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The "gripping story" of a Nazi blockade, a Russian composer, and a ragtag band of musicians who fought to keep up a besieged city's morale (The New York Times Book Review).
For 872 days during World War II, the German Army encircled the city of Leningrad—modern-day St. Petersburg—in a military operation that would cripple the former capital and major Soviet industrial center. Palaces were looted and destroyed. Schools and hospitals were bombarded. Famine raged and millions died, soldiers and innocent civilians alike.
Against the backdrop of this catastrophe, historian Brian Moynahan tells the story of Dmitri Shostakovich, whose Seventh Symphony was first performed during the siege and became a symbol of defiance in the face of fascist brutality. Titled "Leningrad" in honor of the city and its people, the work premiered on August 9, 1942—with musicians scrounged from frontline units and military bands, because only twenty of the orchestra's hundred members had survived.
With this compelling human story of art and culture surviving amid chaos and violence, Leningrad: Siege and Symphony "brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment" (Booklist, starred review), in "a narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune).
"He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival . . . Moynahan's descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting."—The Washington Post
Praise for Leningrad: Siege and Symphony
"Like a movie camera, [Moynahan] zooms in and out on the besieged civilians, the bitterly cold troops on the city’s edge and the simultaneous efforts of Shostakovich to set these experiences to music from the relative safety of evacuation… This multi-perspective approach makes for a gripping story… Moynahan’s Leningrad: Siege and Symphony vividly brings to life a hero city that refused to die."—New York Times Book Review
"A passionate and moving book...nothing short of masterly."—Wall Street Journal
"A narrative that is by turns painful, poignant and inspiring"—Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Moynahan...is a vivid writer, and his account bulges with the reminiscences and contemporaneous accounts of participants; the accumulation of individual experience sears his narrative while sometimes threatening to overwhelm it. He reaches into the guts of the city to extract some humanity from the blood and darkness, and at its best Leningrad captures the heartbreak, agony and small salvations in both death and survival...Moynahan’s descriptions of the battlefield, which also draw from the diaries of the cold, lice-ridden, hungry combatants, are haunting."—Washington Post
"As Moynahan reveals, the real story of the symphony’s genesis and its triumph was more complex and more tragic than is generally understood…Combining a full description of the birth of the Seventh Symphony with a rich and horrifying account of the hell that was Leningrad under siege, this selection brings new depth and drama to a key historical moment”—Booklist (starred review)
“The technique, if not the scale, is Tolstoyan . . .The terrible beauty of the book is in its anecdotal detail, and the horror is of a kind that makes you weep but at times approaches comedy . . . It’s certainly hard to imagine reading his gripping, skillfully woven account without emotion.”—Stephen Walsh, Spectator (UK)
“Brian Moynahan interweaves three gripping stories in this compelling kaleidoscope of war-ravaged Leningrad: Hilter's 900-day siege, Stalin's purges that decimated the city's professional and cultural leaders and Dmitri Shostakovich's desperate struggle to write his haunting Seventh Symphony. Its performance by half-starved musicians between bouts of German shelling attests to the triumph of the human spirit amidst the greatest upheaval of the twentieth century.”—Angela Stent, author of The Limits of Partnership: US-Russian Relations in the Twenty-First Century and professor at Georgetown University.
“Leningrad: Siege and Symphony is a remarkable achievement. Brian Moynahan holds the reader in suspense while teaching an important chapter in the history of the Second World War. His magnificent tale portrays the terror within and without Leningrad during its heroic defiance of the Nazi conquerors and subtle resistance to its Stalinist masters. Like Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony, this is a triumph.”—Charles Glass, author of Americans in Paris: Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation and The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II
“A stupendous story, driven by a furious narrative yet biblical in its thematic confrontations of beauty and evil. It’s vivid in three dimensions: The Red Army’s battles with Hitler’s war machine; the ordeals of the Russian people terrorized by the malevolent maniac in the Kremlin; and throughout the faint but swelling counterpoint of hope as the great Dmitri Shostakovich struggles to write the score of his Seventh Symphony to express the soul of his martyred city . . . This is history to cherish.”—Sir Harold Evans, Editor at Large at Reuters, author of The American Century, and publisher of The Russian Century
“Beautifully written and profoundly moving, Leningrad is a stunning, haunting book that has stayed with me long after I turned the last page.”—James Holland, author of Dam Busters
“A bold attempt to set the composition of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony within the extraordinary context of its times”—Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday (London)
Brian Moynahan's books include the much-praised William Tyndale: If God Spare My Life. As a foreign correspondent, he covered fighting in the Far and Middle East and Africa, and was latterly the European Editor of the London Sunday Times.