Your
reviewer was in Washington, D.C. this week, but regrettably not
long enough to go to the superb National Gallery of Art. The
National Gallery, on the Mall between the Capitol and the White
House, is special for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the
paintings there are the property of the country, of each individual
American, for all of us to enjoy. But even so, there are times when
you wander back through a hall where you've been already or observe
paintings you've seen and enjoyed, and you feel they've lost
something --- the image is more familiar than it was, and perhaps
not as special. And as you leave, you might wonder about the people
who work there, who see the art everyday, and what they feel about
it.

Debra Dean's luminous debut novel is about a museum docent in the
Hermitage Museum in Leningrad on the eve of the German invasion of
the Soviet Union. Her heroine, Marina, leads tours through a
legendary collection of great art --- a collection she is thrilled
to discover is her own as a Soviet citizen. (She later learns that
the Hermitage collection is Stalin's personal slush fund, of
course, but that does little to diminish the beauty.) Dean
frequently interrupts her narrative to allow Marina to do some
first-person storytelling about the art she sees, and it's some of
the best writing in the novel.

When the war reaches Leningrad, Marina stays at the museum to help
evacuate the paintings and other precious works of art, which are
sent far beyond the lines for safekeeping. But Marina's own
precious love, Dmitri, is sent in the other direction, to the front
lines to halt the Nazi advance. Left behind in the city, Marina
prowls the empty halls of the Hermitage, trying to reconstruct in
her mind the past glories amidst the horrible privations of the
besieged city.

This is the stuff of great stories, and Dean tells this part of the
tale superbly well, reminding an inattentive public of the
suffering endured by ordinary Russians in the Second World War. THE
MADONNAS OF LENINGRAD, though, is very much a tale of our time as
well, with past and present interchanging and intersecting with
rapidity.

In our time, Marina is old and beginning to lose her faculties, and
words like "Alzheimer's" and "assisted living" are being tossed
about. When we see her as an elderly woman, she is leaving her
comfortable Seattle home to go somewhere; she has to be reminded
that it is to the wedding of her granddaughter, to a young man she
does not recognize at all. The stories are interlayered so that the
reader is led to recognize --- slowly, at first, and then
unmistakably --- that the past devastation of the Hermitage is
paralleled in the slow collapse of Marina's own "memory
palace."

The evocation of Marina's suffering is best seen through her own
eyes, through her own confused and conflicting recollections. It is
all too often seen through the eyes of her daughter, a struggling
middle-aged Phoenix artist whose mundane stresses contrast
unfavorably with those of the mother whose history she barely
knows.

The Madonna is a favorite subject of painters, again and again,
because her presence in a painting says so much about so many
things --- about joy, serenity, anguish, the power and majesty of
divine revelation as expressed in the pride of a young mother. Even
when we see the Madonna when her Child is still a baby, we know her
destiny and the heartbreak that awaits her at the foot of the
Cross, but we cannot be unmoved by her transcendental beauty and
grace. We recognize the beauty and the suffering that accompanies
it, and that cannot be separated. It is to the immense credit of
Dean that she understands this essential truth and that the novel
transmits it so eloquently.