In July-September of 1941, the German, Finnish and Spanish troops overcame the fierce resistance of the Red Army and reached the Ladoga Lake and the outskirts of Leningrad, cutting the city off the mainland. The attempt to capture the Northern capital of Russia by blitzkrieg was unsuccessful, so the Nazi command decided to destroy the city by bombs and artillery shelling and to kill its population by hunger. While the city was fighting and dying, its factories, schools, theaters and museums still worked, and scientists, poets, composers and artists kept creating.
One of the impartial witnesses and chroniclers of the first year of the Siege was the artist Aleksandr Eduardovich Black (1907–1970). His whole life was connected with the city on the Neva River: he graduated from the Leningrad Higher Artistical and Technical Institute (VHUTEIN), where he was a student of such well-known masters as V. M. Konashevich and D. I. Mitrokhin. Later he worked as an artist at the Lenfilm Studio, where he participated in the creation of such legendary motion pictures as The Man with a Gun (diected by S. I. Yutkevich, 1938); Valery Chkalov (directed by M. K. Kalatozov, 1941); Facing the Judgment of History (directed by F. M. Ermler, 1965), did stage design for the performances of the Leningrad Comedy Theatre, the Opera Studio of the Leningrad Conservatory, the Lensovet Academic Theatre, the Leningrad Puppet Theatre. The war found the artist in his native city. “The short night of June 22. On this night, according to an old tradition, we always took a walk around the city… and at the eve of war I did a drawing titled “White Night”, which became the first of the series. Next day, whenwe heard the word “war”, I decided to draw everything I see…,” the artist remembered. Soon he was conscripted and went to work on camouflaging military and industrial facilities.
The collection of the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia holds 121 carton (24 ×17 см) depicting in ink, watercolor and white paint the events of the first ten months of war; these were created by A. Black amid cold, hunger, unending bombardment and hellfire. An explosion destroyed the artist’s apartment, and it was only by miracle that two days afterwards he found the briefcase with these drawings among the ruins. Work saved his life. “This became my obsession. Dying from dystrophy, I kept fighting on out of desire to continue my observations and drawings,” he explained.
