Anna in The Siege

The Siege is a historical novel based on real events. Helen Dunmore makes it very realistic with her peculiar way of non-linear narration, descriptions and close study of human nature. The story happens during the winter of 1941 when Leningrad is under siege from the Germans as well as the Russians. Food runs short and death rates rises sky high.

It is in this background that we see Anna a 23 year old girl with her lost aspiration to become an artist takes charge of her family and manages to help most of its members survive as well as bring positive changes in the lives of other people.

Anna, the protagonist of the novel, lost her mother and gained a brother at once. He is 18 years younger to her and in Evgenia’s words clings on to her as if she is his own mother. He behaves with her the same way Anna behaved with her mother long ago. Even her father considers the young boy as Anna’s own liability and interacts with him only sparsely.

Marina, an ex-girl friend of Mikhail comes to Anna’s life mostly after her mother’s death. She meets Marina only once before her mother’s death. She meets her again when her father sends her to draw Marina’s portrait with a view to bring them closer to each other. Though it is not an instant success, when Marina later comes home, Anna extends her friendship which last a life time and Marina too make amends for the harm she unwittingly brought on Anna’s family.

Maria too is dreamy, romantic, artistic and imaginative but she is different from her father and his girl friend. She is more like her mother. She rises to the occasion and is sensitive to the needs of those around her and her family forms no boundary for her existence. She shares her son’s ration of sugar with her neighbour Zena for her child, even though Zena is not so fond of her.

She remembers her childhood friend Vasya who has gone away to Moscow with his family. She falls in love with Andrei so soon but restricts herself from getting to intimate with him so as not to risk having a baby. She understands how her father is fond of Marina and how her own mother was agonized by that. But she holds no hostile feeling towards Marina and in fact gives her shelter when she most needs it. She is not as Romantic as the rest of the characters and Andrei has to force her to agree with  him that she will sit with his dead body like Marina sat with Mikhail’s.

She is a typical Levin with her interest in books and knowledge thought it is fine arts that she really wants to pursue. A very perspicacious Evgenia tells her that she looks so academic. She is well informed about life science and her quick remedies come to the help of people around her. She is a person who can make tea with anything. She is highly skilled in drawing that she is able to catch people not only as they are but also as they want to be. This is because she is seeing more that ‘light’s scrutiny on form’. She sees deep into people. She observes them and tries her best to take care of the fragile Katinka while they go for digging trenches and when Katia dies, she is hurt more than anyone else.

Anna’s resourcefulness too is amazing. She thinks just like Pavlov and measures out rations very carefully and like him she too realizes that there should be some nutrition in leather articles and makes soup out of Kolya old school bag. She is good at farming and seasoning and uses every page in her skill book her mother taught her. She remembers poems like her father and keeps some fire in her mind all through the winter of discontent.

She is optimally optimistic and has no high hopes about Stalinism. She is known to rubbish it at times. Fredya, her neighbour, notices it. Her own boss knows she is efficient but refuses to acknowledge it. Her father, a writer who understands human nature, sees her almost as part of the furniture. He is caught much in himself. Her mother was very affectionate to her but her early death came as a blow to Anna. Incidentally, she has to guard Andrei from Marina like her mother guarded her father.

She is mentally and physically strong and nothing makes her fall sick. When she hears about the oncoming war, she rushes back from the dacha to their home in the city. She gets to work immediately. She had had two bad winters behind her but she stores whatever she can for the coming one as it is not just ‘General Winter but General Hunger’ too as her father has written. Her fight for a few chips of woods, her visit to the market to buy a heater, her meeting Marina at her dacha, her confrontation with the sentry on her way back from the dacha with the sack of potatoes, her passion for and resistance to Andrei, her understanding of her father’s relationship with Marina, her warm generosity to people who suffer with her in spite of their bitterness towards her are  all well portrayed vividly by the author to create one of the most memorable characters in English literature.

The only cruel act that she commits is when she destroys the excess produce in her farm so as not to be grabbed by the Germans. Though this act is done in self protection, she suffers later from shortage of food having been denied food to the hungry in the name of war and enmity. She too has all the frailties of a human being like exasperation and frustration, but she rises above all that when duty calls her, whether it is the duty to her nation, to her job or to her family. She always seems to know the right thing to do. Living in the long drawn shadow of her own mother’s death and with people around her falling off like flies, she looks fear at its face and conquers it. She is the symbol of life’s longing for itself. 

Why can I write?

True, this is a correct sentence. But something at the back of our mind tells us that something is not right. The question looks right if we use ‘can’t’ instead of ‘can’, right? There we have some clue to the strange sound of the title. When we can’t we want to know why and we ask why. When we can, we simply take the ability for granted. We never bother to ask why we can do something. When we can, we don’t want to know why we can, but how we can. Obviously it is a different question demanding a different answer.

This is a question that we should encourage the writers to ask themselves. They might be able to come up with some answers. I asked this question to myself recently though I can’t claim to be a writer of any notability or notoriety. But there is something that those who know me have figured out about me. I love writing. To me, the key board of the computer is better than that of the piano and for audible reasons too. I love to hear the tapping sound on the keyboard and surely, I have a preference for certain well sounding keyboards. After I learned touch typing, the sound of each key seems to be chasing each other with the backspace key coming in between and wiping it all out like a green monster in a child’s video game.

There, almost 250 words already and I have not said anything I intended to say. I am relishing it, revelling in it.  I also delete a lot of what I type, like a child making sand castles.

But the question remains. Why can I write, well or ill, while many can’t. Why am I different? Is it an ability to be proud of, a difference to be put right or a disability to be made use of? I asked this question to myself one of these days and came up with several reasons.

I write because I can. I can because I don’t fear. Growing up with people who didn’t know much English and among books which never had the guts to point out my errors, though they themselves were impeccably error-free, I was never a singed cat. I learned a little bit of grammar from a favourite teacher at school, just enough not to be laughed at. Nobody took the pain of making me feel bad about the errors. I corrected myself when I found that I didn’t mean what I had said and hadn’t said what I meant. I think the unsinged cat says it all.

And there is the passion too. There is music in the words, apart from the tapping of the keys. This is not new knowledge to anyone. Everyone knows there is something in writing like humming an old song. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Something inhibits their motivation, external or internal, to write. They do want to write and many satisfy themselves by talking or talking about the writing they are going to do. As I see it, it is just the fear of standards we set for ourselves or we let other set for us that prevent us from playing on this Apollo’s harp which can raise not just cities but an entire world, the Middle Earth for one.

Thus I believe that the magic potion that makes a prolific writer out of any kid we meet is nothing but our forbearance or shedding of our fastidiousness. When we think of the occasions when we correct them, if it is an honest introspection, we may find new answers. Were we trying to show them an error or show off our knowledge? Pedagogue of pedantic?

We should try to see a child’s writing just the way we see his drawing. It is not correct. But then his drawing is not realistic either, though he intended it to be. Bear with them. Let it come. Let it gush out and remove the clogging in the conduit. Let it come out in quantity and then we can work on its quality and accuracy. That is, if it has not gained them by then and in all probability it would have. 

Marina Petrovna in The Siege

Marina Petrovna in The Siege

Marina Petrovna is an important character in the Siege. She is an artiste and finds it hard to put up with things happening around her. It is hard for others to understand her. Even the heroine takes time to come to terms with her.

We are told about Marina in the very first chapter itself. Anna’s earliest memory of her is how he mother felt mortified after a casual meeting with her. She was trying to be nice to Vera and asked about her and her husband whom she lovingly refers to as Misha. But Vera could not tolerate such niceties coming from her husband’s girlfriend. In the following chapter we see Anna going to meet Marina and paint her portrait as demanded by her father. The first sentence of this chapter which describes where  Marina lives is striking.

                                    The track narrows down to a path.

This sentence in a way summarizes the life of Marina. She used to be a famous actor like Mikhail was a well acknowledged writer. They both lost their stature. But it Marina was more hurt by that.

                        Her name was wiped from posters, programmes and reviews.

She was lucky in that she was sidelined by the Soviet regime before it became too brutal. If she had been questioned a year later, she would have disappeared along with her name.

But an actress can’t burrow down and work alone, hidden. She’s got to have a stage, cast,   

director, lighting, and above all an audience.

But very few are willing to associate with her now. Even Anna doesn’t want her father to correspond with her and when a letter comes, asks he father not to keep it in the house. Marina too doesn’t use the Postal system anymore. She sends the letters only though people she trusts. Vera never read those letters even when they were handed over to her. ‘It is you she writes to, isn’t it?” Vera used to ask Mikhail when he asked her to read Marina’a letter.

Obviously, it was Anna’s father’s strategy to bring her and Marina close to each other that made him ask Anna to go to Marina’s place and paint her portrait. Anna is unwilling to go to see Marina and she has an argument with her father about it. He tells her Marina was a friend of her mother. But she knows it is not true. Her mother had explicitly told her so.

‘Isn’t she your friend as well mammy?’

‘Not really. She’s your father’s friend. He’s known her for a long time.’

‘But she wants to be your friend, or she shouldn’t write to you.’

‘I daresay. But friendship doesn’t work like that.’

This chapter and the next are written in such a way that we are intrigued about this character who appears to be living outside the main frame of the other actions in the story. The description of the dacha where Marina lives and how Anna tries to find her way into the house reminds us of Kafka’a novel The Caslte.  She lives thirty kilometres away from Leningrad and twenty kilometres away from the dacha. She lives with her own nurse and does not mingle much with the public. She has been blacklisted in her own profession in the theatre, just like her old time love Mikhail in his profession as a writer. Even those who associate with her could get into trouble. Her dacha is within a forest area and she is very discrete about whom she contact lest the state should take her away and imprison her. But it is Marina’s life that reminds us more of Kafka’s castle than her dacha itself. All her life she has been trying to reach something, finish something and dies without reaching there.

As Anna tries to finish Marina’s portrait and Marina tries to strike a warm conversation with Anna, we get to see a lot about their characters as if one is a touch stone for the other. Anna is trying to be as professional as she can, forget the old problems between Marina and her mother and concentrate on her work while Marina is trying to snatch every chance to get closer to her. Anna does her work and Marina is much impressed with it. She does she a lot of her feature for the first time only in Anna’s drawing. Towards the end of the day, Marina talks about Anna’s father but Anna shows the least interest.

Among other things, we forget about Marina and then she suddenly comes back to Anna’s life. The war has begun and Anna’s father is away at the battlefield making fortifications. Marian comes to Anna’s house when she finds that her own dacha is about to be attacked. She has brought a lot of food for Anna and tells her that food is the most important thing in war. Though she comes only for two days she neverl leaves and finally dies there. After two days, she asks Anna that she is free to go as volunteer to dig trenches and that she can take care of Kolya. Thus begins her close association with Kolya.

Both the women try their best to keep the rest of the family alive after Anna comes back from the trenches at the onset of winter and her father also returns wounded. There is a Andrei too living with them and he too is much impressed by Marina. Marina is still very energetic and she does a lot of domestic chores, quite a new thing for her who lived always with her old nurse.

Later in the story we find that she was pregnant from Mikhail. She met a doctor and effected an abortion. She had known it was a male foetus. She tells a fantasy about this to Anna and then she tells her what really happened. We feel that it was to win over her by giving Mikhail a son that Vera went ahead with her pregnancy so late in her life. But it is Marina who had the good fortune to bring take care of Vera’s death. Kolya has the same feelings for her and Mikhail, his father.

Marina fulfils one last thing in her life. She takes care of her lover till his death and even after his death for days since it takes several days for them to bury her. Before he is buried she too dies. Before she dies she gives them two bottles of jam which she was resisting to touch. But she dies without being able to touch the jam. Through her death she was able to help the rest of the family, with her rations and those two bottles of jam.

Marina’s is a tragic story which reminds us of what happens to artists in a totalitarian state and how they make is even worse by not being able to manage their emotional instability. In the present day society where family is the boundary of relationships, her love for Mikhail was not recognized even by Mikhail. She is able to hear his thoughts but he is quiet reticent near her. Everyone found fault with her. Only death was kind to her by putting an end to her life soon after Mikhail’s. They get to lie together in the same mass tomb, close to each other, a privilege she won over Vera. 

Who is Who 

Anna Mikhailovna Levin	Protagonist, Kolya’s mother, Vera’s and Mikhail’s father, nursery assistant at the local nursery school and works under Elizaveta Antonova, falls into a relationship with Andrei, her childhood friend, befriends Maria Petrovna, her father’s lover later in life, works hard at the dacha and saves her own and her brother’s life, very practical and hopeful, strong and aware of her own feelings and emotions and limitations, determined and persevering. She is 18 when her mother dies and 23 when the blockade happens.
Andrei	A dedicated doctor, talks medical science all the time, Romantic and falls in love with Anna. He comes from Siberia and stays with the Levins during the worst part of their life. He is very romantic and has great respect for Anna’s father and his work. One day on his way to hospital he almost gets lost in the snow storm. He is much loved by Kolya too.
Maria Petrovna	An actress, fall in love with her long time friend Mikhail after her gets married, tried to befriend Vera, her lover’s wife and fails, befriends her lover’s daughter Anna, lives with them during the siege and dies before it is all over. We are introduced to her through Anna’s memories of her childhood and then when Anna really goes to her dacha to draw her portrait as directed by her father. It is also interesting that Marina forces Anna to draw the portrait of her father as he lies dead. She was pregnant from her relationship with Mikhail before Anna was born, it was a boy but she opted for abortion. She was seeing a doctor who fell for her and she told Mikhail that she had had an abortion and he was upset and wrote some poems of grief and Vera found the poems insincere. She is not a supporter of Stalin and lives in her past glory. She is suspected to be a rebel and it is true. She later sort of sacrificed her life for Anna’s family by saving two bottles of jam for her and she couldn’t use them. A very interesting character, very much like Andrei and when Andrei hears that she sat near Mikhail’s dead body for days, he asks Anna whether she also would do the same. Anna refuses first and then yields.
Mikhail Ilyich Levin	A passionate writer, he speaks good German and French apart from Russian. The time he spent in two European countries as early as 1912 has enriched him and also made him a suspect. The government can always label him as man with suspicious foreign connections. He writes stories and lives on his translation and editing work. The writers’ committee has put a ban on his works. They found that his work is not as optimistic as Stalin expects it to be. It is full of gloom and doom. So, he keeps on writing and keeps them to himself. He is a lover of Pushkin’s poems and can recite most of them. When he dies Marina places a book in his hands and it is a book of poems by Pushkin. Marina sits near his dead body for days and when she dies, Anna and Andrei place their dead bodies together on the same bed and they are buried close together in a mass grave. They could never unite like this while they were alive. Anna says that Marina loved him but he only loved the fact that Marina loved him. He was very devoted to his wife and admired Marina for her artistic qualities and he is happy to see those qualities inherited by his daughter. His second child Kolya is very affectionate towards him as if he is his grandfather and not his father but we don’t see him showing much affection to his son Kolya. He dies after getting wounded in bombing. Andrei brings him home and the whole family takes care of him till he dies. His body is left like that for more than ten days since there is not one strong enough to drag it to the cemetery.
Kolya	He is only five or six and is unhealthy in several ways. He considers his sister like his mother and his father like his grandfather. His mother died at his birth. He is a typical child with his interest in war games, stubborn nature, hunger, insensitivity to the harsh realities of life. Anna says he is a typical Levin because of his studious nature. It is by pure luck and the care shown by the adults around him that he survives the blockade. When he is hungry, there are three things that Anna is able to provide him with during the blockade; a root of liquorice, her own fingers or a piece of his old leather school bag which was already used for soup a few days before!
Vera	Vera is a radiologist and she is totally aware of health issues but she relents to her husband’s need for a full fledged family and opts to get pregnant and dies delivering a child. Probably, when Mikhail heard that the foetus Marina aborted was male, it would have promoted Vera to try her luck at giving him a male child. A very amiable person, scholarly, unrelenting in personal matters, not so much of an artist, Vera is always upset about Marina and refuses to have anything to do with her. Paradoxically, it is Marina who gets to be with Mikhail on his eternal sleep. Anna has some sweet memories of her two-week life with her mother at the dacha during a vacation.
Olya	A student Vera was very fond of. After Vera’s death she lost her job and was suspected as a rebel and faced much hardship in life.
Elizaveta Antonova	Anna’s boss at the childcare centre; a typical bureaucrat who is not at all creative or sensitive and ironically she is in charge of very small children; she is a stern administrator as she throws her weight around; being a turncoat she manages to get to Moscow when the blockade gets worse and lives there safe and secure
General Hunger and General Winter	Though these are made to sound like the fantasy names of two kinds of hardships, later we find that the word general is used literally. Hunger and Winter affects everyone in general and they prove to be lacking in several humane qualities. They are the characters in a story written by Mikhail and it becomes a prophesy in his own life.
Darya Alexandrovna	She is Anna’s neighbour and she is the first one to inform Anna of the coming catastrophe. She demonstrates how people are going to behave from then onwards by refusing to giver  Anna  jar of honey she had promised.
Vasya Sokolov	Vasya Sokolov is one of the Sokolovs in Leningrad. He played building a dam with Anna when he was young. They had built it across a stream fed by melting snow. Anna’s hair grip falls into the dam and it disappears as their tiny dam breaks letting the water flow through. Later in life as Vasya is driving a government truck loaded with food for the starving village, his truck breaks down and all he needs is a hair grip to lengthen a circuit. He can’t find it and he dies in the snow with a small girl wail about a lost hair grip still ringing in  his ears.
Katya	She is a little 15 year old absent minded girl who dies in the trenches dug by the volunteers when a wall collapses on them. Being slow in movement, she is not able to move out of harm’s way. She was digging with Anna for more than a week and used to be very nice to her. They wrap her body in a some rag and throw it on the roadside.
Katinka	This is another young woman who is digging with Anna.
Evgenia	Evgenia another young woman used to be very optimistic about herself. She become a prostitute later on and comes to Anna’s help whenever she has some trouble in the market place or in the street.
Pavlov	He is in charge of the food supply or the rations during the blockade. His position is far from being a covetable one in that he is the one to take decisions about how much they are allowed to eat each day. He is the one has to prevent people from dying and at the same time hope that more people die to leave their rations for the living.
Zina	She is Anna’s neighbour and her husband who works at a factory in Leningrad has convinced her that the Levins are rebels and that they should have nothing to do with them. When her baby is weak, Anna decides to share Kolya’s ration with her though Mariana objects to this. A few days later she brings her baby who has been dead for three days to Anna and asks her to draw a portrait of her baby.
Fedya	Feyda, once against the Levins, is later moved by Anna’s selfish act of giving Kolya’s ration of sugar to his and Zina’s baby later patches up with her. He contacts kidney disease but he survives the blockade more dead than alive. His wife adores him.