Stars of the day

"Stars of the Day" is a novelistic text in the form of a biography filled with deep poetic and human emotion, by the prominent Soviet poetess and writer Olga Bergoltse. In it, she recounts her entire life honestly from the first moments of her awareness as a child. This novel can be considered as the main book, as Bergoltse states in one of the most important chapters of her book titled: "The Main Book," which is the dream of every writer and one they strive to achieve throughout their life. Olga Bergoltse's works, a recipient of the State Prize, are widely known not only in the Soviet Union but also worldwide. Her book "Stars of the Day" is a poetic philosophical memoir that combines, through a highly skillful narrative style, memories of the tragic time of the Siege of Leningrad by the German army during World War II, with the narration of many expressive and unique stories, and reflections on various aspects of life. This allows the reader to understand and know the "biography of an era" in its entirety and to feel the fate of a generation that lived through all the tragedies of war, resisted, and endured despite hunger, cold, and disappointments. The author, who lived through her adolescence during the socialist revolution, was filled with faith in it, in its ideas, its leader, and her inspiration Lenin. However, while glorifying the revolution and its ideas, she does not focus on propaganda, but rather reflects the contradictions and deviations between the lines, and discusses the difference between propaganda and sincerity in literary texts. Olga Bergoltse tells her stories with great intelligence, even cunning, as her texts have an apparent surface meaning and another hidden between the lines. For example, when emphasizing the need for writers to dedicate their literary efforts to propaganda for the revolution, she names two of the best who dedicated their literature to this purpose: the poet Mayakovsky and the novelist Fadiev, without mentioning the well-known truth about them: both faced repression by the bureaucratic authority, and both ended their lives tragically—Mayakovsky committed suicide, and Fadiev as well.