The Siege of Leningrad lasted from September 1941 to January 1944, during which German and Finnish forces blockaded the city, causing the deaths of approximately one million civilians from bombardment, starvation, and disease. The Peter and Paul Fortress, the Hermitage, and the great eighteenth-century palaces of the city — themselves a kind of monumental fortification of European culture — were damaged but not destroyed. Writers, poets, and musicians remained in the city throughout, producing some of the most remarkable wartime literature in any language.

Anna Akhmatova's Leningrad sequence and Olga Berggolts's radio poetry, composed and broadcast during the siege, used the embattled fortress-city as a site of spiritual resistance. Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony — the 'Leningrad' — premiered in the besieged city and was celebrated in verse across the world. The siege produced a specifically Russian tradition of poetry-in-extremis that drew on the fortified city as a symbol of cultural endurance against barbarism.