Description

Drawing on 125 unpublished diaries from the Soviet archives, this lecture offers an intimate look at the Leningrad Blockade, one of the longest and deadliest sieges in history. The talk examines how Leningraders trapped inside the city came to intellectual grips with extreme starvation and isolation. In the process of contemplating the meaning of their suffering, they placed themselves, their city, and the Soviet experience under a critical microscope.
 
Alexis Peri received her PhD in history from the University of California Berkeley, and is an Associate Professor of History at Boston University. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad, the book upon which the talk is based, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and won the Pushkin Book Prize, the University of Southern California Book Prize in Literary and Cultural Studies, and the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages Book Prize for Cultural Studies. She is working on a new book project about Soviet and American pen-friendships during WWII and the Cold War. It is entitled Dear Unknown Friend: Soviet and American Women Discovered the Power of the Personal.