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02 December 2019, 13:43

Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin's Blockade Book hailed as literary feat

MINSK, 2 December (BelTA) - Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin's Leningrad Under Siege: First-hand Accounts of the Ordeal known in Russian as The Blockade Book is a literary feat, Russian Ambassador to Belarus Dmitry Mezentsev said as he spoke at a conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of Daniil Granin and the 40th anniversary of The Blockade Book in the House of Moscow in Minsk, BelTA has learned.

“Today we will talk about Daniil Granin and Ales Adamovich's accomplishment of 40 years ago. This is not just a book. We all have read it all more than once. It is a literary feat. It is a human feat," Dmitry Mezentsev said. “Two great writers and citizens took the pains and presented the history of the siege as honestly and truthfully as possible. It was big for the late 1970s,” the ambassador said.

The Ambassador stressed that this book is now getting a special resonance. “We are now responsible for not letting them to rewrite the history, to rethink the role of the soldier of the Great Patriotic War who liberated Europe and the world from fascism. Today we pay tribute to Ales Adamovich and Daniil Granin, and I will name another name, to Valentin Kovalchuk Professor, Doctor of Historical Sciences, one of the leading Russian historians. In due time he persuaded the leadership of Leningrad to release the real figures of the huge losses that the besieged city suffered,” he said.

Literature and spirituality unite people, said Marianna Shchetkina, the head of the Union State Standing Committee Office in Minsk. “In December, we will mark 20 years of the Union State Treaty," she said. “Now they often ask the question: whether the Union State has a future? We heard the answer at this conference today. We cannot be separated. We are one people, we share common history, common values,” she noted.

The Blockade Book is a documentary chronicle of the siege of Leningrad. The initiative to write the book came from Ales Adamovich. The authors collected 200 stories of the siege survivors and recorded them on tape. The total volume of the recorded material was 4,000 pages. “The book, which many call the Leningrad Bible, has been translated into 15 languages. Now negotiations are in progress to translate the book into French,” said Natalia Adamovich, Ales Adamovich's daughter.

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