A* Description: Leningrad by Rachel C for IGCSE First Language English

Video Lesson

Leningrad by Rachel C

Author’s Note: This description is best experienced with the first movement of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 7th symphony (subtitled “Leningrad”) playing in the background, preferably Leonard Bernstein’s 1989 recording with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon. This can be found by searching “Shostakovich 7 Bernstein Chicago Allegretto” on any platform.

Leningrad slumped under a chrisom of snow. Before me, the Nevsky Prospect was silent and still, save for the hazy movement of snowflakes and my breath rising in ribbons. The scene resembled some painting from my childhood – Vrubel’s “The Snow Maiden”? It may not have been Vrubel’s at all, but the galleries had long closed, the encyclopedias burned for warmth, and there was no way to verify whether my starvation-fogged memory held. It didn’t matter. In teary eyed blues and oppressive whites, the Vrubel of my mind rendered a landscape of ice and sleet, of buildings buried under the weight of disuse, of a city besieged for two years. Faint fan-brush clouds grazed against a sky choked with white, covering and uncovering the sun.

In a moment of sadism, the painter had spattered in mottled piles of corpses, not stacked but scattered haphazardly. Heavy, careless brushstrokes in desolate grey. Their gangly limbs splaying, so thin they appeared to be naked bone, the dead seemed odd growths spreading from street lamps and cracks in the pavement. Leningrad’s macabre dandelions, weeds marring the landscape. It couldn’t be Vrubel, then, I thought – this painter of the imagination rejected romance and fantasy.

I had so loved this street before. What an unreachable idyll that time now seemed, with our endless parties and petty dilemmas: Did I make my boss mad? Will I graduate with honours or without? Is Alexei-in-the-apartment-next-door spying on me? Such problems did I wish to have today. Allowing myself a moment of weakness, I sank into that golden past-

In those bygone years, the aroma of freshly baked bread wafted through the same air, undercurrents of perfume and alcohol intermingling with sweet pastry scents, olfactory hawkers leading me to this storefront or that. Oh, the smell of fresh snow, too. Not a summer scene but a winter one, the people dressed in heavy fur coats and the buildings in bridal gowns. Even before, Leningrad – how temperamental she could be – had been mired in constant snow. Businessmen hurried, hurried, hurried, a sea of briefcase-bearing suits, all with deals to sign and meetings to make. No time to stop and observe the weather when there’s simply so much to do.

And every evening, the torrent of Galyas and Yasyas and Nastyas overflowing from the ballrooms, each with an Ivan or Sasha on their arm. Their many-tiered dresses were like gourmet cakes, more cream than substance, piped with enough lace and ruffles to choke a man as their fondant heads of coiffed hair bobbed lazily atop. Filling their days with the theatre, the ballet, the symphony, the opera, they fluttered from place to place gaily, bearing champagne flutes instead of briefcases but just as eternally busy.

Now, those dresses seemed a faraway delusion, a shadow of a ghost of a memory carried over from past lives experienced by strangers. In this life, all I had were threadbare coats that never seemed to stop the frost from creeping onto my skin. Every day, I waited on that avenue. For bread, for escape, I don’t know. I wanted to scream, recalling the cold suffusing every corner of my apartment — no, far better to freeze outside and become a dandelion. My corpse might at least fertilise the ground for those lucky few who do live.

And I dreamed about spring the same way children dream of growing up and going to bed late. I felt that it would never come, even though no siege can stop the earth from tilting back towards the sun, felt that it was inevitable and yet impossible. But life refused to let me go so easily. The moments of sunlight grew longer day by day and the aufeis on the Neva began to crack, sending pale rivulets of water across the banks. Children, miraculously alive, climbed trees to chew budding leaves from the branches, scrambled in the frigid dirt to find shoots of grass. And the snow was melting. Finally, the snow was melting. All these were the harbingers of a reluctant warmth, and I cherished them more than I could any dress or bottle of wine. In our city where survival had become the only victory, spring felt like a quiet revolution.