The Madonnas of Leningrad By Debra Dean
New York: William Morrow, an imprint of
HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.
A Book Review by Ted Odenwald
This novel focuses upon two critical stages of the life of Marina, Dean’s protagonist. As a docent barely out of her teens in Leningrad’s Hermitage during the Nazi siege in World War II, she manages to survive the stressful horrors of fire-bombings, squalid living conditions, disease, and starvation—a world in which “…time is measured in the space between one meal and the next, and without bread to look forward to, the day never ends.” As an octogenarian living in Seattle, her world is shrouded by Alzheimer’s Disease: “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.” The linchpin between these two stages of her life is her “memory palaces,” detailed recollections of art works whose histories and execution provide keys to understanding the human condition.
Marina’s building of memory palaces began as an exercise, a distraction from the Nazi invasion. She had been a guide, but eventually there was nothing to show, for most of the artwork had been removed from the frames and shipped to undisclosed sanctuaries. Each time she entered a room in the Hermitage, she would “…run through her script, mentally placing as many of the paintings as she [could] recall in their frames. She move[d] like a ghost past the blank rectangles, …[describing] by rote the pictures that hung inside.” The exercise became an obsession after Anya, an older room attendant, convinced her that someone must remember each work of art or it would disappear without a trace. The obsession itself may very well have saved Marina’s life, as she was able to focus all of her thoughts and energy upon her imaginary tours.
This preoccupation with remembered art works, combined with her deteriorating physical and mental condition, led the young docent to have a number of visions and/or hallucinations which were clearly influenced by the artifacts. For example, she believed that while she was serving as a fire lookout in the museum tower, she had been impregnated by a god. She even claimed in later years that Zeus was her son’s father; in all likelihood, she was recalling and identifying with the Rembrandt picture of Danae, who was impregnated by Zeus.
Now in her dotage, describing her entire being as melting away just as the Hermitage had been inundated by leaks from the Spring thaw, Marina is unable to function socially. Everyday tasks have become impossible to perform. “One of the effects of this deterioration seems to be 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.” Though distant, the memory palaces remain vivid as do a number of incidents which her brain has managed to merge with the artwork. “Her distant past is preserved, better than preserved. Moments that occurred in Leningrad… reappear, vivid, plump, and perfumed.” Simple events now trigger dream-like journeys into her mental reservoir: being reminded that she had been wearing a blue dress when she had met her granddaughter’s fiancé, Marina journeys to her packaging of Gainsborough’s “Lady in Blue.” She recalls that despite the fact that the subject was clearly among the pampered rich, there was in her eyes a sense that she “can envision how her fortunes are about to change…” It is as if she can look into her future. In Leningrad, from her watchtower, Marina had observed the disastrous fire-bombing of the massive warehouse containing the food supplies intended to enable the city to resist a siege. “She cannot know this now, but lodged in [her] mind, as real as anything else, is the chilling certainty that they are witnessing catastrophe.” In the Rubens room, there had been a picture of a starving old man being suckled by his young daughter. Marina had found this portrayal of love to be “raw and wretched and demeaning”; nevertheless it was presenting filial love. In her mind this artwork blends with an encounter that she had had with a starving woman. Clutching a precious bar of chocolate, which she had gone to great pains to retrieve, Marina trudged back towards the Hermitage and her starving family, only to be accosted by a pitiful woman bundled in rags, begging, “Mary, mother of God. Have mercy.” Marina, overwhelmed by compassion, breaks off a piece of the chocolate, ministering to the doomed woman as a priest would offer up the Eucharistic bread.
Through this merging of pictures with events past and present, Dean leads readers to consider the focus upon the Madonna. Certainly some of the most moving connections between art and events are connected to famous pictures of Mary. Marina’s Uncle Viktor, who had provided hope and sustenance for all in his extended family, passes away in his sleep. Marina finds her Aunt Nadezhda cradling him in her arms in a position reminiscent of Veronese’s “Pieta.” “In the flickering light of the single candle, the hollows in his face are sunken in deep shadow, and the skin pulled over his nose and cheekbones is like beeswax. She has always assumed that the Italian painter exaggerated the chiaroscuro to heighten the drama, the contrasts of light and dark, warm tones and cold, were so marked, but here it is.”
A poignant twist occurs late in the novel when Helen, Marina’s artist daughter, tries to capture the mystery of her bedridden mother’s early life by drawing an image based upon a photograph taken in Leningrad. Shown the sketch, Marina identifies the subject as one of the Madonnas. Although she is sadly disoriented, Marina may very well have revealed the role that she had subconsciously taken upon herself so many years ago. Certainly the mystical aura around her impregnation, though processed through the Zeus-Danae artwork, recalls Mary’s annunciation. When Marina had gone to the Leningrad baths, she became a figure of hope for the women, for she was pregnant, her abdomen distended with child rather than from starvation. A long procession of bathers asked to touch her belly to feel the movement of a new life—a miracle of hope in an environment filled with the dead and the dying. Marina’s association with the Holy Mother is developed as she recognizes that a heavy responsibility—the hope of life—has been placed upon her. “Everything now is for this child. She is merely a vehicle for something bigger.” While most children born during the Leningrad blockade were “runty things…tiny and deformed or born dead,” Marina’s son Andrei was “miraculously chubby,” quiet and contented, greatly admired by passing observers. The elderly Marina’s deteriorating mind had placed herself and her “miracle” child among the hundreds of Madonna pictures at the Hermitage, especially Leonardo da Vinci’s “Litta Madonna.”
Perhaps Marina’s presence has been that of a Madonna of spiritual beauty and hope in a deteriorating world. After washing Viktor’s corpse and sewing his shroud, she appears to be the only one with a sense of hope. “No one weeps anymore, or if they do, it is over small things, inconsequential moments that catch them unprepared. What is left that is heartbreaking? Not death; death is ordinary. What is heartbreaking is the sight of a single gull lifting effortlessly from a streetlamp. Its wings unfurl like silk scarves against the mauve sky, and Marina hears the rustle of its feathers. What is heartbreaking is that there is still beauty in the world.” As a docent in the virtually empty Hermitage, Marina leads a group of cadets through the halls, recreating through words the spiritually uplifting representations of the Virgin: van der Weyden’s “Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin,”; Raphael’s “The Holy Family,” “Conestabile Madonna,” and “Alba Madonna”; Carracci’s “Three Women at the Tomb of Christ”; and Murillo’s “Assumption of the Virgin.” The young men and their superior officers are awestruck by the beauty which Marina has helped them to envision. She has provided solace and joy in a time of horror and despair. At the close of the novel, the old woman has wandered off aimlessly into the night. Missing for 30 hours, and having no idea of who she is or why she is where she is, she curls up in the fireplace of a mansion that is under construction. Horribly underdressed, incoherent, and nearly frozen to death, she astounds her rescuer with an exultation over the beauty of the world. The worker says, “There’s a killer view of the straits, but she was pointing at everything. It was like she was saying everything is beautiful…You had to be there. She was showing me the world.”
Marina remained the docent, a Madonna who grasped onto the beauty of the world, dedicating herself to a “bigger purpose”: not just survival, but victory through hope and love.