Brief Summary of School Reading List Books - Ievgen Sykalo 2026

City of Thieves by David Benioff

Part I. The Beginning: Eggs and Bombs

My grandfather, Lev Beniov, never told war stories. Not because there weren’t any — oh no — but because there were too many, and most of them were too heavy for daylight. But there was one tale he eventually shared, late in his life, that sounded more like a fever dream than a true chronicle of survival. It began, as absurdly as a good Russian tragedy should, with an egg.

Leningrad, winter of 1942. The city was a frozen tomb, buried under siege and starvation. Snow was everywhere — clotted, dirty, bloodstained. Hunger gnawed at the bones of every citizen, rats and glue became meals, and the Luftwaffe’s bombs made the sky as cruel as the streets. And in the middle of this misery stood Lev, seventeen, skinny as a matchstick, abandoned by his father (a “disappeared” poet), and left to scrape by on petty theft and curfew evasion.

One night, while looting the corpse of a dead German paratrooper — not for honor, not for victory, just for boots and maybe a crust of bread — Lev got caught. The NKVD didn’t smile on thieves, especially Jewish ones. So they tossed him in a jail cell under the Ice Palace, where he met the second half of this story’s wild equation: Kolya.

Kolya Vlasov — cocky, blonde, self-declared ladies' man, deserter of the Red Army (or so he claimed), and a lover of Russian literature. Where Lev was quiet, cautious, and rule-bound, Kolya was a storm — brash, theatrical, full of dubious stories and even more dubious courage. And somehow, through a twist of the cruelest bureaucratic humor, both boys were given a task rather than a bullet: find a dozen eggs for the wedding cake of a Soviet colonel’s daughter. In four days.

Eggs. In a city where people were boiling wallpaper for soup.

Either they succeeded, or they’d be executed. That’s war logic for you.

Part II. The Journey Through Hell

So, two boys — one a virgin chess-loving introvert, the other a flamboyant, possibly mad soldier with a taste for poetry and his own legend — stepped into the white wilderness of a ruined Russia to find eggs, and, unknowingly, themselves.

They tried the black market first, and that meant dealing with the kind of people who thrived in wartime scarcity — men who bartered in rubles, bullets, and human flesh. A butcher offered Lev a grim deal for one egg: an hour alone with his sister. Lev’s fist answered for both of them. No eggs, but a little pride salvaged.

As they trudged out of Leningrad, following whispers and rumors, they left the broken bricks of civilization and wandered into the wolves’ forest — both the four-legged and the two-legged kind. What followed was not so much a journey as an odyssey — a trail lined with monsters, madmen, and moments of strange, unexpected beauty.

They found a farmhouse filled with cannibals, dining on the meat of children. Escaping that horror cost them their innocence, and maybe something more. They walked through the frozen countryside, sleeping in barns, hunted by partisans and Germans alike. Lev watched Kolya charm, lie, dance, and defy death as if he were auditioning for the role of his own hero.

But underneath Kolya’s swagger, there was a kind of broken truth. He talked too much because silence left room for sorrow. He flirted because he didn’t dare to hope. He fought because he had seen what happened to those who didn’t. And Lev, quiet Lev, began to grow teeth of his own. He killed. He survived. He became something else. Not a man yet, but no longer a boy.

Part III. The Girl and the German

And then, in the shadow of death, something warm. They stumbled upon a partisan camp, run by a ruthless but poetic woman named Vika — sharp-eyed, sure-shot, a sniper with a fire in her belly and a haunted past. She was the first woman Lev had spoken to in months, maybe years, and certainly the first one who looked at him like he was more than a shivering ghost.

Vika was everything Kolya pretended to be — fearless, deadly, magnetic. And she changed Lev. Not by loving him, but by making him want to be the kind of man worthy of her respect. They joined forces with her, not just because of the eggs (which still hadn’t been found), but because war forges strange families.

The road led to a German outpost in a small town called Mga. There, nestled among the corpses and the frostbite, was the man who might hold the keys to their salvation — a Nazi officer named Abendroth, a sadist with a taste for chess and theater. He played life-and-death games for amusement. Lev, the boy raised by a poet, the boy who once solved problems with silence and logic, was invited to play.

The stakes: his life, Kolya’s life, the eggs. The cost of losing: execution. The cost of winning: blood, yes, but also the shivering knowledge that even a game could be sacred in a world so desecrated.

Lev won.

They got the eggs.

But nothing in war comes free.

Part IV. The Price of Survival

Victory was not sweet. On the road back to Leningrad, as dawn crept across the snow and the smell of rot rose with the mist, Kolya was shot. Not in a blaze of glory. Not during a hero’s charge. Just one bullet, from a retreating German, because luck runs out for everyone eventually.

Lev held him. Watched the life leak out of the one friend who had dragged him through hell laughing. Kolya died not for the cause, not for the cake, but because in war, even clowns and poets get silenced.

Lev returned alone.

With the eggs.

He delivered them to the colonel. The cake was made. The wedding happened. Somewhere, someone danced.

And Lev, changed forever, returned to the crumbling city with Vika’s address in his pocket and Kolya’s memory in his bones.

Epilogue: Memory and Meaning

Years later, long after the guns stopped, Lev told this story to his grandson. Not all of it — some wounds were stitched with silence — but enough. Enough for the boy to understand that war isn’t just about armies or flags. It’s about people. About the absurdity of life continuing even as death circles like a starving hawk. About the friendships forged in the pit, about the cruelty of randomness, the quiet heroism of survival.

In the end, “City of Thieves” is less a war novel than a love letter to resilience. It’s a bitter comedy and a tender tragedy. A tale about two boys looking for eggs in a city with no food, and finding, along the way, courage, laughter, first love, and loss.

Lev Beniov never became a soldier. Never became a legend. But he lived. And in a war that tried to eat everything human, that alone was a kind of victory.