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that they know nothing about Leningrad here. No one seems to have the remotest idea of what the city has gone through. They say that Leningraders are heroes, but they don’t know what this heroism consists of. They don’t know that we were starving, that people were dying of hunger, that there was no public transport, no electricity or water. They’ve never heard of such an illness as ‘dystrophy’. People ask, ‘Is it dangerous?’. . I couldn’t open my mouth on the radio, because I was told ‘You can talk about anything, but no recollections of starvation. None, none. Leningraders’ courage, their heroism, that’s what we need. . But not a word about hunger.’11

Bearing crates of lemons and tins of condensed milk, Berggolts returned to Leningrad on 20 April, to find that winter had ended and the air raids had resumed. She moved with Makogonenko out of his attic room with its view of shell-damaged roofs, down two floors into the flat of an actor recently killed at the front. Full of the actor’s possessions — photographs, books, ‘a mass of little saucers, two matching cups and a rusty mincer’ — it increased her sense of disconnection, of having stepped into somebody else’s life or into a life after death. Writing was impossible — ‘like pulling ticker-tape out of my soul, bloodily and painfully’. A writers’ conference held on 30 May should have been a magnificent occasion, a defiant celebration of the power of the word. But in reality it was ‘organised hypocrisy’ — dull, political and overcast by colleagues’ dangerous envy of her sudden new fame.12

Six weeks later Makogonenko temporarily lost his job at the Radio House, for inadvertently allowing the broadcast of a banned poem, Zinaida Shishova’s Sassoonesque Road of Life. With its reference to a corpse stored on a balcony, and deliberately trite, heavily sarcastic final couplet — ‘Rest, son, you did all you had to/You were at the defence of Leningrad’ — it had been deemed ‘odd’ and ‘almost mocking’ by the censors, and was taken off air mid-verse by a telephone call direct from the city Party Committee.13 Berggolts’s own February Diary was published but bowdlerised, a thrice-repeated line — ‘In this dirt, darkness, hunger, sorrow’ — made bland by the replacement of the words ‘hunger’ and ‘dirt’ with the safely abstract ‘bondage’ and ‘suffering’.14 Consolation came from ordinary members of the public, who wrote to Berggolts in their hundreds. Some of the letters were semi-official group efforts, from Red Army units or collective farms, but others were from private individuals, thanking her for putting their experiences and feelings into words. One woman described how Berggolts’s broadcasts had helped her bear news of a son’s death at the front, another how they calmed her as she tried to feed her dying husband in the darkness, the spoon often hitting his nose instead of his mouth. ‘This is something truly splendid’, wrote Berggolts:

The people of Leningrad, masses of them, lay in their dark, damp corners, their beds shaking. . (God, I know myself how I lay there without any will, any desire, just in empty space). And their only connection with the outside world was the radio. . If I brought them a moment’s happiness — even just the passing illusion of it — then my existence is justified.

Like others, she also found symbolism-freighted comfort in the coming of spring, in the greening of the city square limes (their buds stripped to the height of an upstretched hand), and in the sprouting of coltsfoot and camomile amid bomb-site rubble. One of her very few truly joyful diary entries was written on a warm June night while Makogonenko stood outside on the roof watching for incendiaries:

Yesterday we had an amazing evening. At great expense Yurka bought a huge bundle of birch branches. We brought them indoors and put them in a vase. The window was wide open and you could see the great calm sky. A cool breeze wafted in, the city was very quiet and the scent of birch so sweet that my whole life, my best days, seemed reborn in me. Feeling poured through my soul — happiness, desire, content. Damp, fragrant childhood evenings in Glushina. My first evening with Kolya on the Island, when, young and handsome, he kissed me for the first time. I was wearing an embroidered smock and it smelled of birch then too. . And now I have yesterday evening, when I lay next to a handsome, loving, present husband, and felt with my entire being that this is happiness — that he is here now, lying next to me, loving me, and that it’s quiet and smells, smells of fresh birch. All this merged into one, painlessly — or to be more exact, with a pleasurable pain. Everything was wonderful, eternal, whole.15