Dmitry Sergeevich Likhachev is a world-famous scientist: philologist, cultural critic, art critic, author of about 500 scientific and 600 journalistic works; Chairman of the Board of the Russian (Soviet until 1991) Cultural Foundation.
During the Great Patriotic War, he was in Leningrad besieged by the Nazis, where he saw all the horrors of the blockade. In his memoirs he writes about this; details of the life of the "blockade survivors", efforts to defend the city are shown against the backdrop of general thoughts about the moral state of people in these difficult conditions, about the war, about the political and social system of the USSR and Germany, about the causes of the world conflict.