1910–1975
○ Illness
The radio voice of the besieged city
In February 1942, just after her husband Molchanov starved to death, Berggolts read over the radio: "I, too, am a widow of Leningrad."
A Soviet poet who became the living voice of Leningrad during the 1941–1944 siege, reading her poems and speeches over the radio almost daily to citizens on the edge of starvation. Arrested in 1938 in the 'Literary Group' case, she endured torture and stillbirth in prison but refused to confess; she was released and exonerated in 1939. Her wartime works *February Diary* (1942) and *Leningrad Poem* (1942) faced the siege's horror and its citizens' dignity without flinching, and her words carved on the Piskaryovskoye Memorial, 'No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten', became an enduring symbol of war memory. She won the Stalin Prize (1951) for *Pervorossiysk* and opened a path for Thaw-era literature with her autobiographical novel *Day Stars* (1959).
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1925First poem 'Lenin' published in *Red Weaver*
- 1930Graduated Leningrad University; first book *Winter-Summer-Parrot*
- 1934Joined the Union of Soviet Writers
- 1938–1939Arrested, imprisoned seven months, released and exonerated
- 1941–1944Radio broadcaster throughout the Siege of Leningrad
- 1942Published *February Diary* and *Leningrad Poem*
- 1951Won Stalin Prize for *Pervorossiysk*
- 1959Published autobiographical novel *Day Stars*
Related historical events
Wartime radio work and diaries
From 1941, as German forces besieged Leningrad, Berggolts read poems and speeches on the radio. For many residents, radio was their only link to the outside world. In May 1942, one listener told her that she had heard the poet’s words while her husband was dying of hunger and shelling shook her bed; hearing them, she said, made her feel “there is life.” Berggolts recorded the account in her diary and wrote that her poems had briefly comforted hungry, despairing people. Alongside this broadcasting, she kept a diary of the war. In an entry written in Moscow in March 1942, she looked back on the months since June 1941 and wrote that the war had taken her husband, Nikolai. Her private entries thus record both the public work of broadcasting during the siege and her experience of loss.
After the war, the diaries remained contested as both private papers and a public record. In 1949, after a warning that archives were being confiscated, Berggolts and her husband, Yuri Makogonenko, took notebooks from 1938–1939 and 1949 to their dacha. Accounts differ over whether she or Makogonenko later nailed notebooks to a chair or bench; the exact circumstances and number of notebooks involved cannot be established. After Berggolts’s death, officials removed 39 diary notebooks, while 33 others remained in her apartment. Her sister Maria won a lawsuit demanding their return and transferred the papers to the Central State Archive of Literature and Art in Moscow. Officials ordered the diaries closed in the name of the poet’s reputation and state security, and after archives began opening in 1991, the heirs continued to restrict access. In 2008, an heir authorized publication, prompting work to decipher and annotate the manuscripts. The diaries’ history therefore encompasses not only wartime writing but also a conflict between state authorities and the family over preservation and access to personal papers.