Why, Let the Stricken Deer Go Weep

By Elena Shvarts
Translated by Sasha Dugdale

Queen:     If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet:     Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not seems.

Hamlet, Act One, Scene Two

I

In February 1942 the Leningrad Theatre Institute, or at least, what was left of it, was evacuated from besieged Leningrad to Pyatigorsk, together with the Philharmonic and Radlov’s Theatre Company. They had barely settled or begun recovering a little from their starvation, when the Germans began a sudden and unexpected offensive in the Caucasus and reached Pyatigorsk with unimaginable speed. The soldiers and the town’s administration all fled south to Tbilisi. Almost everyone in the Theatre Institute set off in their wake, the students walking, some hitching lifts on the last military lorries going in that direction. Initially my Mother and her friend had the luck to be offered a ride, but then the soldiers began harassing them, and finally, angered by their aloofness, they threw them back out onto the road. Read more