This is the story of Misha, a young Russian boy who survived the siege of Leningrad by Nazi Germany during World War II. For 900 days (1941-1944) three million Leningraders endured starvation, lack of water, electricity, and fuel, living on one small piece of bread per day and subjected to endless air raids and bombardments. Cold and starvation destroyed over one million lives. The focal point of the book is based on the events detailed in Misha's diary. The remainder describes the historical context and impact of the blockade, and the survivor's life story. The book is intended as a tribute to the human spirit. Evelina was born in Russia in 1934. She worked as an engineer in Lvov, Ukraine for many years. It was there that she married Misha. After her husband died prematurely, Evelina decided to emigrate to America. She settled in Minnesota and found a job as an engineer. It was in America that Evelina became a Christian and married a minister. For many years she had an unshakeable determination to write this book, a biography of her beloved husband. Even as she struggled with cancer, which eventually took her life, finishing the book remained one of her top concerns. Although she never saw it published, her hope was that one day many people would be inspired by her husband's great zeal for life. In Misha's own words, "I have just now realized what life means to me. Life is a great gift given to us; it is not always lived properly."

In May 1941 Lena Mukhina was an ordinary teenage girl, living in Leningrad, worrying about her homework and whether Vova - the boy she liked - liked her. Like a good Soviet schoolgirl, she was also diligently learning German, the language of Russia's Nazi ally. And she was keeping a diary, in which she recorded her hopes and dreams. Then, on 22 June 1941, Hitler broke his pact with Stalin and declared war on the Soviet Union. All too soon, Leningrad was besieged and life became a living hell. Lena and her family fought to stay alive; their city was starving and its citizens were dying in their hundreds of thousands. From day to dreadful day, Lena records her experiences: the desperate hunt for food, the bitter cold of the Russian winter and the cruel deaths of those she loved. A truly remarkable account of this most terrible era in modern history, The Diary of Lena Mukhina is the vivid first-hand testimony of a courageous young woman struggling simply to survive.

Winner of the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize Winner of the University of Southern California Book Prize Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize “Fascinating and perceptive.” —Antony Beevor, New York Review of Books “Stand aside, Homer. I doubt whether even the author of the Iliad could have matched Alexis Peri’s account of the 872-day siege which Leningrad endured.” —Jonathan Mirsky, The Spectator “Powerful and illuminating...A fascinating, insightful, and nuanced work.” —Anna Reid, Times Literary Supplement “Much has been written about Leningrad’s heroic resistance. But the remarkable aspect of [Peri’s] book is that she tells a very different story: recounting the internal struggles of ordinary people desperately trying to survive and make sense of their fate.” —John Thornhill, Financial Times “A sensitive, at times almost poetic examination of their emotions and disordered mental states. It both contrasts with and complements the equally accurate official Soviet portrait of a stalwart population standing firm in the face of evil and in defense of Soviet ideals.” —Robert Legvold, Foreign Affairs In September 1941, two and a half months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, the German Wehrmacht encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days, at a cost of almost a million lives. It was one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. The War Within chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured it. Drawing on unpublished diaries, Alexis Peri tells the tragic story of how young and old struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. When the blockade was lifted in 1944, Kremlin officials censored publications describing the ordeal and arrested many of Leningrad’s wartime leaders. Some were executed. Diaries—now dangerous to their authors—were concealed, shelved in archives, and forgotten. The War Within recovers these lost accounts, shedding light on one of World War II’s darkest episodes while paying tribute the resilience of the human spirit.

Silver Winner, ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year, History From September 1941 until January 1944, Leningrad suffered under one of the worst sieges in the history of warfare. At least one million civilians died, many during the terribly cold first winter. Bearing the brunt of this hardship—and keeping the city alive through their daily toil and sacrifice—were the women of Leningrad. Yet their perspective on life during the siege has been little examined. Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina have searched archival holdings for letters and diaries written during the siege, conducted interviews with survivors, and collected poetry, fiction, and retrospective memoirs written by the blokadnitsy (women survivors) to present a truer picture of the city under siege. In simple, direct, even heartbreaking language, these documents tell of lost husbands, mothers, children; meager rations often supplemented with sawdust and other inedible additives; crime, cruelty, and even cannibalism. They also relate unexpected acts of kindness and generosity; attempts to maintain cultural life through musical and dramatic performances; and provide insight into a group of ordinary women reaching beyond differences in socioeconomic class, ethnicity, and profession in order to survive in extraordinary times.

In this eagerly anticipated book, Boris Gasparov gazes through the lens of music to find an unusual perspective on Russian cultural and literary history. He discusses six major works of Russian music from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, showing the interplay of musical texts with their literary and historical sources within the ideological and cultural contexts of their times. Each musical work becomes a tableau representing a moment in Russian history, and together the works form a coherent story of ideological and aesthetic trends as they evolved in Russia from the time of Pushkin to the rise of totalitarianism in the 1930s. Gasparov discusses Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla (1842), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1871) and Khovanshchina (1881), Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1878) and The Queen of Spades (1890), and Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony (1934). Offering new interpretations to enhance our understanding and appreciation of these important works, Gasparov also demonstrates how Russian music and cultural history illuminate one another.

In 1970 a small band of Soviet Jews, led by Eduard Kuznetsov and emboldened by the heroism of the Israelis in the Six-Day War, conceived a daring plan to escape the Soviet Union by commandeering a small civilian airplane. Beyond seeking their personal freedom, the group wanted their desperate act to ignite the world’s attention to the ongoing plight of Soviet Jews who were denied the right to emigrate. Prison Diaries, by Eduard Kuznetsov, sheds light on their mission and details the preparations they made before attempting to seize the plane. It also describes from a first-person perspective the group’s ultimate arrest prior to boarding, and its ensuing trial, which resulted in death sentences for Eduard Kuznetsov and the mission’s pilot Mark Dymshits. “Solzhenitsyn overwhelmed me in a way no other had done, with the exception of the prison diaries of Eduard Kuznetsov.” – Leonard Schapiro, The Sunday Times (London)