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Leningraders also wrote — Knyazev his catalogues, Inber poetry, Likhachev a history of medieval Novgorod, and Olga Fridenberg a paper on the origins of the Greek epics, until the contents of her inkwell congealed into a violet lump. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, remarkably, never lost her appreciation of beauty, describing in detail the look of bare, frost-covered branches against the sky even in the depths of February. She tried to animate her increasingly lethargic teenage nephews, Petya and Boba — ‘pale and thin as paper’ — by setting up a still life for them to draw (Boba died, Petya survived). Mikhail Steblin-Kamensky, a folklorist and friend of Boldyrev’s, studied Greek grammar and strove to convince himself that he had ‘been presented with a singular opportunity to observe life at its most strange and remote’. He had often tried to imagine medieval Russia in time of plague or famine; now he could see it for himself. No wonder that the chroniclers had described a dragon swooping over the land, snatching children and breathing fire.24 The archaeologist Boris Piotrovsky, living in the Hermitage basement, wrote a history of Urartu, a lost seventh-century kingdom on the shores of Lake Van. ‘Terribly cold’, he scribbled in the margins, and ‘Cold, it’s hard to write’.25 At the zoo, Nikolai Sokolov wrote up different species’ reactions to artillery fire. Baboons and monkeys, he noted, became hysterical during shelling, but quickly became used to barrage balloons and showed only ‘normal curiosity’ towards searchlights and flares. Completely unruffled was the zoo’s bear, which ‘lay peacefully, sucking on its paw’. Similar sang-froid was displayed by a Siberian mountain goat: when a high-explosive shell landed in its enclosure it was found peering with calm interest into the resulting crater. The emu was ‘completely unresponsive to anything’ — thanks, Sokolov thought, to its ‘limited intellect’.

As well as being read or written, books could, of course, be used as fuel. ‘We warm ourselves’, wrote Fridenberg, ‘by burning memoirs and floorboards. Prose, it turns out, provides more heat than poetry. History boils the kettle to make our tea.’26 Boldyrev sorted his books, like his furniture, into three categories —‘keep’, ‘sell’ and ‘burn’. One by one Likhachev dismembered and fed into his burzhuika the records of the proceedings of the pre-revolutionary Duma, saving only the volume covering its last session, a rarity. Olga Grechina burned her dead uncle’s books of Roman law — nineteenth-century paper, she discovered, gave out more heat than the flimsy Soviet sort. Another family started with reference works and technical manuals, moved on to bound sets of journals, then to the German classics, then to Shakespeare, and finally to their blue and gold-bound editions of Pushkin and Tolstoy.27

Another siege cliché borne out by the diaries is the emotional sustenance Leningraders derived from the radio. Portable sets having been confiscated at the outbreak of war, they listened on fixed-wire loudspeakers, more than 400,000 of which had been installed in domestic apartments, as well as in outdoor public spaces, from the 1920s onwards.^* Headquartered in the art deco ‘Radio House’ on the corner of Italyanskaya and Malaya Sadovaya streets, the city radio station continued to broadcast, despite power outages and shell damage to its transmission network, throughout the mass-death winter. Stories of its resuscitating power are legion: Olga Berggolts, collapsed in the street, picking herself up at the sound of her own voice reading her own poetry; a fighter pilot making it home ‘on one wing’ on hearing Klavdiya Shulzhenko — Russia’s Vera Lynn — singing ‘Little Blue Scarf’; the housewife, stumbling home to her family, ‘handed’ from loudspeaker to loudspeaker as if along a human chain. A (hammily Stalinist) programme for teenagers, titled ‘Letter to my Friend in Leningrad’ and broadcast on 7 December, delighted sixteen-year-old Klara Rakhman. ‘What a wonderful letter!’ she wrote in her diary: ‘It very precisely expresses my thoughts. I’ll put down everything I can remember of it.’28 The writer Lev Uspensky, smoking a late-night cigarette at a railway junction south of Ladoga, was startled to hear the words ‘Leningrad speaking’ echoing out of the fog above his head. A time delay between loudspeakers attached to a series of telegraph poles meant that the words overlapped, fading into the distance. It sounded, he thought, as if a line of giants were speaking, gently urging the German idiots to give it up, to go back home before they got hurt.29