Before the war, I taught Russian literature at School No. 47 on Vasilyevsky Island. I taught Pushkin and Tolstoy and Chekhov and believed, as teachers of literature are perhaps obligated to believe, that the examination of difficult human experience in carefully constructed sentences was a form of preparation for difficult human experience in actual life. The winter of 1941 tested this theory comprehensively.
The Germans reached the city's outskirts in September. The last train left for the mainland on August 27th. By the time most of us understood what was happening, the ring was closed and there was no way out except across Lake Ladoga, which was not yet frozen.
The Bread
I will describe the ration system because the ration system was the architecture of every day.
You received a ration card. The card entitled you to a certain amount of bread per day, depending on your category: workers received more, dependents and children received less. In November 1941, the dependent ration was 125 grams. A standard loaf of bread weighs approximately 700 grams. You can calculate what 125 grams looks like.
I weighed mine every morning. This was not distrust of the bakery workers, who were themselves starving and who measured as carefully as their shaking hands allowed. It was the need to know precisely what I had, which is a need that becomes urgent when what you have is very small. Precision is a form of control when control is otherwise unavailable.
The bread was not bread in the pre-war sense. It contained flour — some percentage of flour, declining as winter progressed — and also cellulose, and bran, and other materials that resembled flour and could be called flour by someone sufficiently motivated to call it that. It was dark and dense and tasted of something that was not quite food but was close enough to food that your body accepted it as such, mostly.
The Cold
The winter of 1941–42 was one of the coldest on record — minus thirty Celsius at its worst. The heating system failed. The water pipes froze. People burned their furniture, then their books, then whatever wood they could find. I burned the legs of my dining table in November. I burned the chair backs in December. By January I was burning the table itself, one board at a time, feeding it into the iron stove that had replaced the central heating as the source of all warmth in the apartment.
I kept five books: the collected Pushkin, because I was a literature teacher and could not burn Pushkin; two volumes of Tolstoy for the same reason; my mother's Bible, which I did not read but could not destroy; and a small notebook in which I wrote, every day, what I had eaten and what the temperature was outside and one other thing — something I had seen or thought that seemed worth keeping. I do not know why I kept this record. Some instinct that the experience should be witnessed, should be written down, should not simply happen and leave nothing behind.
The Road of Life
In December, the lake froze thick enough to drive trucks on. The Road of Life: trucks crossing the ice at night with their headlights off, carrying flour and ammunition into the city and carrying children and the very ill back out. Several trucks went through the ice each week. The drivers kept their doors open so they could jump clear if the vehicle began to sink.
My neighbor's daughter was evacuated across the lake in January — she was eight years old and weighed what a four-year-old should weigh. Her mother stayed. I do not know what the calculation was that produced that decision. I know it was made in a single conversation and not revisited.
Spring
In April the snow melted and revealed what winter had left in the streets — which I will not describe in detail, because some things are better described abstractly. The surviving population of the city emerged into the spring light looking, as my notebook records, like the figures in certain medieval paintings of the afterlife: present, ambulatory, no longer entirely of the category they had previously occupied.
I weighed forty-one kilograms in April. Before the siege I had weighed sixty-two. I taught school again in May — the school building was damaged and we met in an apartment — and I taught Pushkin to children who had survived winter on 125 grams a day, and I thought that perhaps I had been right after all about literature being preparation, though not in the way I had originally meant it.
Narrator's note: Vera Sorokina is a fictional figure. The ration amounts, temperatures, fuel conditions, and Road of Life details are drawn from Lidiya Ginzburg's Blockade Diary (written 1942, published 1984), Harrison Salisbury's The 900 Days (1969), and the diaries of Leningrad civilians archived at the St. Petersburg History Museum.