Helen Dunmore's marvelous novel (surely her best*) begins with Spring in 1941: "And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the current swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea." It will end with Spring a year later, but by that time a large part of the Leningrad population will have died of cold or malnutrition, as the German armies hold the city in a relentless siege.
Dunmore begins gently, almost lyrically, in a small dacha outside the city. Not that everyday life is easy. Her protagonist, 23-year-old Anna Mikhailova Levin, has had to abandon her studies as an artist to look after her baby brother Kolya, when her mother died in childbirth five years before. Her father, a writer, has been blacklisted by the Soviet Writers' Union, so Anna must work in a daycare nursery to support them, suffering under a boss whose strict adherence to socialist doctrines does not disguise her dislike of children. It is a period when nobody dare speak openly, for fear of denunciation and arrest. But Russia still has a pact with Germany and war seems far off.
By the end of summer, all has changed. Germany invades Russia, and Leningrad is marked for destruction. The city's food warehouses are firebombed, its supply lines are cut, and strict food rationing is imposed. The citizens are mobilized to dig ditches, build defenses, work in factories, but slowly everything grinds to a halt; everyone now has one business only, survival. Anna holes up in a tiny apartment with Kolya, her father, and two others from outside the family: one is Marina Petrovna, a blacklisted actress and her father's old friend; the other, Andrei, is a young medical student, and Anna's first love. For love blooms against all odds; there may be little romance in two fully-dressed unwashed emaciated bodies huddling together for warmth, but there is something deeper: responsibility and caring. And the political climate changes also: "Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It is not like trying to read mirror writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There's only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future."
Dunmore's ability to paint simultaneously a vast canvas and an intimate portrait has naturally been compared to Tolstoy. But as the situation worsens and many succumb to the inevitable while others find an impossible will to survive, I thought more of John Steinbeck's
GRAPES OF WRATH
. Dunmore does not quite reach his spiritual transcendence, but she has the same deep belief in the human spirit. Spring does come, and the authorities find ways to get some food in and inhabitants out. The siege will continue for eighteen more months, but its grip has been loosened. The survivors have rediscovered their humanity.
*The others I have read and reviewed, in my personal order of preference, are:
ZENNOR IN DARKNESS
,
A SPELL OF WINTER
, and
TALKING TO THE DEAD
.
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Binny
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Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 19, 2019