Conversations, Dreams and Desires of the Inhabitants of Besieged Leningrad. 1941–1944

Abstract

The author explores non-classical sources on the social history of besieged Leningrad — conversations, dreams and desires of the inhabitants of the city. Conversations, dreams and desires testify what is passionately desired, illusory and at the same time the most important for people. In relation to the history of the Siege of Leningrad, this has a special meaning, since it is a study of the fears, aspirations and hopes of a person in a catastrophe. The sources of studying of such specific forms of communication and auto-communication are reflections recorded in diaries, letters, memoirs, interviews. The author concludes that the dreams and desires of the inhabitants of besieged Leningrad, often remaining unfulfilled, reflected obvious and secret thoughts, fears, aspirations. Leningraders often told each other about their dreams, which were a bright moment of salvation to overcome the aching loneliness and stress. Thinking, speaking, dreaming about food, many have experienced or deliberately aroused in themselves a blissful, ecstatic state, returning with incredible pain to a deadly hungry reality. Men, women, children, people of different levels of education and culture were prone to daydreaming. The blockade present was so unbearable that the imagination painted a picture of well-being, comfort, satiety, peace in the past, which was experienced, familiar and sometimes seemed more real than the present and the future. The danger, often the practical impossibility of evacuation, transferred the physical movement to the space of sleep and dreams, where only the blockade could “act”. Such escapism allowed a person to escape the tyranny of blockaded reality. A very personal, private space which is a dream with the beginning of the war and especially the blockade, shrank to a very limited circle, the main ones in which were the lifting of the blockade and food.