Ольга. Запретный дневник

by Olga Bergholz, Н. Соколовская (составитель), А. Рубашкин (составитель)

К столетию Ольги Берггольц издательство «Азбука» подготовило книгу «Ольга. Запретный дневник», в которую вошли ошеломляющей откровенности и силы дневники 1939—1949 годов, письма, отрывки из второй, так и недописанной части романа «Дневные звезды», избранные стихотворения и поэмы, а также материалы из следственного дела О. Берггольц (1938—1939), которое считалось утерянным и стало доступно лишь осенью 2009 года. Публикуемые материалы сопровождены комментарием.

В книгу включены малоизвестные и ранее не известные фотографии и документы из Российского государственного архива литературы и искусства, из Пушкинского Дома (ИРЛИ РАН), Российской национальной библиотеки, Центрального государственного архива литературы и искусства Санкт-Петербурга, из Музея Дома Радио. Также публикуются письма к отцу, предоставленные для этого издания Рукописным отделом Пушкинского Дома. Впервые читатели увидят верстку книги «Узел» с авторской и цензурной правкой (архив Н. Банк в РНБ). Впервые в этом издании представлены фотографии уникальных вещей, хранящихся в семье наследников. В книгу включены также воспоминания об О. Берггольц.

Ольгу Берггольц называли «ленинградской Мадонной», она была «голосом Города» почти все девятьсот блокадных дней. «В истории Ленинградской эпопеи она стала символом, воплощением героизма блокадной трагедии. Ее чтили, как чтут блаженных, святых» (Д. Гранин). По дневникам, прозе и стихам О. Берггольц, проследив перипетии судьбы поэта, можно понять, что происходило с нашей страной в довоенные, военные и послевоенные годы. Берггольц — поэт огромной лирической и гражданской силы. Своей судьбой она дает невероятный пример патриотизма, понятия, так дискредитированного в наше время.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography

544 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2010

About the author

Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz (Russian: Ольга Фёдоровна Берггольц; May 16 [O.S. May 3] 1910 – November 13, 1975) was a Soviet poet, writer, playwright and journalist. She is most famous for her work on the Leningrad radio during the city's blockade, when she became the symbol of city's strength and determination.

Reviews

[Gremrien · Rating 2 out of 5]

Wow. I was DISGUSTED by this person.

Yeah, it was unexpected. From what I knew (very superficially) about Ольга Берггольц before, I already respected her and thought that reading her diaries and other materials about her would only reinforce this attitude and give me more interesting and thought-provoking grounds for this. Instead, I discovered a person that I really despised, especially in the context of this strange cult around her as “the voice of the Siege of Leningrad” and “Leningrad Madonna.”

This is a large book, and the diaries are only a small part of it (and they are mostly from 1941-42, about the Siege of Leningrad — this was obviously a deliberate excerpt from a large oeuvre of her real diaries). There are also some notes, various letters, many memoir essays of other people about Ольга Берггольц and their relationships with her, and many of her verses as well. The book is extremely complimentary regarding Ольга Берггольц, of course, especially the part with the memoirs of other people about her (they are on the verge of a holy scripture about some absolute genius and saint), and I am sure that many readers would be infected by this mood and consider Ольга Берггольц a very cool and important person. And yet, reading it resulted in growing disbelief and aversion for me. Later, I checked out some information in other sources, and only confirmed for myself what I saw “between the lines” of the book and often even in plain sight if you know what to look at.

I tried to persuade myself that she was just a mere mortal, and nobody is perfect, and she experienced many personal tragedies herself (especially the deaths of all her children, born and unborn), and she was also arrested and tortured by the NKVD in 1938 and repressed in other regards, and her father was deported from Leningrad during the war, and all this stuff. I tried to be compassionate and tolerant. But I couldn’t. Just couldn’t.

Here’s what I learned from this book and from other materials I read about Ольга Берггольц (and anyone else might have a completely different impression about her personality and life story):

First of all, she was an ardent Communist. Absolutely brainwashed and happy to help brainwashing others. One of those who really believed in “communes,” socialist unity of nations, heroism and superiority of Soviet people, and all this bullshit about “the most progressive country in the world.” Surely, many people believed in the same thing. However, Ольга Берггольц was not only a naïve believer; she was also a happy instrument of propaganda that retranslated these notions as the only possible “truth.” She worked in and for propaganda basically from childhood, and although her education was “literary,” she started her work (and continued to do it all her life) as a correspondent who praised the great building projects of the Soviet state, heroism, devotion, superiority, etc., etc.

She was among those young journalists who were specifically sent to Kazakhstan in 1931 (as a “war correspondent”!) to describe how the Soviet government “helps” the poor agriculture of Kazakhstan and makes it thriving. And she never blamed herself for working in propaganda to praise “collective farms,” “раскулачивание,” and all those agricultural innovations that literally killed about 40% of the Kazakh nation. She is talking about “чудовищные окраины, пузатые (коричневые круглые животы и тощие задики), грязные ребятишки на тоненьких (тонюсеньких) ножках, изможденные женщины” — as if not knowing that this was exactly BECAUSE the Soviet state did to them. She never felt bad knowing that these kids most probably died from hunger within several months after she saw them — yes, even many years after this, even working in propaganda and therefore having access to much more real-life information than a regular person.

No, for Ольга Берггольц, only her own sufferings were sacred. And that’s why you find in her diaries a lot of anger towards the NKVD because of her own arrest and tortures and towards the Germans because of the Siege of Leningrad, and never ever anything else. No Holodomor (Ukrainian or Kazakh), no occupation of the neighboring countries, no Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, no GULAG, no mass deportations, nothing like this. Nothing.

After her release in 1938, she was bitter about her experience but she worked very hard to “restore” her reputation in the party and society — not only because it was reasonable from a practical point of view, but because the party and her status of “a true Communist” were part of her core identity.

Everything “critical” you can find in this book is about her hate towards the NKVD — but she loved everything else “Soviet.” And there was only one bad year in Soviet history, 1938, because she personally was arrested and tortured. Everything else was cool for her. She wrote in March 1956 (yes, soon after the 20th Congress): “Коммунизм — это Советская власть минус НКВД” — and this is basically her most intimate and strong belief she had all her life.

Many of her words about the West and Western Allies show how sincerely she despised them and how she believed that the Soviet state is the most peaceful and benevolent country in the world.

She would later, much later, receive “Сталинская премия третьей степени” (1951) for her poem “Первороссийск” — yes, not for her “Siege poetry.” This poem, “Первороссийск,” is a “Communist Bible” about an early commune. You can read quite a lot of materials about this future poem in this book, and you can see clearly that this was her magnum opus by definition. This is what she believed in and regarded as her most important work. This was truly sacred for her. And the party and Stalin agreed with her on this, and that’s why she received this prestigious award.

*

And then there was the Siege of Leningrad. And this is another, quite painful and disgusting issue.

It should be said that she not only worked for propaganda but also wrote some poems before the Siege. It was just very trivial bad poetry — pompous, artificial, pretentious, full of Big Words (I laughed over them because you can call these poems summarily “рубежи и бытие” — yeah, try to look for those words in her poetry). However, her pathetic and pretentious poetry suddenly became extremely popular during the Siege of Leningrad. For the state propaganda, it was the necessary “heroic fanfare” they would never produce themselves if not for such sincere enthusiasts. For regular people — well, they believed that Ольга Берггольц tried “to tell the truth” about their sufferings. In fact, there is almost zero “truth” in her poems. The real truth that we are only starting to discover for ourselves today. The only difference from the official propaganda is that she mentioned some hunger and deaths (very carefully, and always in the exuberant garland of exclamations about “heroism” and “devotion” and all that shit).

The official propaganda did not like the hunger-and-death aspects very much, but they quickly understood that this poetry and its sudden popularity among people can serve them a lot. And that’s why Ольга Берггольц was very much supported and encouraged about it. And that’s why this cult of “Leningrad Madonna” was growing and growing over years. And that’s why Ольга Берггольц did not starve herself.

Yeah, “Leningrad Madonna” quite enjoyed her life during the Siege of Leningrad. Well, she was in a bad state during the first winter, of course, when nobody knew her. And that’s when her first husband died (because his epilepsy worsened fatally due to dystrophy). Nevertheless, she was already in relationships with Георгий Макогоненко, her future new husband, and Георгий Макогоненко belonged to the privileged propaganda elite (wikipedia: “в 1941—1942 работал редактором и начальником Литературного отдела Ленинградского радиокомитета”). She certainly never starved after this. Both because of Георгий Макогоненко, and because of her own more and more privileged status. She read her “heroic poems” standing in a velvet dress in front of starving people, but she never starved herself. In fact, she was sending quite large sums of money to her relatives (you can find exact figures in her letters to her father, for example, and those are hundreds if not thousands of rubles). She herself and her multiple friends regularly traveled “beyond the Siege” (“за кольцо”) — and returned to Leningrad voluntarily, yes, because life there was not deadly for them. It was difficult but never deadly — for them.

She writes in 1942 in her diary: “А так вообще пищи — много. Прилетела из-за кольца Кетлинская — привезла разного, в том числе моя радость — кофе…”

I have never seen before a diary from the Siege of Leningrad where food and starvation would be hardly even mentioned. Any starving person, however intelligent and immaterial he/she is, starts to list all those crumbles of food he/she managed to eat and talk about the horrific changes he/she sees in his/her body, mind, behavior, surrounding people, and society overall during the starvation. And you will never find this in Ольга Берггольц’s diary. Not because she just did not write about it. Clearly, because she just did not experience this. She did not starve. She did not stand in lines for hours. She did not go to fetch icy water from the river. Nothing like this. Reading her diary overall (no mentioning of feeling hungry and standing in grim lines or worries about the bread cards whatsoever!), you understand that she was very far from the most typical lives of Leningrad people.

Instead, she was giving her “concerts” by dozens and extremely enjoyed reading her poetry.

I also have NEVER before seen even mentioning that people during the Siege could (or wanted to) move into an apartment where somebody else’s family died of starvation. I did not even know that it was theoretically possible, because obviously, all the died-out apartments were sealed by the police and definitely not available for other people to choose, even if those people needed a better place to live.

Ольга Берггольц and Георгий Макогоненко did it and were very happy about it. They moved to a separate two-room apartment ("вымершая квартира") and were free to use (or to throw out) all the things and furniture left after the death of the owners. Yep, a family of two people who are not even married yet. In Soviet Leningrad. During the war. You can understand my feelings about the very phenomenon, even if we disregard the whole horror of the situation when people enjoy themselves in such a place.

*

There is another disgusting aspect of her personality: vanity. Huge vanity. Most of her diary entries concerning the Siege of Leningrad are about her poetry and the popularity it gains. She REPROCESSED THE SUFFERING OF PEOPLE INTO HER PERSONAL INSPIRATION. She considered it her job as a propagandist and a blessing for her personally — because this sudden popularity not only flattered her vanity (which can be seen even in her earliest poems and in the diary: “Меня выгнали из демонстрации. Ничего. Я не сержусь на вас. Я еще напишу о вас такое, что вы будете плакать над этим. Парикмахер, который стрижет меня сейчас, когда-нибудь будет гордиться этим.”) but also allowed her “to cleanse herself” after her arrest and repressions in 1938. To cleanse in the eyes of the party (her own words: “соблазны конъюнктурного успеха с целью «обеления»”). This was her hour of triumph. This was her golden opportunity. And she exploited it to the brim.

There are many really horrific lines in this book that show how sickly IN LOVE she was with the Siege. No, not with the people and their “heroism.” The Siege itself was her muse. She had many opportunities to leave the starving Leningrad where “Трупы лежат штабелями, в конце Мойки целые переулки и улицы из штабелей трупов. Между этими штабелями ездят грузовики с трупами же, ездят прямо по свалившимся сверху мертвецам, и кости их хрустят под колесами грузовиков” — but she never did it, because here was her fame and inspiration (and well, because she personally did not suffer much anyway).

The Siege was indeed just an inspiration for Ольга Берггольц and not her personal tragedy. Лев Левин said very important words about Ольга Берггольц and her relationships with the Siege: “Все годы блокады она жила счастливой — да, да, именно счастливой! — жизнью. Вся предыдущая жизнь казалась Ольге лишь закономерным подступом к ее жестокому, короткому расцвету.” Yes, all the book is about this. How happy she was that the Siege happened and made her famous.

Starving and dying people found her poetry moving and heartwarming, but she hardly mentions THEM in her diaries or personal notes or letters or whatever. You might think that any intelligent person, especially if this person is a journalist and a poet, “the voice of starving Leningrad,” would notice other people on the streets, observe them, talk to them, help them, etc. Nope, nothing like this. She is intoxicated by her popularity and fame, she is discussing news from the frontline, she is writing about her work (on radio and with her poems and articles), she is reading her poetry at multiple “concerts,” she worries about her father, and she is engrossed by her personal relationships with her new husband and some memories about the previous one, but you would see almost nothing about the life of the city and people in her diaries. She just never noticed them!

I was especially appalled by this fragment:

“А люди голодают и голодают, и многие еще отчаяннее, чем в феврале. Маруся, Фриц, Мэри, Мироновы — прямо об этом и говорят. Уже последние запасы сил выходят. Прендель рассказывал недавно, что трупоедство растет — в мае в их больнице 15 случаев вместо 11 — в апреле. Ему же пришлось и все еще приходится держать экспертизу по определению вменяемости людоедов. Людоедство — факт, он рассказывал о двух людоедах, которые сначала съели трупик своего ребенка, а потом заманили троих — убили их и съели. Это было в апреле. Когда Прендель об этом говорил — мне почему-то было смешно, совершенно искренне смешно, тем более что он еще пытался как-то оправдывать их. Я сказала: «Но ведь ты же не скушал свою бабушку», — после этого уже не могла всерьез относиться к его рассказу о людоедах. А как все это опротивело — людоеды, продырявленные крыши, выбитые стекла, идиотическое разрушение города — тоже, героика, романтика войны!”

Yeah, this is your “Leningrad Madonna.” And no, this is not some deviation from her normal self, hysterical damnation. She was like this overall.

Disgusting.

(And I never even mentioned that she was an alcoholic — severe alcoholic, who even was treated in a psychiatric hospital from alcoholism.)

[Nataly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Жизнь, как она есть. Трудно вместить в понимание, что такое можно пережить.
Это надо знать!
Об этом надо помнить!