City Of Thieves By David Benioff: The Characters Of Lev And Kolya

The City of Thieves was a war based novel written by David Benioff. It is a coming of age story set during World War 2 in the blockade of Leningrad where no one has food and no animals walk the streets or fly above and the temperature are freezing cold. It follows the adventures of two youth named Lev who is a Russian Jew who is skinny and all bone and not very good looking while we have Kolya a young handsome solider who is arrested for deserting his unit.

When thrown in prison they meet and are presented to Colonel Grechko, who send them to do a difficult task. Both of them are desperately searching for a dozen eggs for a Soviet NKVD officer whose daughter is about to get married. This task makes these young men create bonds and takes them to were they don’t wanna be, into enemy territory. Lev is a 17-year-old Jewish boy who grew up in Leningrad, Soviet Union, who is the protagonist in the City of Thieves. He was raised by a famous poet, Abraham Beniov, who never returned when he was arrested by the Soviet government. Lev has always been a great chess player his whole life and did competition and would come in first place. Lev is a weak character who is going through puberty, has ache, and is always telling himself that he would never get a girl because he doesn’t find himself attracted. Lev is always fantasizing about how he is an orphan and becoming a hero later on. It shows that he is very naïveté. He was arrested for looting a dead German who fell from the sky and also while he was saving a girl he liked because of the way she looked at him and he didn’t want to be hunted for the rest of his life because of that.

Throughout levs journey he carries a stolen German knife that he took for when he was looting at the body before he got arrested. When he first used it it was stab Abendroth and that was his transition from a boy to a man. I say this because he had to conquer his fear, death. Lev becomes a man, in what he been through he has gained wisdom about the world which he lives in and in himself, but all of this involves the loss of innocence.