as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. . . . And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.
— Paul Valéry
You may have noticed the bush that it pushes to air, Comical-delicate, sometimes with second-rate flowers Awkward and milky and beautiful only to hunger.
— Richard Wilbur, from “Potato”
Hunger
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.
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