Please join us for a talk with Alexis Peri, Assistant Professor of History at Boston University, about her book The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Harvard University Press, 2017).
In September 1941, about two months after the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, German and Finnish troops encircled Leningrad. Cut off from the rest of Russia, the city remained blockaded for 872 days at a cost of almost a million civilian lives, making it one of the longest and deadliest sieges in modern history. In The War Within, Alexis Peri chronicles the Leningrad blockade from the perspective of those who endured the unendurable. Based on 125 unpublished diaries written by individuals from all walks of Soviet life, Peri tells the harrowing story of how Leningraders struggled to make sense of a world collapsing around them. Leningraders recorded in intimate detail how starvation, bombardment, and isolation assaulted them, body and mind. They also documented numerous intellectual discoveries and creative insights, which emerged from that ordeal. For many Leningraders, diary writing was instrumental to survival. It became a tangible reminder of one’s humanity and an act of defiance against inhumane conditions.
Alexis Peri is Assistant Professor of History at Boston University. Her book, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, from Harvard University Press (2017), won the 2018 Pushkin House Book Prize for the best work of non-fiction about Russia in the English language. Her current research investigates hundreds of pen-friendships that Soviet and American women formed during World War II, and it traces their struggle to maintain those friendships during the Cold War.
