Valery Petrochenkov – författare

This novel provides a biosketch of the City of St. Petersburg in Russia, then Leningrad, during and shortly after World War II. During the Siege of Leningrad, at least one million people died of disease, starvation, and the effects of war. Soviet propaganda has consistently framed the Siege as heroic resistance to Fascism, which has encouraged most accounts to emphasize the strength and resilience of the Russian people, and not the accounts of their great suffering The truth regarding actual conditions in this City cannot be easily conveyed, but this novel. cuts through to the essence of the events. Survivors of the Siege, who have read the book in the original Russian, have expressed the opinion that is the best account of the Siege they have ever read.The novel describes different aspects of survival and non-survival during the Siege. A child narrator, whose early vocabulary includes words such as bombyoshka (bombing), relates the events in several chapters. The childs frank appraisal allows the reader to penetrate to the very core of reality in a city where bombs are falling, dead bodies line the streets, and simple joys still exist in a narrow context. Each additional chapter reveals one more perspective.

Miserere is an account of World War II that focuses on the fate of Aleksey, a boy from the Volga region, as he and his beloved friends try to survive World War II and beyond.As the story begins, the Soviet government of the thirties has just confiscated most of the grain in the Volga region, leading to the death of around 1,000,000 people. When Aleksey’s father is arrested and his family is starving, the boy seeks his best friend, Kurt. Aleksey is captured and put into a camp. The Warden notices the boy’s bravery and character, so sends him to a special orphanage school. After graduation, he attends military school and becomes a spy. The fates of Kurt in Kazakhstan, of Ilse in Berlin, of his schoolmate Sasha in Finland, and of Lyubov, a beautiful visionary in Russia, are woven together into a rich tapestry.