thumb|Olga Berggolts in 1930

Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts (; – November 13, 1975) was a Soviet and Russian poet, writer, playwright and journalist. She is most famous for her work on the Leningrad radio during the city's siege, when she became the symbol of the city's resilience.

Early life

Olga Berggolts was born in a working suburb of Saint Petersburg. Her father Fyodor Khristophorovich Berggolts (1885—1948) was a surgeon of half-Russian and half-Latvian descent, although in 1942 he was deported to the Krasnoyarsk Krai as "an ethnic German and a son of a principal shareholder" (his father was in fact a factory worker). He studied in the Imperial Military Medical Academy under Nikolay Burdenko and served as a military doctor during the World War I; after the October Revolution he was mobilized by the Red Army and continued working at the hospital train.

Olga's mother, Maria Timofeyevna Berggolts (née Grustilina) (1884—1957), was a native Russian. She also had a younger sister Maria (1912—2003) who would later become an actress of the Leningrad State Theatre of Musical Comedy. With the start of the Russian Civil War in 1918 Fyodor Berggolts sent his family to Uglich where they lived in the former Bogoyavlensky Monastery up until 1921. Upon return Olga entered a Petrograd labor school which she finished in 1926. Soon the institute was shut down. Some of the students —including Olga, but not Boris— were moved to the Leningrad University.

In 1930, she graduated from the philological faculty and was sent to Kazakhstan to work as a journalist for the Soviet Steppe newspaper. During this period Olga divorced Kornilov and married her fellow student Nikolay Molchanov. She also published her first book for children Winter-Summer-Parrot (1930).

After returning to Leningrad in 1931, she started working as a journalist for the newspaper of the electric power plant (Electric Power). In 1932 she gave birth to her second daughter Maya who died in just a year. Her feelings and thoughts on this period were expressed in such books as The Out-of-the-way Place (1932), Night (1935), Journalists (1934), and Grains (1935). Such works by Berggolts as Poems (1934) and Uglich (1932) were approved of by Maxim Gorky. In 1934 she joined the Union of Soviet Writers.

In January 1942, she survived another personal tragedy: her second husband Nikolay Molchanov died of hunger. Olga later dedicated a poem 29 January 1942 and her book The Knot (1965) to Nikolay. In March 1942, Olga, who suffered from a critical form of dystrophy, was forcefully sent by her friends to Moscow using the Road of Life, despite her protests. On 20 April, she returned to Leningrad and continued her work at the Radio House. On her return, she married Georgy Makogonenko, a literary critic, also a radio host during the siege. In 1943, she was awarded the Medal "For the Defence of Leningrad".

Honours and legacy

  • Stalin Prize, third class (1951) – for the poem "Pervorossiysk" (1950)
  • Order of Lenin
  • Order of the Red Banner of Labour
  • Medal "For the Defence of Leningrad" (1943)
  • Medal "For Valiant Labour in the Great Patriotic War 1941–1945"
  • Honorary citizen of St. Petersburg (1994)

A minor planet 3093 Bergholz discovered by Soviet astronomer Tamara Smirnova in 1971 is named after her. A street in the Nevsky District bears her name, as well as a central street in Uglich. A monument in her memory was opened in Saint Petersburg in May 2015. Also on June the complete collection of diaries by Olga Berggolts was published for the first time by the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. A crater on Venus is named after her.

American playwright Ivan Fuller wrote a play about Berggolts in 2009 called Awake in Me.

References

  • Some poems by Olga Berggolts
  • More poems by Olga Berggolts
  • Olga Fyodorovna Berggolts. Verses and poems.
  • The Poems by Olga Berggolts (English)