"Besieged Leningrad was living hell. Eyewitnesses reported corpses of people who died of hunger and cold lying in doorways and stairwells. They lay there because people dropped them there, the way newborn infants used to be left. Janitors swept them away in the morning like rubbish. Funerals, graves, coffins were long forgotten. It was a flood of death that could not be managed. Entire families vanished, entire apartaments with their collective families. Houses,streets, and neighborhoods vanished."
Even before the war in Leningrad there probably wasn't a single family who hasn't lost someone, a father, a brother, or if not a relative, then a close friend. Everyone had someone to cry over, but you had to cry silently, under the blanket, so no one would see. Everyone feared everyone else and the sorrow oppressed and suffocated us. It suffocated me, too. I had to write about it, I felt that is was my responsability, my duty. I had to write a requiem for all those who died, who had suffered. I had to describe the horrible extermination machine and express protest against it.
And in my wake, lit by mysterious flame,
A being that took the
"Seventh" as its name
Dashed to a festival without peer
Disguised as musical notation,
The Leningrad's renowned creation
Returned to its ethereal native sphere
Shostakovich and Stalin, Solomon Volkov & an excerpt from a discarded version for the ending of Poem Without a Hero by Akhmatova. Akhmatova was entrusted with the musical sheet for the Leningrad Symphony by Shostakovich as she was evacuated by Soviet authorities from the besieged city.
*the formula by which Tsarista Yevdokia Lopukhina cursed the newly founded capital of Peter the Great, Petersburg