After Silence
Since September 1941, the Russian city of Leningrad had been ruthlessly besieged by the Nazi army, its civilian population, cruelly deprived, starved and subjected to intense cold, had died in their thousands. In 1942, something happened which, popularly and even officially, is believed to have been a prelude to the ultimate overthrow of the besieging Germans. A group of musicians, mainly members of the Leningrad Radio Orchestra, most of whom were so weakened and emaciated that they could barely handle their instruments, contrived to rehearse and finally deliver, the first performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony—a significant historical event in itself.
The way the musicians sustain and support one another is inspiring and movingly told. If an individual player did not attend a rehearsal, it was almost inevitably because he or she was physically incapable. On one such occasion, when a player named Dima is absent, Katya (our narrator) goes to his rooms. He is near death and all but resigned to it but, practical and compassionate, she supports him enough to enable him to continue his fight to attend the next rehearsals and maintain his determination to achieve the group’s goal.
Illuminating the facts with clarity and fluency, Gregson convincingly establishes characters who are rounded, and whose often-gruelling experiences are met with fortitude and defiance rather than with self-pity. “Katya” takes us through the musical history, balancing it vividly with her experiences in the context of her own young family’s story.
The manages, with an impressive assurance, the complexity of all the diverse aspects of the novel she has chosen to tell us, and the result is an impressive piece of work. An unforgettable book.
