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The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel Kindle Edition
The ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye.
Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .
“Extraordinary. . . . Dean’s exquisite prose shimmers . . . illuminating us to the notion that art itself is perhaps our most necessary nourishment.” —Chang-Rae Lee, New York Times bestselling author of Aloft and Native Speaker
“A poignant tale.” —Booklist, starred review
“Dean writes with passion and compelling drama.” —People
“Rare is the novel that creates that blissful forgot-you-were-reading experience . . . but that is precisely what Debra Dean has achieved with her image-rich book.” —Seattle Post-Intelligencer
“Poetic.” —San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“[A] heartfelt debut.” —New York Times Book Review
“Remarkable”— NPR, Nancy Pearl Book Review
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherHarperCollins e-books
- Publication dateOctober 13, 2009
- File size1553 KB
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Review
From the Back Cover
Bit by bit, the ravages of age are eroding Marina's grip on the everyday. An elderly Russian woman now living in America, she cannot hold on to fresh memories—the details of her grown children's lives, the approaching wedding of her grandchild—yet her distant past is miraculously preserved in her mind's eye.
Vivid images of her youth in war-torn Leningrad arise unbidden, carrying her back to the terrible fall of 1941, when she was a tour guide at the Hermitage Museum and the German army's approach signaled the beginning of what would be a long, torturous siege on the city. As the people braved starvation, bitter cold, and a relentless German onslaught, Marina joined other staff members in removing the museum's priceless masterpieces for safekeeping, leaving the frames hanging empty on the walls to symbolize the artworks' eventual return. As the Luftwaffe's bombs pounded the proud, stricken city, Marina built a personal Hermitage in her mind—a refuge that would stay buried deep within her, until she needed it once more. . . .
About the Author
Debra Dean worked as an actor in New York theater for nearly a decade before opting for the life of a writer and teacher. She and her husband now live in Miami, where she teaches at the University at Miami. She is at work on her second novel.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Madonnas of Leningrad
A NovelBy Debra DeanPerennial
Copyright © 2007 Debra DeanAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-082531-7
Chapter One
This way, please. We are standing in the Spanish Skylight Hall. The three skylight halls were designed to display the largest canvases in the collection. Look up. The huge vault and frieze are like a wedding cake, with molded and gilt arabesques. Light streams down on parquet floors the color of wheat, and the walls are painted a rich red in imitation of the original cloth covering. Each of the skylight halls is decorated with exquisite vases, standing candelabra, and tabletops made of semiprecious stones in the Russian mosaic technique.Over here, to our left, is a table with a heavy white cloth. Three Spanish peasants are eating lunch. The fellow in the center is raising the decanter of wine and offering us a drink. Clearly, they are enjoying themselves. Their luncheon is light-a dish of sardines, a pomegranate, and a loaf of bread-but it is more than enough. A whole loaf of bread, and white bread at that, not the blockade bread that is mostly wood shavings.
The other residents of the museum are allotted only three small chunks of bread each day. Bread the size and color of pebbles. And sometimes frozen potatoes, potatoes dug from a garden at the edge of the city. Before the siege, Director Orbeli ordered great quantities of linseed oil to repaint the walls of the museum. We fry bits of potato in the linseed oil. Later, when the potatoes and oil are gone, we make a jelly out of the glue used to bind frames and eat that.
The man on the right, giving us a thumbs-up, is probably the artist. Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velzquez. This is from his early Seville period, a type of painting called bodegones, "scenes in taverns."
It is as though she has been transported into a two-dimensional world, a book perhaps, and she exists only on this page. When the page turns, whatever was on the previous page disappears from her view.
Marina finds herself standing in front of the kitchen sink, holding a saucepan of water. But she has no idea why. Is she rinsing the pan? Or has she just finished filling it up? It is a puzzle. Sometimes it requires all her wits to piece together the world with the fragments she is given: an open can of Folgers, a carton of eggs on the counter, the faint scent of toast. Breakfast. Has she eaten? She cannot recall. Well, does she feel hungry or full? Hungry, she decides. And here is the miracle of five white eggs nested in a foam carton. She can almost taste the satiny yellow of the yolks on her tongue. Go ahead, she tells herself, eat.
When her husband, Dmitri, comes into the kitchen carrying the dirty breakfast dishes, she is poaching more eggs.
"What are you doing?" he asks.
She notes the dishes in his hands, the smear of dried yolk in a bowl, the evidence that she has eaten already, perhaps no more than ten minutes ago.
"I'm still hungry." In fact, her hunger has vanished, but she says it nonetheless.
Dmitri sets down the dishes and takes the pan from her hands, sets it down on the counter also. His dry lips graze the back of her neck, and then he steers her out of the kitchen.
"The wedding," he reminds her. "We need to get dressed. Elena called from the hotel and she's on her way."
"Elena is here?"
"She arrived late last night, remember?"
Marina has no recollection of seeing her daughter, and she feels certain she couldn't forget this.
"Where is she?"
"She spent the night at the airport. Her flight was delayed."
"Has she come for the wedding?"
"Yes."
There is a wedding this weekend, but she can't recall the couple who is marrying. Dmitri says she has met them, and it's not that she doubts him, but ...
"Now, who is getting married?" she asks.
"Katie, Andrei's girl. To Cooper."
Katie is her granddaughter. But who is Cooper? You'd think she'd remember that name.
"We met him at Christmas," Dmitri says. "And again at Andrei and Naureen's a few weeks ago. He's very tall." He is waiting for some sign of recognition, but there is nothing. "You wore that blue dress with the flowers, and they had salmon for supper," he prompts.
Still nothing. She sees a ghost of despair in his eyes. Sometimes that look is her only hint that something is missing. She begins with the dress. Blue. A blue flowered dress. Bidden, it appears in her mind's eye. She bought it at Penney's.
"It has a pleated collar," she announces triumphantly.
"What's that?" His brow furrows.
"The dress. And branches of lilac flowers." She can call up the exact shade of the fabric. It is the same vivid robin's-egg as the dress worn by the Lady in Blue.
Thomas Gainsborough. Portrait of the Duchess of Beaufort. She packed that very painting during the evacuation. She remembers helping to remove it from its gilt frame and then from the stretcher that held it taut.
Whatever is eating her brain consumes only the fresher memories, the unripe moments. Her distant past is preserved, better than preserved. Moments that occurred in Leningrad sixty-some years ago reappear, vivid, plump, and perfumed.
In the Hermitage, they are packing up the picture gallery. It is past midnight but still light enough to see without electricity. It is the end of June 1941, and this far north, the sun barely skims beneath the horizon. Belye nochi, they are called, the white nights. She is numb with exhaustion and her eyes itch from the sawdust and cotton wadding. Her clothes are stale, and it has been days since she has slept. There is too much to be done. Every eighteen or twenty hours, she slips away to one of the army cots in the next room and falls briefly into a dreamless state. One can't really call it sleep. It is more like disappearing for a few moments at a time. Like a switch being turned off. After an hour or so, the switch mysteriously flips again, and like an automaton she rises from her cot and returns to work.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Madonnas of Leningradby Debra Dean Copyright © 2007 by Debra Dean . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- ASIN : B000FCKRKQ
- Publisher : HarperCollins e-books (October 13, 2009)
- Publication date : October 13, 2009
- Language : English
- File size : 1553 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 256 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #344,566 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #383 in Literary Sagas
- #760 in Read & Listen for $14.99 or Less
- #1,505 in Read & Listen for Less
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Debra Dean is the bestselling author of four critically acclaimed books that have been published in twenty-two languages. Her newest book, HIDDEN TAPESTRY: JAN YOORS, HIS TWO WIVES, AND THE WAR THAT MADE THEM ONE tells the unforgettable true story of Flemish American artist Jan Yoors — childhood vagabond, wartime resistance leader, and New York bohemian — and the two women who agreed to share him. At the peak of his fame in the 1970s, Yoors' photographs and tapestries inspired a dedicated following in his adopted Manhattan and brought him international acclaim. But though his intimate friends guessed the rough outline of his colorful life, HIDDEN TAPESTRY is first to detail Yoors’ astonishing secrets.
A native of Seattle, Debra lives in Miami and teaches at Florida International University. She loves to talk with book groups. You can find her at https://www.debradean.com and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/debradeanauthor.
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The book alternates between the two time frames, in chapter-less sections, in a very coherent way. The one taking place during the war deals with the city in preparation for attack, the beginning of the German onslaught on Leningrad, and the siege setting in through the winter of 1941-42. That winter especially had especially horrific consequences for city’s citizenry—people received paltry rations of bread, dealt with the extreme cold, and many thousands starved to death over that first winder. In Leningrad Marina stays with her aunt and uncle, and a friend she works with, in the renowned museum the Hermitage, where in peace time she worked as tour guide before the war came to the. Now the valuable pieces have been stored away elsewhere, and she takes shifts on the roof to report on fires caused by German air raids. In the later time frame many decades later (a “present” I could call it, though both parts are written in the present tense) Marina’s granddaughter is getting married, and the now elderly woman has increasing trouble remembering things, likely in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Her husband Dimitri, who was a soldier in the war, who loves her deeply, tries much to help her. But what she often recalls most clearly are things from more than fifty years back: the hunkering down in the shelter, the rationing of food, the suffering; but especially the paintings, the that were not there in the museum at that trying time taken elsewhere for safekeeping (she even remembers about paintings removed before she ever came to work at the museum, a situation the book would do best to explain so I won’t bother). The parts during the war are told almost exclusively though Marina, appropriately so; but while she’s also followed closely at times in the later frame, it’s Marina’s daughter, Helen, who’s the primary one whom we stick closest by. The two different situations at different times, from the viewpoint two different people, is a formula that works quite well. We may know things Helen does not about Marina’s past, but it’s interesting how she and others try to peace it together. In addition, the theme of dealing with aging parents is dealt with movingly without too much sentimentality.
A few years ago I read a powerful non-fiction book about the 900-day siege of the city called Leningrad: State of Siege by Michael Jones, and I recognized a lot of what I recalled in that book in this one. In at least one case that knowledge made the story much more emotionally impactful to me: when the bombs of German planes hit the food storage location, which Soviet authorities extremely unwisely put in one place; Marina witnesses the explosion, and I as well as she knew that that would mean so much unnecessary suffering for the people of the city, and it was such a somber feeling. But the fascinating detail of the paintings, very much were new to me, I might call my ultimate highlight. Dean in Madonnas keeps true to the vital overlying events, while putting in fictionalized characters and plotlines that give solid emotional impact. This book isn’t without a few flaws, and the things in the present-time are not quite as interesting as what goes on during the war. But on balance it’s definitely a successful, efficient debut novel, and for people interested in the subject the book it will fly by.
While the story of Marina was written as an elaborate ballet in which the scenes shifted between the present, and Marina's memories of her life and time in the Hermitage during the German siege, the ballet became a series of missteps and distractions towards the end of the book.
I was very disappointed that Marina's story was not completed--that Marina's life at the Hermitage, and during the post War period was not finished. That Marina's story about her life with Dmitri was not connected to their eventual immigration to the USA, and their life in the Post War period that led to their move in the US.
There were too many holes left unfilled. For example, a huge hole that was left unfilled would have been the story/explanation about why Marina's family never knew anything about Marina's war time experience, or her expertise in the Art at the Hermitage. And what about her reunion with Dmitri at the end of the War, the birth of Alexei, and many other parts of Marina's and Dmitri's lives.
Some parts of the book were repetitious. And then, the book ended abruptly--as if the author simply quit, because she'd run out of words, or was simply tired, and didn't know what else to do.
And then, the mystery of who exactly were the Madonnas of Leningrad--perhaps if more had been written, it would be possible to make a good analogy to say that perhaps the women who cared for the artworks, originally, were the Madonnas? or perhaps the Madonnas were those whose absence from their frames was so profound during the siege. Perhaps the women who took care of "others" during the war. I suppose we'll have to continue to use our imaginations to figure out the puzzle, just like Marina imagined the presence of the absent Madonnas in their vacant places along the walls of the galleries in the Hermitage.
Top reviews from other countries
a view to the connect and world of art even from the least artistically involved people. A story about what art is, what war is, what survival is, wrapped into a historically true event, softened by a fictional story. Great read, spiritually driven and part of the evil legacy of the Nazi's 900 siege of Leningrad (St Petersburg). In the end a story of survival of the heart, the person and the art.
This is a very well written story and should not be overlooked.