In the Palace of Memory
Seattle Novelist Debra Dean on art, war, and the transcendence of the human spirit

By ROBIN LINDLEY
Contributing Writer

In her debut novel The Madonnas of Leningrad, Seattle writer Debra Dean tells the story of Marina, a survivor of the 900-day German siege of Leningrad in World War II who wages a present-day battle with Alzheimer’s disease in the Pacific Northwest. Marina’s struggle with dementia at age 82 is interspersed with vivid memories of the war and its toll on civilians—starvation, disease, bombing raids— and of her refuge, the magnificent Hermitage Museum.

Madonnas has been widely acclaimed for its literary merit and broad reader appeal—and its timeliness on issues of aging and the effect of war on civilians. Isabel Allende praised Dean’s novel as, “Elegant and poetic, the kind of book that you want to keep but you have to share.” Library Journal and Booklist both honored Madonnas with starred reviews, and Seattle librarian and reviewer Nancy Pearl selected Dean’s book as one of her 10 favorite novels of 2006.

Debra Dean works as a college writing professor. She has published short stories and has an MFA from the University of Oregon. She also worked as an actor in New York for a decade before opting for a life of teaching and writing. She lives in Seattle with her husband, also a writer.

Dean spoke with Real Change about her novel and reflections on war, illness and hope.

Real Change: What drew you to the subjects of your novel: the siege of Leningrad and Alzheimer’s disease?

Debra Dean: I initially thought this would be two short stories. The main character is an 82-year-old woman in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, living in Seattle. The germ for that was my grandmother who died of Alzheimer’s. She forgot words and people, and told the same stories over and over. Paradoxically though, her long-term memory became much more intense, so she spent more time in her distant past. One of the weird gifts of the Alzheimer’s was that I found out more about who she was before I knew her. We weren’t always sure which stories were true. She’d start a story that would sound very plausible, but then would segue into magical realism. So I started to write a story about a character with Alzheimer’s.

RC: Was your grandmother a survivor of war?

Dean: No. I should rush to say she was not Russian and her childhood memories were quite placid. She was a southerner. But at about the same time, I saw a PBS documentary on the Hermitage Museum and the siege of Leningrad. I was stunned. I didn’t know anything about the siege.

Right after the Nazis attacked, the Russians evacuated the art [at the Hermitage]. They worked around the clock to put this art on special trains and ship it out of the city to keep it from Hitler. They left the empty frames hanging on the museum walls as a pledge that the art would come back. Over the first winter of the siege, a curator gave impromptu tours of the empty museum. He would take [viewers] to these empty frames and describe the paintings that had hung inside the frames. Witnesses said he described them so well that they could almost see the paintings. I wrote in my journal that this would be a wonderful short story [but] it quickly became apparent that it wouldn’t stay confined within that short form, and I put it away. I went back to my grandmother and her story. Then the two stories merged and my grandmother became a Russian woman who spent her youth in Leningrad.

RC: It’s incredible that you wrote this book without seeing Leningrad or the Hermitage. Can you talk about your research?

Dean: I teach research writing, so I did what I tell my students to do: I went to the library. I [read] everything I could get on the [Hermitage] collection, the war, the siege, and Soviet Russia. If I had imagined it would be published in this prominent fashion, I don’t know that I would have had the chutzpa to write it. But I wrote it for myself. I didn’t think about it being out in the world.

I did the research over a couple years. I found some first-person accounts. Oddly enough, a couple of Americans went to St. Petersburg [and] interviewed survivors, mostly women. The city was mostly women. For many of the women it was the first time they told their stories. They were in their 80s and 90s. And many of these people were repressing these memories because they were so awful.

About halfway through my research I found the Hermitage website. They have a map of the museum and you can click on the rooms and get video that scans the rooms. This was a godsend, because I’d been trying to recreate this museum without having set foot in it. In the novel, you actually go on a tour.

RC: I don’t think most Americans understand that the Hermitage is one of the most prominent sites of great Western art, not just Russian art.

Dean: The Hermitage was a collection of European art started by Catherine the Great, announcing to heads of state of Europe that [Russia] was of the European world. Each czar added another wing, so it’s an enormous museum. There’s over 400 rooms with over two and a half million pieces of art. They say if you spend one minute looking at each piece of art, it will take five years.

RC: You describe the horrifying course of starvation in a human being and the Alzheimer’s process. Did you do medical research for those aspects of the book?

Dean: The Alzheimer’s research was mostly observing my grandmother. I read The Forgetting by David Shenk, a good look at Alzheimer’s. The starvation was researched. The Russians were very good about telling their own stories, so there was a lot of information. Amazing stories. What happened then staggered the imagination.

RC: The casualties were incomprehensible. I read that a million and a half died just in the siege of Leningrad.

Dean: They’re not sure about the numbers. Conservative estimates put it over a million. In the siege, most died of starvation. The Nazis bombed every night at seven o’clock. They decided to [destroy] the food supply and, in typical Stalin fashion, all the food was stored in one place. When the warehouse was burnt out, all the food was gone.

Over the first winter of the siege, they were reduced to rations of about four ounces of bread a day — phenomenal because it’s not enough to sustain life. The people who lived found other things to eat. About 2,000 people lived under the Hermitage, and they had a couple food sources that other people didn’t. Before the war, they planned to repaint the museum, so they had stores of linseed oil they used to fry things in. And they also had beef tallow-based glue to bind frames, and they made something nicknamed “Hermitage aspic” from the glue. People ate shoes. They ate belts. Household pets didn’t last very long into the siege. Birds. They dug up flower bulbs. Wallpaper paste. Anything they could get.

RC: Doesn’t the Madonna have a special meaning in Russia?

Dean: The title The Madonnas of Leningrad operates on several levels. At the literal level, when you go to St. Petersburg, you’d be struck by how many Madonnas there are in a godless country [according to] the propaganda that was exported — and completely false. It’s Eastern Orthodox. And at the Hermitage there are literally hundreds and hundreds of Madonnas in the collection.

In the novel, Marina parallels the Madonna story. In a larger sense, all the women in the city [were] doing miraculous things because they ran the city. They ran the factories. They were on the front. The Soviets were feminists long before we were. Heroic women, and I saw them as Madonna figures.

In the story, Marina was a tour guide, and there are no paintings, so she’s out of a job. The people who survived described some sense of purpose. So Marina developed a project for herself: to memorize the missing paintings and mentally rehang them. She continues to tour the museum. Amongst the missing paintings are the missing Madonnas. When things get particularly bad, she appeals to the Madonnas. Though she is a good Soviet, miracles happen for her. Miracles don’t always happen for believers. Very often those chosen are the ones who don’t believe. Marina is one of those.

RC: Could you say something about the appeal of the book now?

Dean: I did not expect this. I’ve been astonished by how many people have been to the Hermitage. I thought it was some exotic place, but it turns out that this is the new tourist destination.

And there are people who come [to readings] because they’ve lost someone to Alzheimer’s, or they’ve nursed somebody, and that’s a much larger community than I knew. The novel’s written largely from inside Marina’s point of view, and when you love somebody with Alzheimer’s, often there’s a curiosity about what’s going on on the other side we can’t know. The novel is an imagining of [what Marina’s experiencing] and a lot of people found that very comforting.

I’m drawing an older crowd. That for me is wonderful. I hope to read for Alzheimer’s caregiver groups because being a caregiver for somebody with Alzheimer’s is such heroic work, and sometimes underappreciated.

RC: Did your acting on stage in New York inform your writing?

Dean: Yes, I’ve spent much of my life pretending to be other people. There’s a strong crossover because, when I write, a large part of that is imagining other people’s experiences, which is also what you do when acting. The highest aim of fiction is to expand our empathy, to allow us to fully imagine what someone else’s life is like, and that’s a worthy goal for writers and readers alike.

RC: You have mentioned that hope comes out of The Madonnas of Leningrad, a novel about overwhelming issues of war and illness.

Dean: On the face of it, a novel about Alzheimer’s and the siege of Leningrad sounds unremittingly bleak. I don’t think it is. It’s sad, but the view of the novel in a lot of ways is hopeful because [it’s] about the human spirit and what is left after our world falls apart, whether it’s the exterior that falls apart through war or a more personal world stripped away by illness. There are things that remain: this human spirit. Alzheimer’s [is] a terrifying illness because who we are in large part seems defined by our memories, and losing those is terribly frightening because it’s like our identity being stripped away. But even after that stripping away, there’s a soul, a human spirit that transcends all that. That’s what I was trying to write about, the things that are transcendent: art, beauty and the human spirit.

Robin Lindley, a Seattle writer, covers international affairs, human rights, politics, history, law, medicine and the arts.

[Online]

Take a virtual tour of St. Petersburg’s world-famous art museum: www.hermitagemuseum.org.

The Alzheimer’s Association of Western and Central Washington offers information and support for coping with the disease to people with memory problems, their friends and family, and health care professionals: www.alzwa.org.

[The book]

The Madonnas of Leningrad
William Morrow, 2006
Hardcover, 231 pages, $18.95
Paperback available in March