Ol’ga Berggol’ts is generally thought of as an official Soviet writer, best known for the poetry she wrote and broadcast on the radio during the Leningrad Siege of 1941-44. Further evidence of her apparent conformity may be found in the award the Stalin Prize in 1950 for a narrative poem, Pervorossiisk [First Russian Commune, 1949], telling the story of a collective farm set up by Petrograd workers in the early years after the 1917 Revolution. Nevertheless, Berggol’ts was no straightforwardly orthodox Soviet writer. In 1965 she published a collection of poetry entitled Uzel [The Knot], in which a number of poems relating to her arrest and imprisonment in 1938-39 appeared for the first time; …
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