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At the Hermitage, staff and their families — about two thousand people altogether — had moved permanently into twelve air-raid shelters in the palace vaults, where they slept on plank beds incongruously mixed with ancient Turkmen rugs and gilded palace furniture. Area-level windows having been bricked up, the rooms were almost pitch-black even in daytime. One, the office of museum director Iosif Orbeli, was supplied with electricity via a cable led in from Tsar Nicholas’s old pleasure yacht the Polar Star, moored outside on the Neva. Otherwise, the only light came from icon lamps and ‘bats’ — fuelled, one memoir claims, with seal oil from the zoo. Several female members of staff, Boldyrev noted, bashfully produced long-hidden wedding candles — the tall, ribboned beeswax tapers held by bride and groom during the traditional Orthodox marriage service.

One of the most famous blockade-defying events of the winter was a symposium held by the Hermitage in mid-December, to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the birth of the Timurid poet Alisher Navai. A display was put together of porcelain decorated with scenes from Navai’s verse (an artist from the old Imperial porcelain works, Mikhail Mokh, painted a small bowl in the style of a Mogul miniature); Boldyrev gave a paper and his fellow Persianist Nikolai Lebedev (so weak that he had to remain seated) read his own new Navai translation. The audience included Boldyrev’s elderly mother, who insisted on contributing a small piece of bread with pork fat to the official lunch. It didn’t matter, one attendee remembered, that there was not a single Uzbek amongst them — the event was ‘a challenge to the enemy. Light was fighting darkness.’26 Boldyrev, ever the realist, thought his old friend Lebedev’s presentation ‘bad and disorganised’, but the translation itself ‘wonderful — the bright clear language of Pushkin’s fairy tales’. His own paper had been worth the effort too: ‘In work lies the only happiness and satisfaction of our days. The worse the situation physically — up to a point — the brighter and fresher the workings of our minds.’27

Two months later Boldyrev heard of Lebedev’s death, from starvation combined with dysentery. He had last seen him a fortnight earlier, in the Hermitage cellars:

He and his wife were lying in cold and complete darkness, in the underground hell of the basement (shelter no. 3). He recognised me by my voice, and grabbed me like a drowning man clutching at a straw. They gave me 250 roubles, imploring me to buy bread and candles for them in the market. . His last words to me were ‘How I want to live, Sandrik, how I want to live!’ He spoke with that amazing, melodious voice of his, with which he so inimitably read his marvellous, musical translations. . At that point I was too squeezed myself to give real help, and couldn’t buy him anything. Rather Galya, who did occasionally go to the market, didn’t make it, not having the strength. And bread was hardly being sold for money anyway.28

Also celebrated as a manifestation of the defiant Leningrad spirit is the fact that some of its dozens of theatres and concert halls continued to function. The Musical Comedy Theatre — the Muzkomediya — stayed open almost throughout the winter, and concerts continued to be held under the crystal-less chandeliers of the Philharmonia into December. (Of the string players, an audience member noted, only the double bassists could wear sheepskin coats. The rest wore padded cotton jackets, which allowed freer movement of the arms.) It is claimed that altogether, Leningraders enjoyed over twenty-five thousand public performances of different kinds in the course of the blockade, and the image of artists flinging themselves into war work — Shostakovich on the roof of the Conservatoire, Akhmatova standing guard duty outside the Sheremetyev Palace, prima ballerinas sewing camouflage nets — is one of the key tropes of the siege.

At the time, however, many Leningraders were cynical. As one diarist noted of a concert given by the great violinist David Oistrakh (flown in from Moscow for the occasion), the audience were not the usual intelligentsia types, and appeared unusually healthy. He and his wife were by far the most ‘dystrophic-looking’ present.29 Even a fervent Stalinist, watching crowds jostle for tickets to an operetta (A Sailor’s Love) in March 1942, was reminded of bread and circuses.30 One of the bitterest siege diary entries must be the following, written by Vera Kostrovitskaya, the dance teacher at the Mariinsky ballet school:

Since in April it became necessary to portray the rebirth of the city at the hands of the half-dead, L.S.T. [the school’s director] got the vain idea that our school — or to be more accurate, what was left of it — would give the first [springtime] public performance at the Philharmonia.