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The 900-day siege of Lenningrad (1941-44) was one of the turning points of the Second World War. It slowed down the German advance into Russia and became a national symbol of survival and resistance. From her own experience as a survivor of the blockade and using facts, conversations and impressions collected over the years, Lidiya Ginzburg has created a remarkable everyman hero in whom she distils the collective experience of life under siege. Though the author may depict, often painfully, the hunger and harrowing conditions of that period, the reader takes away a different impression: the dignity, vitality and intellectual resilience of the thinking mind as it records and makes sense of extreme experience. This first translation of a classic work of documentary fiction, reminiscent of the work of Primo Levi and Albert Camus, introduces a major twentieth-century Russian writer to English-language readers. [via]