The Madonnas of Leningrad

In the afterword of her novel about a woman with alzheimers recalling the siege of Leningrad during WWII, Debra Dean writes that she was "supremely unqualified" to write it. She claims she had only recently heard about the horrible, three year siege in which millions died of starvation, she spoke no Russian, and her knowledge about art history was only general. This is how I felt upon reading the novel. Not that the author was unqualified, but that I knew little or nothing about alzheimers, little or nothing about the siege, little or nothing about the artwork found in the Hermitage in St Petersburg (Leningrad, at the time), but that Debra Dean seemed like a pretty good guide.

We meet Marina just as her mind begins to close doors on the present and drift into the days when she was a guide at the grand museum in Leningrad. Dean describes alzheimers as the world made into book form. "When the page turns, whatever was on the previous page disappears from view." Intriguing, and not yet terribly depressing, because you can sense the book is still there. But then Dean pulls back and Marina's husband's reaction is revealed and you realize the stress of living with someone you love who is slowly abandoning you for the dark days of living in the basement of a war-destroyed city.

In 1941, Marina's job as guide at the Hermitage was to help pack and transport the museum's collection to safety during those first giddy weeks pre-invasion. The exhaustion, the dismay, and the fear are counter-balanced by the strange exhiliration of something big about to happen.
But as winter sets in and they watch helplessly as the entire food storage system of Leningrad is destroyed by German bombs, any hope for a short war disappears into hunger and something close to despair. Dean doesn't perhaps do justice to the despair, but I suppose it's because her main character stays strangely upbeat throughout. She gives hints that Marina has always lived a bit in her head which made me wonder if this is something that can be said about anyone with alzheimers. If Marina was always a bit dazed and dreamy and out-of-it, does that preface her alzheimers as an old woman? Or is that merely a novelist's attempt to be tidy?

There are some bits of humor in this novel, though not many, given the subject. Marina is at the wedding of her granddaughter and slips back into the past, remembering the "food" they ate, including "blockade jelly" which was melted-down joiner's paste. Her daughter-in-law can't quite get her head around her eating glue and thinks Marina's alzheimers is confusing her. "This was during the war?" she asks. "Yes, dear." Marina smiles. "We didn't eat it before. It wasn't THAT good."

Marina also describes living with her uncle in the basement of the Hermitage, along with many others, and having to endure his snoring. She was kept awake another several hours, her fatigued brain snared in the drama of his next breath...She can't help but think of it as an extension of his pedantic character, that even in his sleep he must be listened to. Marina doesn't have to listen for long to her uncle, though, as her family and friends begin to slip away one way or another.

The humor, like food during the siege, is what you make of it. To keep herself occupied during the first cold winter of starvation, the task which Marina gives herself is to recreate the Hermitage in her mind so that she can still give tours of its bare walls. This laborious memorization at a time of severe deprivation perhaps works a bit as the crosswords and sudoku are supposed to. These too are supposed to stave off our own alzheimers. Is all that effort what kept Marina alive during the war when so many others died? Is that what keeps her at home with her devoted husband so long after it becomes clear she cannot stay in the present? It's a lovely thought, to have art into which one can retreat in times of either mental or physical duress. Debra Dean may have felt unqualified, but she paints a tender and interesting picture of a survivor.