The Madonnas of Leningrad [Paperback]

The Madonnas of Leningrad (P.S.)

Having recently visited St Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) and visited the stunning Hermitage Museum, I was intrigued to read this. In wartime all the paintings and many of the artefacts in the museum were packed up and stored in places of safety. The story is told from the viewpoint of Marina, a tour guide at the Hermitage, who helped to save the paintings. Some of the practicalities are fascinating: the paintings were stripped from their frames, and cross referenced then stored in size order. The empty frames were left on the walls to make it easier to return them to their rightful places later.

As visitors continued to visit the Hermitage during the war, there were occasional guided tours around the empty frames, with such excellent descriptions of the missing pictures that the visitors felt they could see the pictures for themselves

Fascinating, moving, a book I shall be happy to re-read.

Read this and weep for the wars that have been and the wars that will be. But although set in St Petersburg, then Leningrad, in WW2, this is not a treatise on war, but rather a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the power of love in both war and more peaceful times. A lovely book, well written and meticulously researched, it made me both happy and sad, and it inspired me to read more about the siege of Leningrad of which I knew very little before reading this novel. After reading this I've also put visiting the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg on my bucket list. A fantastic debut novel and highly recommended for the discerning reader.

This novel pressed several "hot buttons" for me. There is first and foremost, the Hermitage, almost certainly the most impressive art museum in the world. The backdrop though is the horrific siege of Leningrad (the city's name has now reverted to his pre-revolutionary name, St. Petersburg), in which approximately one million of its citizens died during the 900 days in which it was encircled by German troops during the Second World War. Debra Dean weaves the essential Nabokov theme of memory and forgetting throughout the novel, executing it well at several different levels. It is as though the author's model were that unique Russian art form - the Matryoshka dolls; one memory, or the forgetting of same is nested inside the other. In this age of all too transient love, Dean also offers up a much more enduring version, between Marina and Dmitri, which runs to the limit of those allocated days on earth.

Dean utilizes a now familiar literary technique of alternating chapters to tell the story, between the siege itself, and life today, in Washington State, as Marina succumbs to the devastating effects of Alzheimer's Disease, with the corresponding impact on her husband, Dmitri, as well as her now adult children. In addition, Dean utilizes "flashbacks" of only a paragraph, or even a sentence, within the present structure, and it reminded me of the same technique that Sartre used in his trilogy, "Roads to Freedom." This altering sense of time also worked well for me. And then there are the many ironic interplays of the theme of memory itself - certainly the fact that Marina is losing hers in the present, set against the truly heroic efforts that she and other museum workers made during the siege to remember the paintings themselves, after they had been evacuated from the city, and only the empty frames remained on the walls. There is one very powerful scene in which she is giving a tour of the museum to school children; she points at the empty frames, and describes the painting to the attentive children. It all rings authentic, and one cannot imagine such scenes today, with the dominance of Twitter and American Idol.

But the novel is marred by the improbably. In fact, the series of coincidences, despite the many real tales of the unlikely that occur in wartime, verges, but does not cross the line, to the impossible. Again, I thought of those Matryoshka dolls. Sure, there can be that one extremely unlikely occurrence, but you open it, and there is another inside. And then another. Listing them all would be a "spoiler," so let's just state one: the chances of having a healthy baby when the rations of food are so sparse that half of the million who died did so of starvation are minuscule. And the novel really did not indicate any particular special rations that Marina received. In addition, the pregnancy itself pushed the outer envelop of biological time. All that, and the other improbable events are regrettable, since so much else, from the themes themselves, to the prose, works so very well.

Finally, I share the author's enthusiasm for St. Petersburg in general and the Hermitage in particular. I would have appreciated some insight into how this phenomenal collection of art came to be housed in former Czarist property, and suspect that the "spoils of war" is a most likely explanation. I suspect Dean has a few more stories on the backburner; perhaps the accumulative process for the collection is one, or equally, there could be radically different stories. Shed the improbables, and the next will deserve the full 5-stars. While we await, the time would be will-spent in the Hermitage itself... and some, more than others, need to hurry, or we might forget what city we are in.

(Note: Review first published at Amazon, USA, on April 12, 2010)