THE SIEGE NOVEL. TO DREAM AND TO BELIEVE
(Spat’ i verit’. Blokadnyi roman)

• Novel
• 2007
• 383 pp
• Publishers: Eksmo, Moscow

Leningrad, 1941. Citizens freeze and starve to death.

The Siege serves as a magnifying glass and litmus test for the evil and good in society, and in each individual person. As authorities cut food rations, Moscow continues to increase the rate of arms production. Some share their last piece of bread, and literally feed their family with own blood; others steal, or plunder the remains. Some tie themselves up to their machines to keep working; others disclose anti-government plots, abuse and torture suspects during interrogations, and prosecute and shoot them on trumped-up charges.

Maxim, a young NKVD officer, is sent from Moscow to prepare and implement an ominous “Plan D” that involves mining the city’s major buildings and blowing them up in case of surrender. His own secret plans, however, include the assassination of Leningrad’s leader and party head, Kirov. Maxim falls unexpectedly in love with Varenka, a young undergraduate, and a sweet and endearingly na?ve girl. Varenka waits for her fianc?’s return from the front, assists her mother, neighbors and friends in surviving cold and hunger—and dreams.

In Varenka’s dreams, all the people she knows and loves are alive and happy: her brave, smart fianc? Arvil; her favorite teacher, Alexander Pavlovich, and his intelligent, courteous, absentminded wife, Henrietta Davydovna; the self-disciplined and kind doctor Yuri Fedorovich, Arvil’s father; Arvil’s tempestuous and reckless teen brother, Kim; Siskin, Varenka’s timid and awkward friend; and even their shrewd and often obnoxious old neighbor, Patrikeevna.

With superb mastery, the author conjures an authentic and utterly convincing picture of Leningrad under the Siege, carefully delineating each character’s troubles, fears and joys. The reader sinks effortlessly and inexorably into the darkest corners of Maxim’s growing insanity, and is shocked to find a document of historical fiction turn into a macabre account of grim horror. The novel and the history it describes concur in offering a solution to this personal and social hell—to survive, one must dream and believe.

Praise for the novel:

«An obsession gives birth to the novel, visionary in its origin, striking with its ambiguous balance between a grand simplicity and daring of the idea – and the telegraphically told, overwhelming story. <…> The text’s mystical heathen arrogance is explained and justified – ordinary logic cannot possibly interpret the ice hell that lies as a permafrost in the city’s subconsciousness».
TimeOut

«Vyacheslav Kuritsyn talks this (non-)sense with such love and mastery that you never feel repelled. On the contrary, with stylistic means he creates a mesmeric and magic effect of presence. Against my will – I believe Kuritsyn as the author!.
Vzglyad