Thirteen Coats: A Meditation

Evgenii Belodubrovskii’s Thirteen Coats is a meditation on Leningrad–St. Petersburg from his birth in 1941 on the eve of the German invasion, his survival of the three-year blockade, and his post-war Leningrad literary life. Russia’s twentieth century traumas––two world wars and its long civil war––endured until Stalin’s death (1953). If there is a big picture, perhaps it is contained within the pages of The Black Book of Communism whereby French humanists struggled to enumerate the tens of millions murdered in the name of the twentieth century religion of Communism. Yet, numbers empty tragedy of meaning. Stalin, the great cynic, said that one death was a tragedy; ten thousand a statistic. Evgenii Belodubrovskii is among those Russian patriots who struggles to tell the history of Russia's vast twentieth-century tragedy, one story at a time.