#19: Symphony for the City of the Dead
"We began to see that there was something stronger than starvation, fear and death—the will to stay human."
Symphony for the City of the Dead
M. T. Anderson
Year Published: 2015
Pages: 379 (plus 85 pages of source notes and indices)
Genres: YA nonfiction, WWII history, biography, music history
Topics: World War II, Russian Revolution, Dmitri Shostakovich, classical music, Soviet history
Recognition
Summary
Born to a middle-class St. Petersburg family in the last years of the Russian czars, Dmitri Shostakovich showed little interest in music until he began piano lessons at age nine, when his talent became apparent. At the same time, though, Russia was in upheaval, and by the time he was 11, Czar Nicholas II had been deposed and the Bolsheviks had taken power.
After his graduation from the Petrograd Conservatory in 1925, Shostakovich quickly became one of the most well-known composers in the Soviet Union. But being famous in Stalinist Russia often came with significant risks: many of Shostakovich's friends and family were sent to gulags or killed outright during the Terror of the 1930s. Shostakovich himself narrowly escaped a grim fate after Stalin was reportedly unhappy with his Fourth Symphony.
But perhaps Shostakovich's—and the Soviet Union's—greatest challenge came with Hitler's invasion in 1941. The Nazis surrounded Shostakovich's home of Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), beginning an unimaginably brutal siege that lasted two and a half years. In the midst of the shelling and death, Shostakovich began work on his Seventh Symphony, which would become famous worldwide as a bold artistic statement of defiance and resistance against the Nazi onslaught.
Symphony for the City of the Dead and Me
YA nonfiction is still a relatively new subgenre, especially for me. I didn't know where to look for good examples, so I went to the YALSA Nonfiction Book Award lists, where I stumbled on Symphony for the City of the Dead. My sister and I both played classical music growing up (I played cello, she still plays violin), and I was interested to read both about Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad, which I knew very little about.
I really enjoyed Symphony for the City of the Dead, but I'm still struggling to understand the difference between YA nonfiction and adult nonfiction. I would absolutely recommend this book to anyone interested in World War II history, Russian history, or music history, regardless of their age. In fact, I wonder if the book's length and subject matter might turn some students off. Anderson is a talented storyteller, but the book is still dense with information, and it's not exactly a topic that I imagine many young people can immediately relate to. But my local librarian assures me that middle grade and YA readers are still fascinated by WWII history, so I would like to have this book available for students.
I'm very interested in exploring the YA nonfiction subgenre more. The two non-memoir nonfiction books I've read for this project were very different, and I'm still trying to wrap my head around what exactly qualifies a nonfiction book as "young adult." I was also floored by Anderson's descriptions of the Soviet experience in WWII, and I would definitely like to read more about that.
Teaching Considerations
Young Adult: Symphony for the City of the Dead is long and complex, with many characters with potentially difficult Russian names. And although its subject matter is historical, the accounts of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad are extremely bleak and may disturb some readers. I think readers ages 15 and above would be more apt to stick with the book and engage with its material.
Whole Class or Individual Read: Teaching Symphony for the City of the Dead as a whole-class text could be difficult because of its length, but with some editing, I think it could be an excellent high school text for a World War II unit. If that wouldn't be possible, though, the book would still be a good read for anyone interested in World War II or the Russian Revolution.
World War II History: Anderson's book is an in-depth exploration of an aspect of World War II that not many people in the United States are familiar with. Even if the entire book would be too much to teach in a World War II unit, selections from it would be excellent informational text to bolster students' understanding of the Russian experience during the war.
Sensitive Content: Symphony for the City of the Dead contains descriptions of Stalin's Terror in the 1930s, which resulted in the deaths of millions. More graphic and potentially more upsetting, though, are the descriptions of the death and starvation of the citizens of Leningrad. These passages contain frank descriptions of starvation and cannibalism.
Read-Aloud Passages
- In February 1917, the people of Petrograd took to the streets. ... They played at rebellion. (pp. 17-19)
- The Russian Revolution breaks out as guards and the military refuse to put down large-scale demonstrations in Petrograd. Shostakovich's parents rejoice, but Shostakovich just plays with his sister. This is an exciting passage with a great narrative description of the on-the-ground experience of people in the Russian Revolution.
- In March 1934, two of Russia's most famous poets ... "There's no place where more people are killed for it." (pp. 67-68)
- Two Russian poets, Boris Pasternak and Osip Mandelstam, discuss Stalin's cruelty as his purges sweep the Soviet Union. It's a brief passage that uses an interaction between friends and a brief poem to describe the fear that people lived under during Stalin's purges and the deaths in Ukraine from his first Five-Year Plan.
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