Hunger

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The celebrated biologist Nikolai Vavilov collected hundreds of thousands of seed and plant specimens from around the world, housing them at the Research Institute of Plant Industry in Leningrad. Vavilov became a victim of the antigenetics campaign waged by Trofim Lysenko, who gradually gained control of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. Vavilov died in prison in 1942 or 1943 of some combination of maltreatment and starvation. Many of his associates and staff were imprisoned, exiled, sent to work on collective farms, or dismissed. During the siege of Leningrad, those who remained protected Vavilov’s collections from rats, from human intruders, and from themselves. What follows is a fictional account of such a time and place. The characters are inventions and are in no way based on the courageous people who worked at what today is called the Vavilov Institute.

It is not so uncommon for those near the end of their lives to run their mind’s hand over the contours of those lives. Perhaps that is all that I do here as I reach across the populated spaces of time, geography, and language, reach from a comfortable New York apartment to a city once and again called Saint Petersburg.

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