The poets in this chapter developed their talents during years when the Soviet state was engaged in a vigorous and ruthless effort to efface prerevolutionary culture. They were born between 1907 and 1915, and by early adulthood in the 1930s most of them were writing as convinced and enthusiastic supporters of the new regime. Whatever their views of the Russian cultural heritage, whatever their ties to the past, they seemed to have made an easy and positive accommodation with prevailing official values. In the period of liberalization that followed the death of Stalin, however, it turned out that members of this age group had survived that accommodation. Through the years of Stalinist terror, war, and postwar repression each had suffered doubts and losses, and each had evidently preserved an individualized set of moral and aesthetic values. In maturity, moreover, they demonstrated strong links to prerevolutionary poetic tradition.

Olga Berggolts (1910–1976) was born in St. Petersburg and spent most of her life in her native city. Leningrad is the setting, and often the subject, of much of her poetry. She lived there during the whole of World War II, broadcasting her poems, sketches, and articles on the radio and reading them at factories and military installations. Although her first book of verse was published in 1934, her real literary prominence began with the moving war poems she wrote during and after the siege of Leningrad. Her “February Diary” (1942), for example, is a portrait of the city under blockade – miserable, freezing, and starving but proud and defiant. A harshly vivid account of her compatriots' suffering, the poem combines sorrowful compassion with a strange, fierce joy: