Though his family was far from harmonious (his wife quarrelled relentlessly with his mother, and he with his wife), they continued to operate as a team, Boldyrev bringing home ‘yeast soup’ and ‘jelly’ from his various cafeterias, his wife donating blood (for which extra rations were given) and his mother queuing for bread. Most of all they were fortunate in having inherited valuables to trade. As well as the usual clothes and shoes, in the course of the winter they sold three watches — Boldyrev’s own, his late father’s and his wife’s Longine — for ten kilos of flour and five of beef fat; an amber cigarette holder (for 200 grams of bread), two sets of silver dessert spoons (for two kilos of bread and 700 grams of meat), a silver cream jug and sugar bowl, porcelain teacups (sold to the old Fabergé shop on the Morskaya for 670 roubles, which bought a litre of sunflower oil) and his mother’s wedding ring. This combination of perseverance, cooperation and luck just saved Boldyrev, his wife and daughter, but not his brother-in-law, uncle or mother, all of whom died of starvation between December and May.
At night, lying on a sofa next to a stove stoked with furniture and picture frames, Boldyrev read novels. On 19 December he finished Great Expectations: ‘Indescribable delight — the only parts which grate are those repeated, oh-so-English edible passages.’ The following day he started on Priestley’s The Good Companions — ‘Wonderful so far. Its main appeal is England, contemporary England’ — which he finished ‘with great regret — it was just the book I wanted’. Next came Kipling’s heat- and light-drenched Kim (‘heavenly pleasure’) and Bulwer-Lytton’s critique of the Regency criminal justice system, Paul Clifford. In March he read de Maupassant and Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans,and inApril Conrad’s Chance, about a teenage girl shunned by society after her father’s imprisonment.
That the blockaded Leningraders escaped confinement by reading is a siege cliché. (‘I mostly read Balzac and Stendhal’, a Kirov Works foreman is said to have told the Party hack Aleksandr Fadeyev, ‘reporting’ from the city in the spring.) It is, however, borne out by the memoirs and diaries. At the start of the war, according to Ginzburg, ‘everyone’ avidly read War and Peace, since ‘Tolstoy had said the last word as regards courage, about people doing their bit in a people’s war’.20 Georgi Knyazev, on one of the days when his wife returned from the Academy’s ration distribution point empty-handed, distracted himself with ‘world history’, the Hittites and (uncharacteristically) the French decadents.21 On the pitch-black afternoon of 14 January, Vera Inber sat in coat and gloves reading The Sun, Life and Chlorophyll by the great nineteenth-century botanist Kliment Timiryazev, with its almost visionary description of plants transforming solar energy into life on earth. ‘“Unmeasurable surface of leaves”’, she wrote in her diary. ‘These words evoke in me a swaying ocean of green foliage and light particles flying towards us through the icy space of the universe.’22 A Red Army lieutenant in charge of barrage balloons read Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island, from which he got (and successfully implemented) the idea of using the hydrogen inside the balloons themselves to fuel the engines which hauled them to the ground.23 Mashkova scoured the second-hand bookshops for treasures from the hastily sold libraries of evacuees. For herself she bought Herzen, Dostoyevsky and The Pickwick Papers (‘boring, pointless humour; I’m amazed it gets published, even for children’), and for her ten-year-old son Jules Verne, a life of Pissarro and Mayne Reid’s adventures of the Wild West. Another siege survivor, aged ten at the time, recalls a similarly escapist reading list — Pushkin’s fairy tales, Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Ernest Seton Thompson’s Two Little Savages, about a city boy who learns Indian woodcraft in the Ontario wilderness of the 1850s.
