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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | | | | 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. . . . | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Author: | Debra Dean | | Paperback: | 231 pages | | Publisher: | Harper Perennial | | Publication Date: | February 19, 2007 | | Language: | English | | ISBN: | 0060825316 | | Package Length: | 8.2 inches | | Package Width: | 5.4 inches | | Package Height: | 0.8 inches | | Package Weight: | 0.35 pounds | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 94 reviews |
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| | Features | ISBN13: 9780060825317Condition: NewNotes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed
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 The Poetry of Loss Jul 19, 2010
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.
The Madonnas of Leningrad: A Novel Jun 30, 2010
Used book arrived in excellent condition, on-time delivery. This is a very pleasant way to shop.
Heartbreakingly beautiful! Jun 16, 2010
Apparently, Debra Dean was inspired to write The Madonnas of Leningrad because of a true story. During World War II, staff of the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) packed up 1.1 millions objects of art and evacuated them. 2,000 of the staff lived in the cellar during the seige of the city by Nazis. One of the staff, a former guide, remembered the places and the details of the painting so well that he would give tours of the empty rooms, describing the art so vividly that visitors could envision them. How's that for memory?
In The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean, Marina, a former tour guide at the Hermitage, is now an old woman whose mind is being ravaged by Alzheimer's. Time and memories become fluid for her, as it does in the narrative, which Dean illustrates by seamlessly moving from present to past, sometimes mid-sentence. When Marina slips from the present, to the horror and sadness of her husband and children, she returns to her perfectly remembered memories of her time during the ghastly winter of 1941 when she was living in near starvation in the cellar of the Hermitage. Out of desperation, she built a "memory palace," committing to memory all the works of art that used to be on display in the museum, down to the tiniest detail.
"Marina has her memory palace: that has become her fixation. She can now walk anywhere in the picture gallery, and the sculptures and paintings appear so readily in her mind that she can rattle most of them off without thinking. What started as an exercise, a distraction, has come to seem like the very point of her existence."
This amazing feat is juxtaposed in poignant detail with Marina's current deterioration as an old woman and its effect on her family. The Madonnas of Leningrad by Debra Dean is a magical, bittersweet book that is so well-imagined that the stirring descriptions of the paintings have convinced me a visit to the Hermitage is imperative.
 The 900 days, and of remembrance and forgetting... Apr 12, 2010
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.
Tasteful and respectful Mar 30, 2010
Ms Dean treats her heroes with respect they deserve. To some reviewers the unwillingness of Marina and Dimitri to tell their children about the past did not ring true. However, it is very typical, and there are a few reasons for it. Great book worth reading over and over.
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