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Synopsis

Leningrad, September 1941.  Hitler orders German forces to surround the city at the start of the most dangerous, desperate winter in its history.  For two pairs of lovers - young Anna and Andrei, Anna's novelist father and actress Marina - the siege becomes a battle for survival.  They will soon discover what it is like to be so hungry you boil shoe leather to make soup, so cold you burn furniture and books.  But this is not just a struggle to exist, it is also a fight to keep the spark of hope alive...

The Siege is a brilliantly imagined novel of war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives and a profoundly moving celebration of love, life and survival.  This novel is the fruit of Helen Dunmore's long fascination with Russian history, its people and its culture, and marks a major breakthrough in her writing.

Reviews

Customer Review: 11 September 2002

Reviewer: A reader from Manchester, England

A harrowing, beautifully written account of the siege of Leningrad. The book is well researched and very interesting, but it is minutiae of life, literally staying alive, which Helen Dunmore describes so well. The book concentrates mainly on one family and how they cope during this ordeal - it shows the ingenuity of people pushed to the limit of endurance. It is a moving and humane book which has kindled my interest in this period of Russian history. I have long been a fan of Helen Dunmore's work - but in my opinion this novel is the best thing she has written - a brilliant return to the form of Burning Bright and A Spell of Winter.

Critic Review:

'A magnificent novel of the Siege of Leningrad. Poignant, terrifying and beautifully written.'
Antony Beevor

Interview

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.

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