Read Online Leningrad 1943: Inside a City Under Siege by Alexander Werth - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Alexander Werth
Ads: Link
the little river to the east of it Fontanka, because its waters fed the fountains. Catherine had the fountains and the grottoes scrapped, and the Summer Garden then acquired its definite character – with dark leafy alleys lined by maples and the many centuries-old lime trees. Round it ran a riding path – the Rotten Row of St. Petersburg, and across it, from its pond in the south up to the Neva Embankment ran the famous main alley with its white marble statues of Diana and Apollo and other Greek gods on either side. And near the centre of the garden was the large playground for children, and here in 1855 was erected the large bronze statue of Krylov, the Russian La Fontaine, with bas-reliefs round the pedestal, illustrating his most celebrated fables known by every Russian child. The garden was full of historical and literary memories and was the scene of the first act of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades.
To me, the Letni Sad, the Summer Garden, was also full of childhood memories – for I was taken there every day for years (at first, no doubt in a pram), in spring, autumn, and even winter, when little wooden houses were put over the Greek gods and goddesses to protect them from ice and snow. But I shall not bore the reader with stories of how I built snowmen or played hide-and-seek among Peter the Great’s old lime trees with playmates most of whose names I no longer even remember, and who today may, for all I know, be heroes of the Soviet Union, or white émigrés, or nobodies, or merely the flimsy remains of Leningraders who died in the famine.
Through the half-closed main gate on the Neva Embankment, we walked into the garden. It was the same, and yet very different. The alley of Greek gods and goddesses had disappeared. Not only the statues but the alley itself had almost vanished. The statues had been removed to safety, and much of the width of the famous alley was now being used for growing cabbages. There were cabbages everywhere – even in the shaded parts among the old trees, and naturally, over the whole area of ‘Rotten Row.’ These were plots that had been lent by the Town Council to hundreds of private families. It was hard to find one’s bearings. We walked, however, along a narrow path which was the middle of the former main alley, with cabbage beds on both sides, and came to the children’s playground around ‘Grandpa Krylov.’ It was astonishing: all the trees, even the centenarian lime trees, some of them propped up as before with rusty iron supports, were intact except for a few that had been shattered by shells. The truth is – and this ranks as a particularly remarkable fact – that although in the winter of 1941 thousands died of cold, nobody was even tempted to cut a tree in any of Leningrad’s historic parks. Krylov still sat on his pedestal, reading his own fables. The statue had been sandbagged only half-way up. ‘You see,’ said the architect, ‘we started on this job during the worst possible time. And people were just too weak and too hungry to finish it. And later there were more important things to do, so the job was never completed.’
The garden was almost deserted. There were few people around and there was a strange stillness everywhere, except for the distant thud of exploding shells. There was scarcely any sound of traffic, and that most familiar sound of the Summer Garden was absent – the harsh cry of the hundreds of crows that used to live on the tops of the old trees. I remembered those crows, fluttering among the bare tree-tops in the early purple twilight of St. Petersburg’s winter evenings which came about three in the afternoon. There were no crows in the Summer Garden now, and one could guess their fate. No birds, and few people. Only at the far end, near the pond whose large slopes presented a curious decorative pattern of very regular carrot and cabbage beds, and with the famous granite vase sandbagged in front of it, we came across some
To me, the Letni Sad, the Summer Garden, was also full of childhood memories – for I was taken there every day for years (at first, no doubt in a pram), in spring, autumn, and even winter, when little wooden houses were put over the Greek gods and goddesses to protect them from ice and snow. But I shall not bore the reader with stories of how I built snowmen or played hide-and-seek among Peter the Great’s old lime trees with playmates most of whose names I no longer even remember, and who today may, for all I know, be heroes of the Soviet Union, or white émigrés, or nobodies, or merely the flimsy remains of Leningraders who died in the famine.
Through the half-closed main gate on the Neva Embankment, we walked into the garden. It was the same, and yet very different. The alley of Greek gods and goddesses had disappeared. Not only the statues but the alley itself had almost vanished. The statues had been removed to safety, and much of the width of the famous alley was now being used for growing cabbages. There were cabbages everywhere – even in the shaded parts among the old trees, and naturally, over the whole area of ‘Rotten Row.’ These were plots that had been lent by the Town Council to hundreds of private families. It was hard to find one’s bearings. We walked, however, along a narrow path which was the middle of the former main alley, with cabbage beds on both sides, and came to the children’s playground around ‘Grandpa Krylov.’ It was astonishing: all the trees, even the centenarian lime trees, some of them propped up as before with rusty iron supports, were intact except for a few that had been shattered by shells. The truth is – and this ranks as a particularly remarkable fact – that although in the winter of 1941 thousands died of cold, nobody was even tempted to cut a tree in any of Leningrad’s historic parks. Krylov still sat on his pedestal, reading his own fables. The statue had been sandbagged only half-way up. ‘You see,’ said the architect, ‘we started on this job during the worst possible time. And people were just too weak and too hungry to finish it. And later there were more important things to do, so the job was never completed.’
The garden was almost deserted. There were few people around and there was a strange stillness everywhere, except for the distant thud of exploding shells. There was scarcely any sound of traffic, and that most familiar sound of the Summer Garden was absent – the harsh cry of the hundreds of crows that used to live on the tops of the old trees. I remembered those crows, fluttering among the bare tree-tops in the early purple twilight of St. Petersburg’s winter evenings which came about three in the afternoon. There were no crows in the Summer Garden now, and one could guess their fate. No birds, and few people. Only at the far end, near the pond whose large slopes presented a curious decorative pattern of very regular carrot and cabbage beds, and with the famous granite vase sandbagged in front of it, we came across some
Similar Books
