Dear Mr. Kelly-Bootle,
If you are so fond of figures, ADA, according to my
very rapid and approximate calculations, contains about 203000
words.
Accorging to present-day historians, at least
one million people died during Blokada (as the Siege of
Leningrad, the time span of 872 days, from September 9,
1941, to January 27, 1944, is known), my paternal great-grandfather (who
died of hunger in the Siege's first, and worst, winter) being one of
them.
BLOKADA = BLOK + ADA. Among Blok's short poems
there is the weird and ultra-pessimistic Golos iz khora
("A Voice from the Choir", 1910-14) that has these prophetic lines:
O esli b znali vy, druz'ya,
Kholod i mrak gryadushchikh
dney!
Oh, if you only knew, my friends,
How cold and dark the days to
come will be!
About Blok (who is the most "Petersburgian" of all
Russian poets) in ADA, see my article in Zembla "The Dreams of Aleksandr Blok as
Enacted in Nabokov's ADA by Van Veen and Vice Versa".
Alexey Sklyarenko