Olga Bergholz

Olga Fyodorovna Bergholz[1] (Russian: Ольга Фёдоровна Берггольц, IPA: [ˈolʲɡə ˈfʲɵdərəvnə bʲɪrˈɡolʲts] ⓘ; May 16 [O.S.

With the start of the Russian Civil War in 1918 Fyodor Bergholz sent his family to Uglich where they lived in the former Bogoyavlensky Monastery up until 1921.

After a long period of silence, her novel Dream and a book of stories Vitya Mamanin were published to a great acclaim, although she had to hide her prison poetry.

She spent almost every day of the blockade in Leningrad working at the radio, encouraging hungry and depressed citizens of the city by her speeches and poems.

Her thoughts and impressions on this period, on problems of heroism, love, faithfulness can be found in February Diary (1942), Leningrad Poem (1942), Your Way (1945), and some others.

In March 1942, Olga, who suffered from a critical form of dystrophy, was forcefully sent by her friends to Moscow using the Road of Life, despite her protests.

[2] Together with her husband, she wrote a screenplay turned a play Born in Leningrad and a requiem In Memory of Defenders (1944) on the request of a woman whose brother was killed during the last days of the siege.

On January 27, 1945, Bergholz, Makogonenko and their colleagues released a "radio film" entitled 900 days that included various fragments of reports, voices, sounds and music pieces recorded during the siege.

Bergholz also wrote many times about heroic and glorious events in the history of Russia, such as Pervorossiysk (1950), a poem about the Altay commune organized by the workers of Petrograd; Faithfulness (1954), a tragedy about the defence of Sevastopol in 1941–1942; and The Day Stars (1959), an autobiographical novel that was turned into a movie of the same name by Igor Talankin in 1968.

On May 9, 1960, Piskaryovskoye Memorial Cemetery was opened, dedicated to the victims of the Siege of Leningrad, with the words by Olga Bergholz engraved on the wall behind the Motherland monument.

[10] Also on June the complete collection of diaries by Olga Bergholz was published for the first time by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art.