It is Leningrad in September 1941. As hostile German forces slowly surround the city, Anna struggles to keep her wounded and apathetic father and her 5-year-old brother alive. The presence of Marina, a glamorous and disillusioned actress and one of her father's oldest friends, further disrupts the family's harmony. It is only when Andrei, a young and enthusiastic doctor, arrives as her father's rescuer, that Anna's world is transformed from the mundane tasks of survival. However, as the city becomes increasingly isolated and its citizens fight each other for food, it seems impossible that this family, and those they love, will emerge unscathed.
Written with elegance and simplicity, The Siege movingly conveys the horrors that war can bring. Dunmore's touch is light. She delicately portrays the intimacies of family life and the emotional conflicts that new and old loves can bring. Simultaneously, she conveys the wider picture of the extraordinary deprivation and fear occasioned by warfare. Balancing historical deftness and detail with an expansive emotional vista, the novel avoids labouring the political tensions occasioned by the Stalinist regime. Instead, Dunmore shows the reader the reality of life under siege without over-politicising the narrative. Rooted in a time of tumult, the human pulse of history beats through the novel, and focuses on the characters and their personal struggles for survival until the very bitter end.
Helen Dunmore on The Siege...
In writing The Siege, what was your inspiration for wanting to return to the past and to Russia?
I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place. I'd never thought I'd write directly about Russia, even though I 'd read a great deal [about it]. Gradually this idea of writing something came and grew. I began with this character who had an aunt who lived through the siege of Leningrad then I realised no, that it was the Aunt that I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about these people directly, not as a memory but in the present moment. I want go back to that period and to that war and that winter.
Have you visited Russia?
Yes, and I knew, in a sense, what life might have been like. It's a very big leap of imagination to leap back, it's very hard to do that. But I think there was just enough feeling, enough handholds to begin to scale it. I'm not a blockade survivor, I'm not writing memoirs, I'm not a historian but I think I've got quite a unique combination of things in me. I'm a poet and I've read a lot of Russian poetry and can hear it’s sounds. Russian poetry is so important to an understanding of the culture. I have a love for the place and you have to feel deeply about a city to want to write about it. Some people find those long winters quite repellent but I find them fascinating, exhilarating even. But then to imagine going through that long winter without the heating, without the food, without the structure, with everything crumbling. There is a wealth of fascinating historical material available in terms of work written by historians, but also people's diaries, people's memoirs, people's own experiences. It's almost a question of where do I begin, there is so much. It’s got to be a novel, so where's the narrative drive, where's the story? It was very difficult.
Was there a particular reason for having these characters, in this relationship, in The Siege?
I wanted a double story. The younger ones have grown up under Stalinism. They have to be pragmatic, they don't remember anything else; this is their only life, this is what they've got to live with, this is the material they've got and if they want to survive they have to accommodate to one degree or another. For the older characters there is the memory of all kinds of different pasts, of what the revolution could have been, of what it was, of the different twists and turns that led to Stalinism. There's the sense of loss that they may have betrayed themselves. They have stories that the younger generation don't know about. So, there is a double story and it partly consists of unravelling what's happened in that older generation. And the young people, will they survive, will they have the physical, emotional and even the moral energy to get through this siege? And, if so, what kind of life are they coming to? That was my intention for a double story and the stories echo one another.
Why are you so particularly attached to this episode of history?
It's a very emotional subject. Everybody I 've talked to who's written the history of that kind of tragic time feels that there is something you're grappling with. You cannot fully grasp it, you try to grasp it, then there's the effort of trying to make a shape out of it. A novel, in the end, is a container, a shape which you are trying to pour your story into. After I’d finished I felt I that I couldn’t really abandon the place or the people; they still echo.
'A magnificent novel of the Siege of Leningrad. Poignant, terrifying and beautifully written.'
Antony Beevor
Anna has always loved the first snowfall of winter. She knows as soon as dawn comes that it'll be today .The sky remains dark, with a yellow tinge to the clouds. The light has a sharp, raw edge. Everything is waiting, silent and expectant.
Snow will come. The shrivelled leaves of autumn, the dying grasses, the chilly, dun-coloured earth, will all be covered. The snow will wipe away all mistakes. Light will stream upwards from the immaculate white of the ground.
When the first snow falls, Anna always goes to the Summer Garden. There, the noise of the city is muffled, and the park is eerily luminous. Small, naked-looking sparrows hop from twig to twig, dislodging a powder of snow. The trees are lit up like candelabra by the whiteness they hold in their arms. Underfoot, she hears for the first time the squeak of snow packing into the treads of her boots. She bends down, scoops up a handful of the new snow, throws it up into the air and watches it scatter into powdery fragments as it falls for the second time. And although she's cold and she ought to get home, she always stays much longer than she means to, because she knows that this feeling won't come again for another year. The snow will continue to fall, thaw, freeze, turn grey with use, be covered again and again by fresh blizzards., But nothing again will have the freshness, exhilaration and loneliness of the first snowfall. She's the one thing still warm and alive in a world which is going to sleep.
She looks up, into the snow which spirals down the steep funnels of the sky, whirls into her face, lands on her eyelashes and melts into tears. And then she goes back to the apartment, along streets where trams are already thrashing the new, soft snow into slush.
Children skid around street-corners, yelling, their faces blazing crim- son. Soon it'll be time for skis and sledges. And tomorrow, when she wakes, the snow will be thick and crusted with ice. The sun will be out, and all the shadows will be blue. This is how she has welcomed the snow every year of her life.
But not this year. The first snow falls on the fourteenth of October, drifting down through the sky and settling on the ruins of shelled houses, on to tank-traps, machine-gun nests and heaps of rubble. The snow is silent, but ominous. No one knows, this year, whether it will be an enemy or a friend. The Russian winter defeated Napoleon, people say to one another. Perhaps it will defeat Hitler, too.
A ring of siege grips the city. Nothing comes in, nothing goes out. And in the suburbs, within sight, the Germans have dug them- selves in. There they stay, hunkered down for winter in deep trenches, behind defended firing-positions. The Germans have always been good at digging trenches, say older Leningraders who fought in the last war. Luxury trenches, they have, with carpets and chairs and pictures hanging on the walls. There they squat in the outskirts of Leningrad, like wolves at the mouth of a cave. They pour shells on to the city, but they do not advance any farther. This is blockade.
The Germans eat. Of course they eat. Through binoculars our boys can see that they are well-muscled and healthy. They move briskly through the chilling air, swinging their arms. They write letters to their families, saying that they'll be home soon, when they have won the war. Behind them, unbroken supply lines stretch all the way back to Berlin. The Germans are altering their rolling-stock to fit Russian railway lines ;They have got the harvests of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania on hand, and they can wait as long as they have to. An iron ring squeezes around the besieged city, slowly throttling it.
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