The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel
by Debra Dean
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Book Reviews of The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel
Book Review: Love, survival, and the power of imagination
Summary: 5 Stars
I work with older adults who are in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, one of the most dreaded possible outcomes of aging. The people I work with certainly have problems with their memories, especially short term memory, but they continue to enjoy conversations, reminiscing, music and art. I would like to think their journey is like Marina's, the heroine of Madonnas of Leningrad.
Marina and Dima live in Seattle and on the weekend which opens the book, they are headed to one of the near-by islands for the wedding of their granddaughter. They didn't always live in Seattle. They met in Marina's new school when they were both eleven, after her parents had been arrested by the secret police in Russia. He protected her and taught her to be quietly defiant. They remained friends until the evening before he headed off to fight the Germans. He asked her to marry him when he returned and they became lovers that night, then he was gone.
Debra Dean's story weaves back and forth between the present and the Siege of Leningrad by the Germans. Her vignettes of the rooms in the Hermitage in Leningrad are startlingly vivid, especially when one realizes that the young Marina is reenacting her tours from memory as she faces the empty frames of the great art which has been sent to safe keeping in the event that the Germans reach Leningrad.
Is the Marina who sits on the ferry on her way to the wedding remembering what we read? Is she remembering the vivid details even as she gazes absently at the water? Even as she wonders who the woman next to her is until the woman calls her Mama. Of course, she remembers, Helen, Elana.
Marina is conscious that "[o]ne of the effects of this deterioration that as the scope of her attention narrows, it also focuses like a magnifying glass on smaller pleasures that have escaped her notice for years. She tried once to point out to Dimitri the bottomless beauty in her glass of tea. It looked like amber with buried embers of light and when held just so, there was a rainbow in the glass that took her breath away."
The day of the wedding, Marina sits on the patio of the hotel and finds herself seeing figures from the past. "Marina reaches for [her daughter-in-law] Naureen's hand and grips it tightly in her own. More distressing than the loss of words is the way that time contracts and fractures and drops her in unexpected places."
In the Hermitage, many of the paintings had religious themes and many of them included the Madonna. When Marina accompanied one of the older women, Anya, through the dark and empty halls, Anya would often stop and pray in front of frames which had held different Madonnas. And although Marina felt religion was for the masses, she too began furtively offering prayers. Life did seem to become more bearable. She survived and many others did not.
Dimitri, whose love for Marina never fades, finds that "she is leaving him, not all at once, which would be painful enough, but in a wrenching succession of separations. One moment she is here, and then she is gone again, and each journey takes her a little farther from his reach. He cannot follow her, and he wonders where she goes when she leaves." Perhaps she returns to the Hermitage and the multitudes of Madonnas offering comfort and compassion.
Reviewed by Judith Helburn
For Story Circle Book Reviews
www.storycirclebookreviews.org
reviewing books by, for, and about women
Book Review: The power of the mind
Summary: 5 Stars
This inspiring story of remarkable endurance proved to be one of the most pleasurable reads for me this year. "The Madonnas of Leningrad" is a poignant tale of one woman's harrowing experiences during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad in WWII, alternating with events in her present-day life.
In 1941, Marina Krasnova is a young museum guide at the magnificent Hermitage Museum. Anticipating German attack, the museum staff work night and day to pack the priceless masterpieces to be transported to safety. When the bombings begin, the staff and their families seek refuge in the cellars of the museum, and not long after, starvation, disease, and desperation reduce their numbers. To escape the suffering of their daily lives, Marina and her friend, Anya, build in their minds a "memory palace," burning into their memories each room and the artworks that formerly graced them. As she walks from room to room, Marina sees past the empty gilt frames and sees again the grandeur of each painting-- the Rembrandts, the Da Vincis, the Carravagios, and hundreds more. To Marina, they were all part of her life and what sustained her in the darkest days. Amidst the bombings, she continues to hope that she will once again see her beloved Dmitri, the soldier she has fallen in love with and the father of the child she is carrying.
In the present day, Marina, now Mrs. Buriakov and in her 80s, is ravaged by Alzheimer's. Her memories of her children and recent events are in tatters, but memories of her Leningrad days are as vivid as always. As her faculties continue to degenerate, her mind takes her back to the days of the siege--back to her "memory palace" and the extraordinary paintings and events that defined her life. Her husband and children grow increasingly concerned, and when she disappears one day, it becomes the catalyst for her daughter, Elena's, search for her own identity and meaning in life, as well as a deeper understanding of her mother.
As expected, there is a wealth of art woven within, but one doesn't need to be an aficionado to appreciate the story. The numerous descriptions of the artworks facilitate our understanding of Marina and we identify with her desperate need to hang on to something, no matter that it's intangible, to survive. These masterpieces symbolize hope--that their return to the Hermitage someday is also the return of peace to Marina's Leningrad. The story does not merely contrast the younger Marina (when her mind saves her) and the older Marina (when her mind fails her). More importantly, it illustrates the power of the mind and spirit to provide courage and hope in even the bleakest of circumstances. It's a moving story written concisely yet descriptively, though not overdone, and particularly evocative in the chapters that deal with wartime hardships. Ms. Dean's debut was definitely worth this reader's effort and the few hours spent with her "madonnas" have been a delight.
Book Review: A heartbreaking story of two different battles
Summary: 4 Stars
War is undoubtedly hell but it is a particularly poignant cruelty when it is waged on civilians - men, women and children alike - as it was during the 900 days of the Nazi's bitter siege of Leningrad in 1941. Marina Anatolyevna Krasnova remembers her time as a young girl in a bitterly cold war torn city in astonishingly vivid detail. A former tour guide of the now renowned Hermitage Museum, she has mentally preserved the details of every room and every painting in the museum in her mind's eye with crystal clarity - a "memory palace" as it were. She remembers her breathless efforts along with the rest of the museum staff to remove the museum's priceless artifacts into safekeeping in the museum cellars to protect them from the relentless pounding of the Luftwaffe bombers. The bittersweet lovemaking with her best friend, Dmitri, is an anchor she desperately clutches to with ever diminishing hopes for a future as his wife when he is shipped out of the city to wage battle against the advancing German army.
Beyond all reasonable expectations in the constricted, difficult world that was wartime Russia, both Marina and Dmitri survive into their old age and THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD also tells the story of now elderly Marina's present day battle with an entirely different enemy - the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. Slowly but inevitably, Marina loses the recent memories of her family, her children, the coming wedding of her grand-daughter and any meaningful sense of where she is and what she is doing.
Debut author Debra Dean has told two magnificent stories that evoke compassion without being maudlin, that convey the meaning and importance of beauty, loyalty, patience, caring and love in our lives and, of course, that demonstrate the futility, horror and destruction that war brings to the world. Despite the very obvious literary and artistic content of the novel, her writing is simple and never pretentious or overbearing:
"Aside from the sirens, it is quiet tonight, no planes yet. But the moon is rising, so they will come. She hates the moon. It is dead, and its flat, dead light draws in Fascist planes like moths. Though she knows her perspective has been poisoned by the war, it is hard to see why poets make such a romantic fuss over an ugly, pockmarked disk."
What adjectives does one apply to THE MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD? Warm, compelling, compassionate, literary, moving, poetic, evocative and disturbing are just a few of the words that come to mind. It might be a short novel but it is powerful and you won't soon forget it.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
Book Review: From S. Krishna's Books
Summary: 4 Stars
I don't really know what inspired me to pick up The Madonnas of Leningrad. I was at the library, in a hurry because my husband was waiting outside in the car. I made a quick run over to the "New Releases/Popular Titles" shelf. Because it was a Saturday, it was pretty picked over, but this small novel caught my eye, and I decided to take it home on an impulse. I didn't know what it was about or even what genre it was, but I loved the title.
And now? Now I am so glad I took a chance on The Madonnas of Leningrad. (And how have I not heard about this book before? I think I'm the only one.) It's a short book, to be sure, but inside is a wonderful and moving story about Marina's struggles in the past (the siege of Leningrad) and in the present (Alzheimer's).
Prior to the novel, I knew enough about the siege of Leningrad to know that it was horrific, but the book puts a new face on the struggle. Through Marina, the reader is exposed to the appalling conditions in which people were forced to live while the Nazis were trying to take the city during World War II. It's not until you read a novel like this, whether fiction or not, that you really begin to comprehend what people must have had to deal with. However, I also liked that the struggle wasn't the focus of the novel. While the siege of Leningrad deserves novels, history books, etc. written solely about it, those aren't books I'll be reading because they would probably be depressing. The Madonnas of Leningrad isn't like it; it's sad, to be sure, but it manages to keep the reader's spirit high. It's not a burden or a weight.
I think the best part of the novel is the way it jumps in time. Dean seamlessly weaves the past and the present together; there is one point in the novel where Marina is sitting at her granddaughter's wedding, and before the reader realizes it, Marina has been taken back to Leningrad and watching a different wedding at a different time. Dean is an exceptionally talented writer and it shines through in The Madonnas of Leningrad.
This is a great novel that I think anyone would enjoy. It's easy to read and beautifully written; definitely pick this one up if you are debating on it like I was!
Book Review: The Poetry of Loss
Summary: 5 Stars
The parallel horrors of life during wartime and the ravages of Alzheimer's disease echo through the pages of this haunting, evocative novel as it follows the travails of a young docent named Marina at the Hermitage Museum during the Seige of Leningrad in 1941 and her eventual slide into senility some 60 years later.
As the Germans close in on Leningrad and conditions for the city's residents go from optimistic to horrific, Marina's job shifts from guiding tours through the former Winter Palace, to packing and crating the priceless collections, to night fire spotter, stationed on the roof of the museum complex with a pair of binoculars and a walkie-talkie.
Eventually she learns to cope with the suffering and devastation around her by recreating the museum collections in her memory, a luminous foreshadowing of the scrambled sense of time and place she will eventually succumb to.
Particularly beautiful are the frequent references to the treasures of the museum collection. Marina's imaginary recreations of the masterpieces, especially the many Madonna paintings, become transformed during the long, dark winter months of deprivation until they take on a magical quality.
"Before they leave, Anya presses her lips to the Christ Child's toes and mumbles something to him. At the door, Marina glances back over her shoulder and sees the Christ Child still watching them guardedly. And then he spits the nipple from his mouth and burps. We are both insane, she thinks."
With language finely tuned to the poetry of loss, this first novel by Debra Dean tenderly explores all manner of heroics required for everyday survival, and not just in wartime.
Seamlessly blending the extreme conditions of the Russian citizenry forced into makeshift bomb shelters in the cellars of the museum complex during the most brutal of winters with the poignancy of Marina's decline into dementia so many years later, Dean has created a compelling atmosphere of love and beauty among the ruined lives she has so carefully drawn.