Igor Vishnevetsky is the author of six collections of poems, a new major biography of Sergei Prokofiev, books and articles on the history of music and literature. Vishnevetsky’s experimental story “Leningrad” caused heated discussions and was awarded prizes from the magazine “New World” and “NOS”. The heroes of “Leningrad” are fragments of the old Russian intelligentsia at the moment of the final transformation of their world into the kingdom of the “new Soviet man”; the action period is the first eight months of the Finno-German blockade of Leningrad during the Great Patriotic War. Exceptional circumstances reveal the mechanism of the catastrophe, which is seen by some as an atoning sacrifice, by others as a sentence.