Abstract

This paper focuses on an unusual kind of writing that revisits the traumatic experience of the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944). The main heroine of this article has never been studied in this context: Tamara Gabbe (1903–1960) was a children’s playwright, but in her narrow circle of friends (which included Anna Akhmatova) she was acknowledged as a moral authority. Gabbe’s private letters written after her evacuation from Leningrad repeatedly highlight the impossibility of speaking about everyday life, and her children’s plays enact a happy resolution to the real-life troubles experienced by Gabbe and many others during and after the Great Terror, the Siege, and the Second World War—troubles that could not be described in the Soviet press overtly. This paper analyzes ethical and psychological ideas implicit in Gabbe’s works of 1942–1946; I propose that these ideas show some surprising parallels to the “logotherapy” developed by the Austrian-American psychologist and philosopher Viktor Frankl, and to the methods of existential psychotherapy as a whole.