Notes surviving. Blocade diaries. Great T., Berkhman V., Zelenskaya I.

Today, several hundred diaries of the inhabitants of the besieged Leningrad are known. But, despite the community of time, place and monstrous circumstances that gave rise to this unique collective text of the blockade city, each of them affects us especially. Behind everyone's lines are the history of a personality clash with a catastrophe of a historical scale, a catastrophe stretching for years and in detail recorded by eyewitnesses in real time. “Pages of memoirs, letters, documents sometimes resemble the pages of the apocalypse, create the image of the city as an all -consuming grave, in the insatiable womb, hundreds of thousands of children, women, men”

are all the more striking and truly life -affirming those diary notes are, those diary notes are, Behind which, contrary to the horror of the blockage everyday life, an inconsistent whole person is clearly visible. These are the diaries of Irina Dmitrievna Zelenskaya and sisters of Vera Konstantinovna Berhman and Tatyana Konstantinovna Velikoye published in this book.

Personal diaries - a special type of literature: with separate exceptions, a third -party reader is admitted to these texts by chance. But the value of blockade diaries is unique and enduring: on those terrible days they served as outlets to their authors, these days - give unexpected examples of life stamina, claiming that even in inhuman conditions it is possible to remain a person.