2024/019: The Siege — Helen Dunmore

Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It’s 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. There’s only the dark, besieged, freezing city, and the Germans outside, dug into their winter positions, waiting, stamping their feet. [loc. 3000]

Reading The Lost Pianos of Siberia awakened my interest in the Siege of Leningrad. Luckily my Kindle contained Helen Dunmore's well-regarded novel, The Siege.

Anna is a nursery assistant who lives in Leningrad with her little brother Kolya and her father Mikhail, a writer who's fallen out of favour with the authorities. When the German army invades in the summer of 1941, they think it will all be over soon. It isn't. The winter is brutally cold and people starve to death in the streets. Mikhail's old friend Marina has joined them in the apartment, as has Andrei, a doctor who treated Mikhail when he was injured by shrapnel. The narrative is mostly focussed on Anna as she searches for food and firewood, and determines the limits of what she will and won't do to get her family through the winter: there are passages from Mikhail's diary, and from the viewpoint of Andrei.

Dunmore's writing is sharp and precise, without sentimentality. She describes how a single square of bread can become the focus of a day; how shelled buildings are ransacked for anything that can be burnt; how the dead sit upright in the park, covered in snow; how, even in those times, a neighbour or acquaintance might denounce you for being critical of the Party. It's tremendously evocative, and portrays the characters' experiences vividly and in a way that feels honest and true. I was especially struck by Kolya, who's only five or six, and the way he constructs questions out of his fear. Are we going to die? he asks. 'No, says Andrei. ‘It’s only that I wasn’t sure, so I wanted to know,’ [Kolya] explains.'

I could say that nothing happens in this novel, or that these people are nothing special. In a sense that's true: it's a story of ordinary people in an extraordinary time. Rather, I shall say that what happens, happens beneath the surface: emotional connections made and broken, peacetime worries fading, stories told and retold, a strong pure emphasis on the business of survival.

Fulfils the ‘Part of a duology’ rubric of the 52 books in 2024 challenge. (The second part of the duology, The Betrayal, is set some years later. I shall read it soon.)