Thank you, dear country,
for your help with love and strength.
Thank you for the letters, for the wings for us,
Thanks for the mittens too.
Thank you for your concern -
it is more valuable to us than reward.
She will not be forgotten in a siege, in battle
defenders of Leningrad.
We know that we have had bitter days,
unprecedented troubles threaten.
But the Motherland is with us, and we are not alone,
and victory will be ours.
Conversation with a neighbor
The fifth of December 1941. This is the fourth month of the blockade.
Until the fifth of December air
the alarms lasted for
ten - twelve hours.
Leningraders received from 125
up to 250 grams of bread.
Daria Vlasevna, flatmate,
Let's sit down and talk together.
You know, we'll talk about peace,
about the desired world, about your own.
We've lived here for almost six months,
The battle lasts for one and a half hundred days.
The suffering of the people is severe -
ours, Daria Vlasevna, are with you.
Oh howling night sky
tremors of the earth, a collapse nearby,
poor Leningrad slice of bread -
it barely weighs on your hand...
In order to live in the blockade ring,
every day a mortal hears a whistle -
how much strength do we need, neighbor,
so much hate and love...
So much that for minutes in confusion
you don't recognize yourself:
- Can I bear it? Will you have enough patience?
- You can bear it. You will endure it. You'll live.
Daria Vlasevna, a little more,
the day will come - over our heads
the last alarm will pass
and the last all-clear will sound.
And how distant, long, long ago
you and I will feel like war
in the moment when we push the shutters with our hand,
Let's pull the black curtains off the window.
Let the home glow and breathe,
full of peace and spring...
Cry quieter, laugh quieter, quieter,
Let's enjoy the silence.
We will break fresh bread with our hands,
dark golden and rye.
Slow, large sips
Let's drink rosy wine.
And for you - yes, after all
they'll give it to youThe monument in the square is large.
Stainless, immortal steel
Your appearance will be captured as simple.
Here's the same: emaciated, brave,
in a hastily knitted scarf,
like this when under shelling
you are walking with a wallet in your hand.
Daria Vlasevna, by your strength
the whole earth will be renewed.
This force has a name - Russia.
Stand still and be of good courage, like her!
From the February diary
IIt was day like day.
A friend came to see me
without crying, she told me that yesterday
I buried my only friend,
and we were silent with her until the morning.
What words could I find?
I, too, am a Leningrad widow.
We ate bread
that was postponed for a day,
The two of them wrapped themselves in one scarf,
and everything became quiet in Leningrad.
One, knocking, the metronome worked...
And my feet got cold, and the candle languished.
Around her blind light
a moon ring formed
slightly rainbow-like.
When the sky brightened a little,
we went out together for water and bread
and heard distant cannonade
sobbing, heavy, measured rumble:
then the Army broke the blockade ring,
fired at our enemy.
II
And the city was covered in dense frost.
County snowdrifts, silence...
You can’t find tram lines in the snow,
The runners alone can hear the complaint.
The runners creak and creak along the Nevsky.
On a children's sled, narrow, funny,
they carry blue water in saucepans,
firewood and belongings, the dead and the sick...
This is how the townspeople have been roaming since December
many miles away, in thick foggy darkness,
in the wilderness of blind, icy buildings
looking for a warmer corner.
Here is a woman taking her husband somewhere.
Gray half-mask on the face,
in the hands of a can - this is soup for dinner.
The shells are whistling, the cold is fierce...
- Comrades, we are in a ring of fire.
And the girl with the frosty face,
stubbornly clenching his blackened mouth,
body wrapped in a blanket
lucky to go to the Okhtinskoe cemetery.
Lucky, swinging - to get there by evening...
The eyes look dispassionately into the darkness.
Take off your hat, citizen!
They are transporting a Leningrader,
died at a combat post.
The runners in the city creak, they creak...
How many we are missing already!
But we don't cry: they say the truth,
that the tears of the Leningraders froze.
No, we're not crying. Tears are not enough for the heart.
Hatred prevents us from crying.
For us, hatred has become the guarantee of life:
unites, warms and leads.
About not forgiving, not sparing,
so that I take revenge, take revenge, take revenge as best I can,
a mass grave calls to me
on Okhtinsky, on the right bank.
III
How we were silent that night, how silent we were...
But I have to, I have to speak
with you, sister in anger and sadness:
thoughts are transparent and the soul is on fire.
Our suffering can no longer be found
no measure, no name, no comparison.
But we are at the end of a thorny path
and we know that the day of liberation is near.-
It will probably be a terrible day
marked with long-forgotten joy:
probably there will be fire everywhere,
They will give it to all houses, for the whole evening.
in a ring, in darkness, in hunger, in sadness
we breathe tomorrow,
free, generous day,
We have already won this day.
I've never been a hero
did not crave either fame or reward.
Breathing in the same breath as Leningrad,
I didn’t act like a hero, I lived.
And I do not boast that during the days of the siege
did not change earthly joy,
that this joy shone like dew,
gloomily illuminated by war.
And if I can be proud of anything,
just like all my friends around,
I'm proud that I can still work,
without folding his weakened hands.
I am proud that these days, more than ever,
we knew the inspiration of labor.
In dirt, in darkness, in hunger, in sadness,
where death like a shadow trailed on his heels,
We used to be so happy
they breathed such wild freedom,
that our grandchildren would envy us.
Oh yes, we discovered terrible happiness -
worthy not yet sung,—
when the last crust was shared,
the last pinch of tobacco;
when they had midnight conversations
by the poor and smoky fire,
how we will live,
when victory comes,
appreciating our entire lives in a new way.
And you, my friend, even in the years of peace,
like noon in life, you will remember
house on Krasnykh Komandirov Avenue,
where the fire smoldered and the wind blew from the window.
You will straighten up, you will be young again, as you are today.
Rejoicing, crying, the heart will call
and this darkness, and my voice, and the cold,
and a barricade near the gate.
Long live, may he reign forever
simple human joy,
the basis of defense and labor,
immortality and strength of Leningrad!
Long live the stern and calm,
looking death in the face,
suffocating ring bearer
As a person,
like a worker,
like a Warrior!
My sister, comrade, friend and brother,
After all, it’s us who were baptized by the blockade!
Together they call us Leningrad,
and the globe is proud of Leningrad.
We are now living a double life:
in the ring and cold, in hunger, in sadness,
we breathe tomorrow,
happy, generous day,—
We ourselves won this day.
And whether it be night, morning or evening,
but on this day we will get up and go
warrior-army towards
in his liberated city.
We will leave without flowers,
in dented helmets,
in heavy padded jackets, in frozen
half masks,
as equals, greeting the troops.
And, spreading its xiphoid wings,
Bronze Glory will rise above us,
holding a wreath in charred hands.
January - February 1942
My medal
On June 3, 1943, thousands of Leningraders were
The first medals “For the Defense of Leningrad” were awarded.
...The siege continues, a heavy siege,
unprecedented in any war.
Medal for the Defense of Leningrad
Today the Motherland gives it to me.
Not for fame, honors, rewards
I lived here and could demolish everything:
Medal "For the Defense of Leningrad"
with me as a memory of my journey.
Jealous, merciless memory!
And if suddenly sadness overwhelms me,
Then I will touch you with my hands,
my medal, a soldier's medal.
I will remember everything and straighten up as I should,
to become even more stubborn and strong...
Call upon my memory more often,
The war is still going on, the siege is still underway.
And, like a new weapon in war,
today my homeland gave me
Medal "For the Defense of Leningrad"
After the war, on the granite stele of the Piskarevsky Memorial Cemetery, where 470,000 Leningraders who died during the Leningrad Siege and in battles defending the city rest, her words were carved:
“Leningraders lie here.
The townspeople here are men, women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers.
With all my life
They protected you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the revolution.
We cannot list their noble names here,
There are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite.
But know, he who listens to these stones:
No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten."
After the war, the book “Leningrad Speaks” was published about working on the radio during the war.
She wrote the play “They Lived in Leningrad”, staged at the A. Tairov Theater.
In 1952 - a cycle of poems about Stalingrad. After a business trip to liberated Sevastopol, she created the tragedy “Loyalty” (1954).
A new stage in Bergholz’s work was the prose book “Day Stars” (1959), which allows one to understand and feel the “biography of the century”, the fate of a generation.
Olga Berggolts died in Leningrad on November 13, 1975. She was buried on the Literatorskie Mostki of the Volkovskoye Cemetery.
Bibliography
Selected works in 2 volumes. L., Fiction, 1967.Leningrad diary. - L., GIHL, 1944.
Leningrad speaks. - Lenizdat, 1946.
Favorites. - Young Guard, 1954.
Lyrics. - M., Fiction, 1955.
Day stars. - L., Soviet writer, 1960.
Day stars. - Lenizdat, 1964.
Day stars. - Petrozavodsk, Karelian prince. ed., 1967.
Loyalty. - L., Soviet writer, 1970.
Day stars. - M. Soviet writer, 1971.
Day stars. - M., Sovremennik, 1975.
Day stars. - Lenizdat, 1978—224 p. 100,000 copies
Voice. - M., Book, 1985 - 320 p. 7,000 copies (miniature edition, format 75x98 mm)
Filmography
1962 - Introduction - voice-over, reading his poems1974 - Voice of the Heart (documentary)
2010 - Olga Berggolts. "How impossible it was for us to live..." (documentary)
Film adaptations
1966 - Day Stars (dir. Igor Talankin)1967 - First Russians (dir. Evgeny Shiffers)
Awards and prizes
Stalin Prize of the third degree (1951) - for the poem “Pervorossiysk” (1950)Order of Lenin (1967)
Order of the Red Banner of Labor (1960)
medal "For the Defense of Leningrad" (1943)
Medal "For Valiant Labor in the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945"
Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg (1994)
Addresses in Leningrad
Rubinshteina Street, 7 (“tear of socialism”).
1932-1943 - house-commune of engineers and writers, which received the bright nickname “Tear of Socialism” - Rubinshteina Street, 7, apt. thirty.
The last years of his life - house number 20 on the embankment of the Black River.
Memory
A street in the Nevsky district and a square in the courtyard of house No. 20 on the Chernaya Rechka embankment in the Primorsky district of St. Petersburg are named after Olga Berggolts. A street in the center of Uglich is also named after Olga Berggolts.
Memorial plaque on the building of the former school in the Epiphany Monastery of Uglich, where Olga Berggolts studied from 1918 to 1921.
Memorial plaques to Olga Berggolts are installed on the building of the former school in the Epiphany Monastery of Uglich, where she studied from 1918 to 1921. and on Rubinshteina Street, 7, where she lived. Another bronze bas-relief of her memory is installed at the entrance to the Radio House. A monument to Olga Berggolts was also erected in the courtyard of the Leningrad Regional College of Culture and Art on Gorokhovaya, 57-a: where there was a hospital during the Great Patriotic War.
In 1994, Olga Berggolts was awarded the title “Honorary Citizen of St. Petersburg.”
On January 17, 2013, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad in St. Petersburg, the Olga Berggolts Museum was opened at school No. 340 in the Nevsky district. The exhibition consists of four exhibition sections - “Olga Berggolts’s Room”, “Siege Room”, “Place of Memory” and “History of the Neighborhood and School”.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the poetess’s birth, in 2010, the St. Petersburg theater “Baltic House” staged the play “Olga. Forbidden Diary" (directed by Igor Konyaev, starring Era Ziganshina.
January 18 marks another anniversary of the breaking of the siege of Leningrad. The poetess Olga Berggolts was called the “siege muse”; her passionate patriotic poems were broadcast on Leningrad radio and helped residents of the besieged city fight and survive. But in those days she had to remain silent about many things. She wrote about this in her diaries, which she buried in Leningrad until better times. But even after her death, this “forbidden” diary was published only recently; Bergholtz’s personal file was declassified in 2006.
She got her German surname thanks to her grandfather, a surgeon. The future poetess spent her childhood on the outskirts of the working-class Nevskaya Zastava. From 1918 to 1920, she lived with her family in Uglich in the former cells of the Epiphany Monastery. She grew up and studied at a labor school, graduating in 1926. Her first poem, “To the Pioneers,” was published in the Lenin Sparks newspaper in 1925, and her first story, “The Enchanted Path,” was published in the Red Tie magazine. In 1925, she joined the literary association of working youth - “Smena”. At the age of 16 she married the poet Boris Kornilov, but soon divorced. Later, Kornilov was arrested and then shot on false charges.
She entered the philological faculty of Leningrad University. She married a second time - to classmate Nikolai Molchanov, with whom she lived until his death in 1942. After graduating from the university in 1930, she left for Kazakhstan, working as a correspondent for the newspaper “Soviet Steppe”, which she described in the book “Glubinka”. Returning to Leningrad, she worked as an editor in the newspaper of the Elektrosila plant. In the 1930s, her books were published: essays “Years of Assault”, a collection of short stories “Night in the New World”, a collection of “Poems”, from which her poetic fame began.
But severe trials awaited the young poetess. In December 1938, Olga Berggolts was falsely accused of “in connection with enemies of the people” and as “a participant in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy against comrade. Stalin and Zhdanov were arrested.
I know, I know - in a stone house
They judge, they judge, they say
About my fiery soul,
They want to imprison her.
For suffering for what is right,
For unwritten friends
They'll give me a rusty window,
A sentry at the door...
Pregnant, she spent six months in prison, where, after torture and abuse, she gave birth to a stillborn child (both of her daughters had died before). When Bergholz was released, she wrote about this in her diary with bitterness and anger: “The feeling of prison now, after five months of freedom, arises in me more acutely than in the first time after liberation. I not only really feel and smell this heavy smell of the corridor from the prison to the Big House, the smell of fish, dampness, onions, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, but also that mixed state... of doom, hopelessness with which I went for interrogations... They took out my soul , dug into it with stinking fingers, spat in it, shit on it, then put it back and said: “live.”
After the blockade began, she and her seriously ill husband were supposed to be evacuated from Leningrad, but Molchanov died, and Olga Fedorovna was left alone in the besieged city. She was sent to the literary and dramatic editorial office of Leningrad Radio, where her voice became the voice of besieged Leningrad itself. The young woman suddenly became a poet, personifying the steadfastness of the defenders of Leningrad. She worked at the Radio House throughout the days of the siege, conducting radio broadcasts almost every day, which were later included in her book “Leningrad Speaks.”
In your face, War,
I take this oath,
like an eternal life relay,
that was given to me by friends.
There are many of them - my friends,
friends of my native Leningrad.
Oh, we would suffocate without them
Like Levitan in Moscow, Olga Berggolts was included by the Germans in the list of persons subject to immediate destruction after the capture of the city. But on January 18, 1943, it was Olga Berggolts who announced on the radio: “Leningraders! Dear comrades-in-arms, friends! The blockade has been broken! We have been waiting for this day for a long time, we always believed that it would come... Leningrad has begun to pay for its torment. We know - we still have a lot to do We have to endure, endure a lot. We will endure everything. We are Leningraders!”
For this work during the war years, Olga Berggolts was awarded the Order of Lenin and the Red Banner of Labor and medals. Her best poems are dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: “February Diary” and “Leningrad Poem”.
Alexander Kron recalled: “Olga Berggolts had a great gift of love... She loved children and suffered from the fact that motherhood was inaccessible to her due to the trauma she had suffered. She loved her friends, not just being friends, but loving them - demandingly and selflessly. When giving her books to friends, she most often wrote on the title: “with love” - and this was not an empty phrase, she told her friend “I love you” with the chastity of a four-year-old girl and, on occasion, proved it with deeds. She loved Anna Andreevna Akhmatova and rushed to her aid at the most critical moments of her life; loved Alexander Aleksandrovich Fadeev, having learned about his death, rushed out of the house in one dress, came like an arrow to the funeral without a ticket, they brought her back with a cold... She loved her city, her country, and this was not an abstract love that allowed her to remain indifferent to private destinies. A heightened capacity for empathy is one of the most captivating secrets of her work.”
After the war, on the granite stele of the Piskarevsky Memorial Cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of Leningraders who died during the Leningrad Siege and in battles defending the city rest, her words were carved:
Leningraders lie here.
Here the townspeople are men, women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers.
With all my life
They protected you, Leningrad,
The cradle of the revolution.
We cannot list their noble names here,
There are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite.
But know, he who listens to these stones:
No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.
After the war, her book “Leningrad Speaks” was published about working on the radio during the war. The prose book “Day Stars” appears, which allows, as critics noted, to understand and feel the “biography of the century”, the fate of a generation. But Olga Berggolts was a man of her time. Despite the terrible ordeal in prison, she joined the party. And in the days of farewell to Stalin, the following lines of the poetess were published in the Pravda newspaper:
My heart bleeds...
Our beloved, our dear!
Grabbing your headboard,
The Motherland is crying over You.
...Olga Berggolts kept her diaries throughout the blockade. In them she wrote about what she could not talk about.
“Today Kolya will bury these diaries of mine. Still, there is a lot of truth in them... If I survive, they will be useful to write the whole truth,” Olga Berggolts wrote in her diary. And the truth about the blockade she wrote has reached us.
On June 22, she wrote down only three words: “14 o’clock. WAR!" And here is the entry from September 2, 1941: “Today my dad was called to the NKVD Directorate at 12 noon and was asked to leave Leningrad at six o’clock in the evening. Dad is a military surgeon, he served the Sov faithfully. power for 24 years, was in Kr. The entire civilian army, saved thousands of people, a Russian man to the core, who truly loves Russia, despite his harmless old man’s grumbling. There is absolutely nothing behind it and there cannot be anything. Apparently, the NKVD simply did not like his last name - this is without any irony. In his old age, a man who honestly treated the people, a man needed for defense, was spat in the face and kicked out of the city where he was born, to God knows where. As a matter of fact, they are sent to death. “Leave Leningrad!” How can you leave it when it is surrounded all around, when all the roads are cut off! I have grown old again this day..."
Entry from September 12: “A quarter to nine, the Germans will soon arrive. Oh, how terrible, my God, how terrible. Even on the fourth day of the bombing, I cannot shake off the sucking, physical feeling of fear. The heart is like rubber, it is pulled down, the legs are trembling, and the hands are freezing. It’s very scary, and in addition, what a humiliating feeling this is - this physical fear... No, no - how can this be? Throwing explosive iron at unarmed, defenseless people, so that it would whistle beforehand - so that everyone would think: “This is for me” - and die in advance. He died - and she flew by, but in a minute he will be again - and again he whistles, and again the person dies, and again takes a breath - he is resurrected to die again and again. How long? Okay, kill me, but don’t scare me, don’t you dare scare me with that damned whistle, don’t mock me. Kill quietly! Kill all at once, not a little at a time several times a day... Oh, my God!
September 24: “I went to see Akhmatova, she lives with the janitor (killed by an artillery shell on Zhelyabova Street) in the basement, in a dark, dark corner of the hallway, so smelly, absolutely dostoevschitsky, on boards that are on top of each other - a mattress, on the edge - wrapped in scarves, with sunken eyes - Anna Akhmatova, the muse of Lamentation, the pride of Russian poetry - a unique, great shining Poet. She is almost starving, sick, scared. And Comrade Shumilov sits in Smolny in an armored, comfortable bomb shelter and is engaged in the fact that even now, at such a tragic moment, he does not allow people to utter living words, as necessary as bread...”
Bergholtz’s testimony about her trip to Moscow, where her friends sent her, exhausted and exhausted, in March 1942, is also significant. She spent less than two months in the capital and returned back to the besieged city.
In Moscow, she said, after the “high mountain, rarefied, very clean air” of the Leningrad “biblically threatening” winter, there was nothing to breathe. “They don’t tell the truth about Leningrad here...” “...No one had even an approximate idea of what the city was going through... They didn’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger...” “...Conspiracy of silence around Leningrad.” “...I don’t do anything here and I don’t want to do anything - the lie is still suffocating!” “Death is raging in the city... Corpses lie in stacks... “According to official data, about two million have died...” “And for the word - the truthful word about Leningrad - apparently the time has not yet come... Will it come at all?...”
“So, the Germans occupied Kyiv. Now they are organizing some kind of stinking government there. My God, my God! I don’t know what is more in me - hatred of the Germans or irritation, furious, pinching, mixed with wild pity - towards our government. How to shit yourself! The Germans have almost all of Ukraine - our steel, our coal, our people, people, people!.. Or maybe it was the people who let us down? Maybe people did nothing but keep up appearances? In recent years, we have been mostly focused on keeping up appearances. Maybe we are fighting so shamefully not only because we do not have enough equipment (but why, why the hell is there not enough, there should have been enough, we sacrificed everything in its name!), not only because disorganization is stifling us, There’s carrion everywhere… footage of the litter of ’37–38, but also because people were tired long before the war, stopped believing, learned that they had nothing to fight for.”
On the eighteenth, the Germans fired at the city from long-range guns, there were many casualties and destruction in the city center, not far from our house. They are silent about this, they don’t write about it, even I wasn’t allowed to speak about it (“figuratively”) in poetry.
Why do we lie even before death? In general, they write and broadcast about Leningrad only in a system of phrases - “there are battles on the outskirts”, etc. On the nineteenth at 15.40 there was the heaviest bombing of the city during this time. I was in TASS, and a large bomb landed in the neighboring house. The glass in our room flew out, thick green-yellow clouds of smoke poured into the hole. I wasn’t very scared - firstly, sitting in this room, I was convinced that it wouldn’t hit me, and secondly, I didn’t have time to get scared, it blurted out very unexpectedly. The most terrible thing about fear and, obviously, about death is its anticipation.”
Entry from July 2, 1942: “The fragments are falling quietly... And everyone is falling, and people are still dying. On our streets, of course, there is no such medieval death as in winter, but almost every day you still see an exhausted or dying person lying somewhere near the wall. Just like yesterday on Nevsky, on the steps of the State Bank, a woman lay in a puddle of her own urine, and then she was dragged under the arms of two policemen, and her legs, bent at the knees, wet and smelly, dragged behind her along the asphalt.
23/III-42 “Now the word “dystrophy” is prohibited - death occurs from other causes, but not from hunger! Oh, scoundrels, scoundrels! People are forcibly removed from the city, people die on the road... Death is raging in the city. He's already starting to smell like a corpse. When spring begins, God, there will be a plague there. Even excavators can't handle digging graves. The corpses lie in stacks, at the end of the Moika there are entire alleys and streets made of stacks of corpses. Trucks with corpses drive between these stacks, driving straight over the dead that have fallen from above, and their bones crunch under the wheels of the trucks.
At the same time, Zhdanov sends a telegram demanding that organizations stop sending individual gifts to Leningrad. This, they say, causes “bad political consequences”...
2/VII-42 Leningrad
“...And the children are children in bakeries... Oh, this couple is a mother and a girl about 3 years old, with a brown, motionless monkey face, with huge, transparent blue eyes, frozen, without any movement, with condemnation, with senile contempt looking past everyone. Her covered face was slightly raised and turned to the side, and her inhuman, dirty, brown paw froze in a pleading gesture - the fingers were bent to the palm, and the arm was stretched out in front of the motionless suffering face... Apparently, her mother gave her such a pose, and the girl I sat like that for hours... This is such a condemnation of people, their culture, their lives, such a verdict on all of us - it couldn’t be more ruthless. Everything is a lie - there is only this girl with her exhausted paw frozen in a conventional pose of supplication in front of her motionless face and eyes, petrified from all human suffering.”
On the night of January 18, 1943, news arrived about the breaking of the Leningrad blockade. Olga Berggolts was the first to report this on the radio. But in her diary that day she wrote: “... we know that this breakthrough does not yet finally decide our fate... the Germans are still on Stachek Street.”
January 24. From a letter to my sister: “Everything was swirling around us at the Radio Committee, we were all crying and kissing, kissing and crying - really!”
On the same day, Berggolts’ book “The Leningrad Poem” went on sale. And the Leningraders “... bought it for bread, from 200 to 300 grams per book. There is no and will not be a higher price for me,” she admits in her notes.
But even what she saw after the war was impossible to write about. Here are her notes about her visit to the collective farm in Stary Rakhlin in 1949. “The first day of my observations brought only additional evidence of the same, more and more; complete unwillingness of the state to reckon with a person, complete subordination, crushing him with itself, creating a chain, huge, terrible system for this.
Spring sowing, thus, turns into serving the most difficult, almost hard labor; the state is pressing on deadlines and space, but there is nothing to plow with: there are no horses (14 horses for a collective farm of 240 households) and, in general, two tractors... And so the women manually, with hoes and spades, raise the soil for wheat, not to mention the vegetable gardens. There are no spare parts for tractors. There are almost no working men's hands. In this village there are 400 killed men, before the war there were 450. There is not a single orphaned yard - where is the son, where is the husband and father. They live almost from hand to mouth.
Everyone in this village is a winner, this is the victorious people. As they say, what does he have to gain from this? Well, okay, post-war difficulties, a Pyrrhic victory (at least for this village) - but prospects? I was struck by a kind of depressed, submissive state of people that was clearly felt by me and almost a reconciliation with the state of hopelessness.”
The icon - “Angel of Good Silence”, which was given to her by her mother, and which Olga Berggolts carried with her all her life, was preserved in the family. She wrote a poem about this icon called “Excerpt”:
Reaching silent despair,
who has not prayed to God for a long time,
"Blessed Silence" icon
My mother gave it to me for the trip.
And the angel of Good Silence
He guarded me jealously.
It's not by accident that he doubled me
turned out of the way. He knew...
He knew, no harmonies
I can’t describe what I saw.
Silence will torment my soul,
and the seal of lies will rust...
Olga Fedorovna Berggolts, the muse of besieged Leningrad, who became a truly national poet during the war years, died in November 1975.
She asked to be buried “with her own people,” at the Piskarevskoye cemetery, where hundreds of thousands of victims of the siege are buried and where her words are inscribed on the monument: “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.” But the then secretary of the Leningrad regional committee, G. Romanov, refused her.
The funeral took place on November 18 at the Literary Bridge of the Volkovsky Cemetery. And the monument at the grave of the siege muse appeared only in 2005. After her death, her archive was confiscated by the authorities and placed in a special storage facility. Excerpts from the “forbidden” diaries of Olga Berggolts were published only in 2010, and the entire diary was published quite recently.
Special for the Centenary
May 16 marks the 108th anniversary of the birth of the famous Soviet poetess Olga Berggolts. She was called the “siege Madonna” and “the muse of besieged Leningrad,” since during the Second World War she worked at the House of Radio, and her voice inspired hope and faith in salvation in many. It is she who owns the lines carved on the granite of the Piskarevsky memorial: “No one is forgotten, and nothing is forgotten.” The poetess experienced the death of loved ones, repression, blockade, war and passed away in peacetime, in complete loneliness and oblivion.
Olga was born in 1910 in St. Petersburg into the family of a surgeon. She began writing poetry as a child, and began actively publishing from the age of 15. When Korney Chukovsky first heard her poetry, he said: “What a good girl! Comrades, in time this will be a real poet.”
In the literary association of working youth “Smena”, Olga met the young poet Boris Kornilov and married him, and soon they had a daughter, Irina. After graduating from the Faculty of Philology at Leningrad University, Olga worked as a correspondent for the newspaper “Soviet Steppe” in Kazakhstan, where she was assigned. At the same time, her marriage to Kornilov broke up. And another man appeared in Bergholtz’s life - classmate Nikolai Molchanov. In 1932 they got married and had a daughter, Maya.
And then misfortunes befell the family, which since then have seemed to haunt Olga Berggolts. In 1934, daughter Maya died, and 2 years later, Irina. In 1937, Boris Kornilov was declared an enemy of the people for an absurd reason, and Olga, as his ex-wife, “for relations with an enemy of the people,” was expelled from the Writers' Union and fired from the newspaper. Soon Boris Kornilov was shot, only in 1957 was it recognized that his case was falsified. Lydia Chukovskaya wrote that “troubles followed on her heels.”
In 1938, Olga Berggolts was arrested on a false denunciation as “a member of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev organization and terrorist group.” In prison, she lost another child - she was constantly beaten, demanding confessions of involvement in terrorist activities. After that, she could no longer become a mother. Only in July 1939 was she released for lack of evidence of a crime.
Months later, Olga wrote: “I have not returned from there yet. Staying alone at home, I talk out loud with the investigator, with the commission, with people - about prison, about the shameful, concocted “my case.” Everything resonates with prison - poems, events, conversations with people. She stands between me and life... They took out the soul, dug into it with stinking fingers, spat on it, shit on it, then put it back and said: “Live.” Her lines turned out to be prophetic:
And the path of a generation
That's how simple it is -
Look carefully:
Behind are crosses.
There is a graveyard all around.
And more crosses are ahead...
In 1941, the Great Patriotic War began, and at the beginning of 1942, her husband died. Olga remained in besieged Leningrad and worked on the radio, becoming the voice of the besieged city. It was then that her poetic talent manifested itself in full force. She gave hope, supported and saved many people. She was called a poet who personified the perseverance and courage of Leningraders, “the besieged Madonna,” “the muse of besieged Leningrad.” It was she who became the author of the lines about “one hundred and twenty-five blockade grams, with fire and blood in half.”
But after the war, the poetess again found herself in disgrace: her books were confiscated from libraries due to the fact that she communicated with Anna Akhmatova, who was disliked by the authorities, and because of “the author’s fixation on issues of repression already resolved by the party.” Olga felt broken and defeated, in 1952 she even ended up in a psychiatric hospital due to alcohol addiction that appeared before the war.
“Here lie the Leningraders
Here the townspeople are men and women, children.
Next to them are Red Army soldiers. With all my life
they protected you, Leningrad.
The cradle of the revolution.
We cannot list their noble names here.
There are so many of them under the eternal protection of granite,
But know, he who listens to these stones,
No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.”
These famous lines, carved on the stele of the Piskarevsky memorial, were written by Olga Berggolts. The besieged city needed her so much that Leningraders simply called her “our Olya.”
the site recalls how the fate of the “siege muse” turned out.
Troubles are on the heels
Lydia Chukovskaya wrote that “troubles followed on her heels.” Although at first there were no signs of tragedy. Back in the 20s, Olya was noticed by Gorky and Marshak.
“What a good girl! What wonderful poems I read! Comrades, in time this will be a real poet,” Chukovsky responded with these words to her school poem “The Stone Duck.” Life seemed to promise only happiness to this clear-eyed, golden-braided daughter of the factory doctor, the Russified German Fyodor Bergholz. After graduating from the philological department of Leningrad University, young Olya works as a traveling correspondent for the Kazakh newspaper “Soviet Steppe”, and begins performing her own works in the large circulation of the Elektrosila plant.
Changes are also taking place in personal life. She divorces her first great love, the already popular poet Boris Kornilov, and marries Nikolai Molchanov, with whom she studied at the university. The couple settles in the “tear of socialism” - the famous house on Rubinshteina, 7. The first family drama takes place here - daughters Maya and Ira die.
Spit on my soul
She was arrested on a false denunciation in December 1938. According to one version - for Boris Kornilov, who was shot at less than 30 years old for “counter-revolutionary works”, according to another, “for terrorist activities”. There, in prison, she spent 197 days and “as many nights.” She was summoned for interrogation when she was pregnant, and was tortured so much that they knocked out the baby with their boots. I buried two children/I was free myself/I destroyed my third daughter/-prison before birth.” She could no longer become a mother.
“...I first sat in the safe house with the vile Kudryavtsev, then rushed about on the mattress near the restroom - crushed, spit on, cut off from my loved ones with the very real prospect of hard labor and prison for many years... They took out my soul, dug into it with stinking fingers, spat in it, shitted on it, then they put it back and said: “live.”
How was it possible to find strength after everything you experienced? It is not surprising that the woman began to seek solace in alcohol. According to the memoirs of contemporaries, she drank a lot. There were also casual connections. Life hit her hard.
They say that years later, at some official reception, already favored by the authorities and awarded orders, she encountered the very same Kudryavtsev who tormented her. He said hello as if nothing had happened...
Hitler's personal enemy
Throughout the blockade, Olga Feodorovna was in besieged Leningrad. In November 1941, their family was supposed to be evacuated, but her seriously ill husband died of starvation, and she stayed behind. Vera Ketlinskaya, who then headed the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union, recalled how in the first days of the war Bergholz, “a charming alloy of femininity and sweep, a sharp mind and childish naivety,” came to her and asked where and how she could be useful. Ketlinskaya sent Olenka, as everyone called her then, to the disposal of the literary and dramatic editorial office of the Leningrad radio.
Life hit Olga hard. Photo: Public Domain
Many researchers of the writer’s work call what happened next as nothing other than a miracle. From the author of little-known children's books and poems, about which they said “nice, nice, pleasant - no more,” she overnight became a poet personifying the resilience of Leningrad. Almost every day she broadcast “Leningrad Speaks”, made reports from the front, and read them on the radio. Her voice, filled with unprecedented energy, sounded on the air for more than three years.
Her words entered the icy dead houses, instilled hope in hungry, weakened people, they were believed. It was she who said: “One hundred and twenty-five blockade grams, with fire and blood in half.”
Bergholz's scorching speeches were so powerful that the Germans included her in the list of Soviet figures who would be shot immediately as soon as they took Leningrad.
It is unknown where she got her strength from. She was on the verge of death from exhaustion and, like everyone else, vegetated on starvation rations. In 1942, she was taken to Moscow, where it was “warm, cozy, light, satisfying, hot water.” But at the first opportunity she hurries “back to Leningrad, to the blockade. Light, warmth, bath, food - all this is great, but how can you explain to them that this is not life at all, this is the sum of conveniences. There is only life here, being is there.”
Even then, Olga Berggolts opposed the varnishing of reality. Indeed, in a dying city, even the word dystrophy itself was cynically prohibited. Photography and drawing were not allowed on the streets. “Zhdanov sends a telegram here demanding that organizations stop sending individual gifts to Leningrad. This, they say, causes “bad political consequences”... Oh, scoundrels, scoundrels!”
Last will denied
After the war, Bergholz did not change herself. When the authorities dealt with Akhmatova, she continued to visit her, painfully worried. Together with her third husband, literary critic Georgy Makogonenko, she preserved the typewritten version of Akhmatova’s book “Odd,” which was destroyed by order of censorship. And her books came out with difficulty. She never saw her autobiographical story “Day Stars,” which she dreamed of making her main book.The authorities were irritated by pessimism, “the author’s fixation on issues of repression already resolved by the party”... She was even denied her last will. During her lifetime, she asked to be buried in the Piskarevsky cemetery, where her famous words are carved, “No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten.” But the owner of Leningrad at that time, the all-powerful Grigory Romanov, refused the writer. And access to Berggolts’ investigative file, stored in the FSB archives, was opened only in the fall of 2009. Olga Feodorovna felt all this and even during the blockade she kept another forbidden diary, where she exposed official lies about the blockade, including her own... The iron box was buried in one of the Leningrad courtyards. It became possible to publish it only now.
Today is May 9th and we want to congratulate everyone on Victory Day , happy day of gratitude, day of warmth, day of remembrance of selfless people who had to endure so much - for the sake of the Motherland, for the sake of you and me.
Today we decided to talk about famous women - Anna Akhmatova, Yanina Zheimo and Olga Berggolts who, by the will of fate, ended up in besieged Leningrad during the war. Yes, it was a long time ago, but it happened. By learning the stories of people, the stories of mothers of those distant years, we will probably learn something important both about life and about ourselves... "No one is forgotten", - I want it to be like this. Our story is in two parts, today is part one.
Several stories of famous women - mothers who survived the siege of Leningrad.
“...no one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten”
Every year, when May 9 approaches, I always want to repeat the words from R. Rozhdestvensky’s Requiem:
Remember! Through the centuries, through the years - remember!
Remember about those who will never come again!
This poem and several other, in my opinion, best poems dedicated to War and Victory were collected in 2012: . In 2013, we remembered several women's destinies: .
The scene is a besieged city
Today we will continue the women's theme. In January 2014, the 70th anniversary of the complete liberation of Leningrad from the fascist blockade was celebrated, and it was celebrated not only in Russia, but also everywhere where the fate of those who were able to survive the blockade took them.
By this date, books were published, memories were collected, a book of memory has been created, you can find many photos.
The siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days: from September 8, 1941 to January 27, 1944, two and a half years. Despite the widespread evacuation, in September 1941, 2 million 887 thousand inhabitants found themselves in the surrounded city.
The only transport route connecting the city with the rear regions of the country was the “Road of Life”, laid in winter across Lake Ladoga. During the days of the blockade, 1 million 376 thousand Leningraders, mostly women, children and the elderly, were evacuated along this road. The war scattered them to different parts of the Union, their fates turned out differently, and many did not return back. During the blockade, according to various sources, from 400 thousand to 1.5 million people died.
When the blockade ring closed, in addition to the adult population, 400 thousand children remained in Leningrad - from infants to schoolchildren and teenagers. Naturally, they wanted to save them first of all, they tried to protect them from shelling and bombing.
The most difficult time for Leningraders was the winter of 1941-42, when frosts reached 40 degrees, and there was no firewood or coal. Everything was eaten: leather belts and soles; not a single cat or dog was left in the city, not to mention pigeons and crows. There was no electricity, hungry, exhausted people walked to the Neva to get water, falling and dying along the way. The corpses had already stopped being removed; they were simply covered with snow. People died at home, entire families, entire apartments.
- All food for a person working in production consisted of 250 grams of bread, baked half and half with wood and other impurities, both heavy and so small. Everyone else, including children, received 125 grams of this bread.
The fate of each of the people who survived the blockade is a story full of tragic moments. But it’s impossible to tell about everyone. Therefore, today’s review is about the blockade fates of several very famous women, each of whom is also a mother.
Anna Andreevna Akhmatova
In the summer (just in June) of 1941, she celebrated her 52nd birthday. Since the 20s, she has already been a recognized classic, one of those with whom the Silver Age of Russian poetry is associated. Many tragic moments of her fate are already behind her: her husband N.S. Gumilev was shot in 1921; the only son Lev Gumilyov was arrested briefly in 1935, then sentenced to 5 years in 1938. The first drafts of the poem “Requiem” have already been made, in which Anna Andreevna included both the grief of the widow and the mother of the “enemies of the people.”
- With the outbreak of war, she became one of the few female members of the fire brigade, doing men's work on an equal basis with other residents of the city.
In her memoirs about the first months of the siege, the poetess Olga Berggolts writes: “With a face closed in severity and anger, with a gas mask over her shoulder, she was on duty as ordinary fire fighter . She sewed sandbags that lined shelter trenches in the garden of the same Fountain House, under the maple tree she sang in “Poem Without a Hero”..."
And - Anna Akhmatova does not stop writing. Her poems were read on Leningrad radio. In July 1941, “The Oath,” one of her most famous poems of the war years, was broadcast.
And the one who says goodbye to her beloved today -
Let her transform her pain into strength.
We swear to the children, we swear to the graves,
That no one will force us to submit!
From the diary of Olga Berggolts:
“24/IX-41... I went to see Akhmatova, she lives with the janitor (killed by an artillery shell on Zhelyabova Street) in the basement, in a dark, dark corner of the hallway, so smelly, completely dostoevschitsky, on boards overlapping each other - a mattress, on the edge - wrapped in scarves, with sunken eyes - Anna Akhmatova, the Muse of Lamentation, the pride of Russian poetry - a unique, great shining Poet. She is almost starving, sick, scared. ...She sits in pitch darkness, she can’t even read, she sits as if on death row... and said: “I hate, I hate Hitler, I hate Stalin, I hate those who throw bombs on Leningrad and Berlin, everyone who is waging this war, shameful, terrible..."
In the fall of 1941, the seriously ill Anna Andreevna was taken by plane from besieged Leningrad to Moscow, then evacuated to Central Asia at the end of 1941. In 1944, Akhmatova returned to war-ravaged, but already free Leningrad.
Already in 1946, Akhmatova faced another test - the “Resolution of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks” on the magazines “Zvezda” and “Leningrad” dated August 14, 1946, in which the work of Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko was sharply criticized. On November 6, 1949, his son, L.N., was arrested again. Gumilev. Sentence: 10 years in camps. Only in 1956 did he return from prison, rehabilitated after the 20th Congress.
Anna Akhmatova died on March 5, 1966, and was buried in the cemetery in Komarovo near Leningrad. L.N. Gumilyov, when he was building a monument to his mother together with his students, collected stones for the wall wherever he could. They laid the wall themselves - this is a symbol of the wall under which his mother stood with parcels for her son at “Crosses”. Where the bas-relief of Akhmatova is now, there was originally a niche similar to a prison window.
Yanina Boleslavovna Zheimo
Yanina Zheimo is sometimes called an actress of one role. She acted a lot, but in the history of cinema she remained as Cinderella. They write that “there is no more expressive, more “real” heroine in any Russian film fairy tale.” In Cinderella, Yanina Zheimo sings the song “Stand up, children, stand in a circle” with a crystalline voice. This was in 1947.
And in 1941 she was 32. Yanina Zheimo was the fourth child in a circus family and from the age of three she performed in the arena with her parents and sisters. Her childhood was a mixture of endless celebration and endless need. When Zheimo's father died, the family room fell apart. The mother and daughters settled in Petrograd and set about conquering the stage, learned to play the xylophones and created the “Musical Eccentrics” act, which enjoyed public success.
Many years later, Yanina would write about herself: “It’s strange - I grew normally until I was fourteen, and then my growth stopped, probably because I had to carry heavy xylophones on my head.” Her slight growth will later leave an imprint on her entire film career: for directors, she will remain an actress of one role - a travesty.
Yanina went to study at film school in secret from her family; her career began with roles in the films “Bears against Yudenich”, “Ferris Wheel”, “The Overcoat”, “S.V.D. - Union of Great Deeds", "Brother".
In the film “Bears against Yudenich” she starred with her husband Alexei Kostrichkin, also a student. The young couple soon had a daughter, who, at Andrei’s insistence, was given her mother’s name – Yanina. But the student marriage did not last long.
- In the thirties, Yanina accepted offers from directors one after another. In the film “Wake up Lenochka” (1934), she played a schoolgirl and looked against the background of the performers of other roles - ordinary boys and girls - as if she really were their age. She was even called the “Soviet Mary Pickford.”
In 1938, a creative crisis came for her. It was as if they had forgotten about her. For the entire year - only one minor role, and the filming of two more feature films with her participation was suspended for unknown reasons.
But in the same 1938 she was overwhelmed and carried away by a new love - she met director Joseph Kheifits, a handsome man, gallant, interesting and, as they believed then, reliable. The feeling turned out to be mutual, they started a family and gave birth to a son, Julius.
Kheifitz was a brilliant, bright, witty and intelligent man, one might say unique, there were few like him even in the world of cinema. Plus, he was soft and delicate by nature. No one could have imagined how their married life would end in a nightmare.
When the war began, family members were all over the place: children on vacation, from where they were evacuated to Alma-Ata. Kheifits had already been filming a film for a year, first in Mongolia, and then in Tashkent (in 1942, his not most famous film, “His Name,” was released Sukhbaatar”, after “Baltic Deputy” with N. Cherkasov and “Member of the Government” with V. Maretskaya). An order was received: the Lenfilm film studio was to be evacuated to Tashkent. Joseph Kheifits was the leader, but Zheimo could not go because her sister Elya was seriously ill.
Yanina worked in Leningrad. She starred in “Battle Collections” and propaganda films, and again played teenagers or very young girls. During the day she filmed, in the evening she was on duty on the roof of the studio, extinguishing incendiary bombs.
- She was constantly offered to leave the city by plane. But she did not agree for a long time - they say, this is not comradely. Her house was open to friends even at that terrible time, and many were saved by these evenings. In a large Leningrad apartment, Yanina housed many people left without a roof over their heads.
When she once came out with a concert number in front of the soldiers and was asked: “Why did you stay in Leningrad?”, she replied: “But someone has to defend the city!” There was a burst of laughter - but only the external side of this statement (due to the “fairy-tale” appearance of the heroine) could seem funny.
I received, like everyone else, a ration of 125 grams of bread per day. It’s hard to imagine a small, fragile actress in a padded jacket, sheepskin coat, felt boots, and with a rifle. But that's how it was. She was enlisted in a fighter battalion, was a member of the Lenfilm concert brigade, and performed in hospitals and parks. Yanina joked out loud: “Hitler did one good deed - I lost weight.” And her thoughts are only about her husband and children - how are they doing?
The separation from her husband lasted exactly two years. Finally, a group of Lenfilm employees was assembled, and they went together to evacuate. It took Zheimo two months to get to Alma-Ata. Her train was bombed and stood at a standstill for weeks. Meanwhile, terrible news arrived in Alma-Ata that the Tikhvin train on which the artists were traveling had been bombed. And within two months she was listed among the dead. During this time, many managed to come to terms with this loss, including Kheifits, who soon started an affair with one of the actresses.
When Yanina was told about this, she was shocked to the core. The meeting with Kheifits was not joyful. Yanina could not forgive her husband for betraying her, and did not return to Kheifits. At first she did not show that the break with her husband was a huge tragedy for her, but as a result she fell ill with severe depression. She was helped by the doctor and director Leon Jeannot, her old friend, who was by her side throughout this difficult time. Subsequently, Yanina married him - perhaps it all started with gratitude.
Filming in the film “Cinderella” played a special role in Yanina’s recovery: when it was filmed, Zheimo was 37 years old.
Olga Fedorovna Berggolts
In 1941 she was 31 years old. The poetess Olga Berggolts was called “the siege muse”, “the voice of besieged Leningrad”. Her words:
No one is forgotten and nothing is forgotten!
— carved on the granite wall of the Piskarevskoye Memorial Cemetery. During the war years, while remaining in besieged Leningrad, she worked on the radio, almost daily appealing to the courage of the city's residents. Her voice became a symbol of hope for thousands of people. And she also wrote, wrote poetry...
The fate of Olga Berggolts, her tragic biography, became known only recently. Only in 2010 was her diary read, which Bergholz wrote during the most difficult years of her life - from 1939 to 1949. Based on the materials of this diary and archival materials, a play was written and directed by Igor Konyaev, who says: “Everyone knows Bergholtz as a monument, a Soviet figure who was made from her, who read uplifting poems at parades. But we don’t know the woman with her grief and losses; no one was interested in this.”
- Author of the play “Olga. Forbidden Diary,” Elena Chernaya, talks about her heroine: “This incredibly bright and unyielding character of hers, it survived in creativity, but in life it often broke.”
Let's start with her personal, maternal tragedy. A native Petersburger, a young journalist and already a poet, Olga Berggolts, at the age of 18, married her colleague and very talented poet Boris Kornilov. In 1928 they were born daughter Irina, but just two years later, Kornilov and Bergholz, who was terribly jealous of her already established husband-poet for his fans, divorced.
After working as a journalist, Olga entered the philological faculty of Leningrad University, where she met Nikolai Molchanov, whom she married in 1932. Life seemed wonderful, Olga enthusiastically wrote children's books and gave birth in 1933 second daughter, Maya . Soon Nicholas was drafted into the army.
Trouble, as usual, came suddenly. And not alone. Nikolai served on the border with Turkey, and in the same year he was discharged - after a skirmish with the Basmachi he received a severe form of epilepsy.
... he ended up with the Basmachi, and they buried him up to his shoulders in the ground and threw him away. Only a few days later his fellow soldiers came to his rescue.
In 1934, one-year-old Maya died. And two years later - the eldest daughter Irochka, who only lived to be 8 years old. Olga was so worried about the loss of her children that she was literally on the verge of life and death, consumed by terrible depression. And then began - after 1934 and the murder of Kirov - years of repression that affected her ex-husband, Boris Kornilov. He is arrested on suspicion of participation in an anti-Soviet organization.
Soon they came for Bergholtz. In July 1937, she was a witness in the Kornilov case. Olga Berggolts was excluded from the candidates of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and from the Writers' Union - with the wording “connection with the enemy of the people.” In the fall, she was fired from the newspaper, and the former journalist got a job at a school as a teacher of Russian and literature. At the beginning of 1938, after a resolution “on the mistakes of party organizations,” Olga was reinstated as a candidate member of the CPSU and in the Writers' Union.
Boris Kornilov was much less fortunate - there were no “mistakes” in his case, and in February 1938 Kornilov was shot. However, the matter did not end there - in December Olga Berggolts was arrested as “a member of the Trotskyist-Zinoviev organization and terrorist group.” Olga was pregnant, and they literally beat testimony out of her. The third daughter was stillborn in prison in April 1939... The doctors’ verdict was very harsh - Olga was no longer destined to become a mother. And she dreamed so much about children...
She buried two children
I'm free on my own
She killed her third daughter
Before birth there is a prison...
In July 1939, Olga Berggolts was released from arrest with the wording “lack of proof of the crime” (writers, including A. Fadeev, stood up for her).
What was it like to live after everything you suffered? Moreover, there was little joy in freedom - her husband Nikolai was by that time seriously ill.
- That’s when she started keeping a diary, to which she entrusted the grief of losses and disappointments. Olga Berggolts went the whole way of that era, from a romantic belief in revolution and communism to prison, from love for Stalin to the realization of the nightmare into which the entire country was plunged.
But when the war began - she became "Managed to Rise" . Above all personal misfortunes and indelible grievances. Over the untimely death of two men she loved (N. Molchanov died of hunger). Over the loss of all my children. Abuse in prison. Above the romanticism trampled by boots. Above loneliness.
From the Leningrad branch of the Writers' Union, Olga Berggolts was sent to the disposal of the Leningrad Radio Committee. And - I quote: “After a very short time, the quiet voice of Olga Berggolts became the voice of a long-awaited friend in the frozen and dark besieged Leningrad houses, became the voice of Leningrad itself. This transformation seemed almost a miracle: from the author of little-known children’s books and poems about which they said “this is cute, nice, pleasant - no more,” Olga Berggolts suddenly became a poet personifying the resilience of Leningrad.”(Collection “Remembering Olga Berggolts”).
Bergholz was supposed to be evacuated along with her husband, but in January 1942 Nikolai Molchanov died. Olga decides to stay.
When the war began, Molchanov avoided the fate of a disabled person and was sent to build fortifications on the Luga line. He returned home with dystrophy in the final, irreversible stage. He died in the hospital. His combat description included the phrase: “Capable of self-sacrifice.” Olga Berggolts dedicated to him the best, by her own account, poetic book “The Knot” (1965). She went to see him in the hospital, but he almost didn’t recognize her anymore. And it so happened that I couldn’t bury him.
No one exempted her from working on the radio. And no matter what happened to her, she appeared in the studio strictly on schedule, and on the air they heard:
–Attention! Leningrad speaks! Listen to us, dear country. Poet Olga Berggolts is at the microphone.
Olga Berggolts' voice exuded unprecedented energy. She made reports from the front and read them on the radio. Her voice rang on the air for more than three years. Her voice was known, her performances were expected. Her words, her poems entered frozen, dead houses, inspired hope, and Life continued to glow:
Comrade, we have had bitter days,
Unprecedented troubles threaten
But you and I are not forgotten, we are not alone,
– And this is already a victory!
Every siege year, on December 31, it was Olga Berggolts who spoke on Leningrad radio with New Year’s greetings, instilling confidence in victory. Not by chance The Nazis added Olga Berggolts to the black list of people who would be shot immediately after the city was captured.
And she performed not only on the radio, but also in the workshops of the Kirov plant, and in hospitals, and on the front line of defense. One of her readings was interrupted several times by mortar fire. Then one of the fighters took off his helmet and put it on Olga.
- At times it seemed that a person full of strength and health was talking to the townspeople, but Olga Berggolts, like all the townspeople, existed on a starvation diet.
During the war years, the already famous poetess had no special privileges or additional rations. And when one of the radio committee workers lost his cards and thus sentenced his family to extinction, Olga gave him a bread card; other employees took care of her and helped her survive until the end of the month. When the blockade was broken, Olga Fedorovna was sent to Moscow. Doctors diagnosed her with dystrophy...
- It was her idea to perform Dmitri Shostakovich’s Seventh (Leningrad) Symphony in besieged Leningrad, whose radio performance she prepared in terrible September 1941. The premiere of this symphony, which received worldwide resonance, took place on May 9, 1942 at the Philharmonic. It was broadcast on the radio, and Shostakovich’s immortal music was listened to by city residents and soldiers at the front.
in 1942, Olga’s father, Fyodor Berggolts, was expelled from besieged Leningrad by the NKVD to Minusinsk (Krasnoyarsk Territory) for refusing to become an informant.
He was born in St. Petersburg and saved hundreds of people during the blockade. The recruiters didn't like his wit when he calmly responded to their offer to become a secret informant with this:
–Why secret? Everything that I am aware of, I am used to saying out loud. Secret denunciation is for the Third Department, and not for the medical department.
And the poetic “star” of besieged Leningrad, as Olga Berggolts appeared in the minds of millions of her fans, continued her diary (several excerpts):
2/IX-41
Today my dad was summoned to the NKVD Directorate and asked to leave Leningrad. Dad is a military surgeon, he served the Sov faithfully. power for 24 years, was in Kr. The entire civilian army, saved thousands of people, a Russian man to the core, who truly loves Russia, despite his harmless old man’s grumbling. There is absolutely nothing behind it and there cannot be anything. Apparently, the NKVD simply did not like his last name - this is without any irony. In his old age, a man who honestly treated the people, a man needed for defense, was spat in the face and kicked out of the city where he was born, to God knows where.As a matter of fact, they are sent to death. “Leave Leningrad!” How can you leave it when it is surrounded all around, when all the roads are cut off! This means that the old man and people like him (and there seem to be a lot of them - according to him) will either sit in our barracks, or they will be dragged around in heated vehicles near the city under fire, without protection - nothing, sir!
I grew old again this day. I am painfully ashamed to look at my father. Why, why is he like this? It's all our fault, it's all our fault .
12/IX-41
It's a quarter to nine, the Germans will arrive soon. Oh, how terrible, my God, how terrible. Even on the fourth day of the bombing, I cannot get rid of the sucking, physical feeling of fear. The heart is like rubber, it is pulled down, the legs are trembling, and the hands are freezing. It’s very scary, and on top of that, what a humiliating feeling it is – this physical fear. ..It helps that I’ve been writing good (wartime) poetry lately.No, no - how can this be? Throwing explosive iron at unarmed, defenseless people, so that it would whistle beforehand - so that everyone would think: “This is for me” - and die in advance. He died - and she flew by, but in a minute he will be again - and again he whistles, and again the person dies, and again takes a breath - he is resurrected to die again and again. How long? Okay, kill me, but don’t scare me, don’t you dare scare me with that damned whistle, don’t mock me. Kill quietly! Kill all at once, not a little at a time several times a day... Oh, my God! I feel like something in me is dying...
24/IX-41
...And I have to write for Europe about how Leningrad, the world center of culture, is heroically defending itself. I can’t write this essay, I’m physically giving up. Oh God! Oh, what unfortunate people we are, where have we come, what a wild dead end and delirium. Oh, what powerlessness and horror. Nothing, I can’t do anything. I should have committed suicide myself - that’s the most honest thing. I have already lied so much, made so many mistakes, that nothing can atone for it or correct it. But she only wanted the best. But shouting “brother” is impossible. So what? We need to fight off the Germans. We need to destroy fascism, we need the war to end, and then change everything in our country. How?...No, no... We have to think of something. We need to stop writing (lying, because everything about the war is a lie)... We need to go to the hospital. Helping a soldier urinate is much more useful than writing Rostopchin posters. They will probably take the city after all. Barricades on the streets are nonsense. They are needed to cover the Army's retreat. Stalin doesn’t feel sorry for us, he doesn’t feel sorry for the people. Leaders never think about people at all... I will write for Europe tomorrow morning. I will take anything close to the truth out of my soul.
12/III-42. Moscow
I live in the Moscow Hotel. Warm, cozy, light, satisfying, hot water. To Leningrad! Only to Leningrad... To Leningrad - towards death ... Oh, quickly to Leningrad! I’m already worried about leaving...2/VII-42 Leningrad
...And the children are children in bakeries... Oh, this couple - a mother and a girl about 3 years old, with a brown, motionless monkey face, with huge, transparent blue eyes, frozen, without any movement, looking past everyone with condemnation, with senile contempt. Her covered face was slightly raised and turned to the side, and her inhuman, dirty, brown paw froze in a pleading gesture - the fingers were bent to the palm, and the arm was stretched out in front of the motionless suffering face... Apparently, her mother gave her such a pose, and the girl sat like that - for hours... This is such a condemnation of people, their culture, their lives, such a verdict on all of us - it cannot be more ruthless.Everything is a lie - there is only this girl with her exhausted paw frozen in a conventional pose of supplication in front of her motionless face and eyes, petrified from all human suffering.
The pathetic efforts of the authorities and the party, for which it is painfully ashamed... How they brought it to the point that Leningrad is besieged, Kyiv is besieged, Odessa is besieged. After all, the Germans are coming and going... The artillery is landing continuously... I don’t know what is more in me - hatred of the Germans or irritation, furious, pinching, mixed with wild pity - towards our government... . It was called: “We are ready for war.” Oh bastards, adventurers, ruthless bastards!
And at the same time, Bergholz created her best poems dedicated to the defenders of Leningrad: “February Diary” (1942), “Leningrad Poem”.
- In 1946, she was one of those who did not turn away from Anna Akhmatova, who was persecuted, one of those who continued to visit her, take care of her, listen to and treasure her poems. O.F. Berggolts, together with her third husband, literary critic G.P. Makogonenko, preserved a typewritten copy of Akhmatova’s book “Odd,” a book destroyed by order of censorship.
According to the writer herself, after the war a “well-fed” life began for her. Bergholz was awarded the Stalin Prize, and films were made based on two of her books.
Olga Feodorovna Berggolts died on November 13, 1975. The desire of the muse of besieged Leningrad to lie after death in the Piskarevsky cemetery, among friends who died during the siege, was not fulfilled - the poetess was buried on the Literatorskie Mostki (Volkovo Cemetery). At any time of the year you can see fresh flowers on her grave...
Face of Victory (poems by Evgeny Yevtushenko)
Victory doesn’t have a girl’s face,
and it’s like a grave lump.
Victory's face is not chiseled,
and outlined by a bayonet.Victory's face is sobbing.
Her forehead is like a bump in the trenches.
Victory has a suffering face -
Olga Fedorovna Berggolts.
To be continued.
Materials used are from open sources.
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