Analysis Of The Madonnas Of Leningrad

Professor Peirce

English

4/8/2014

The Art of Literature

The Madonna’s of Leningrad is a very well written piece of literature by Debra Deen. The author’s use of flashbacks, point of view, and vivid imagery takes you on a trip with the main character Marina as her Alzheimer’s claims her memory and she drifts between present day and The Siege of Leningrad. Deen shows a picture of what living with Alzheimer’s would be like and while Marina’s short term memory is failing she can still vividly remember details from her past. Formalist criticism can be applied to The Madonna’s of Leningrad the authors style of writing leaves some details to the readers mind while using literary elements to paint a story of a woman reliving her past slipping into Alzheimer’s.

In one scene after her husband Dimitri and Marina eat breakfast she begins making more eggs “what are you doing? He asks. She notes the dishes in his hands, the smear of dried yolk in a bowl, the evidence that she has eaten already, perhaps no more than ten minutes ago. I’m still hungry. In fact her hunger has vanished, but she says it nonetheless.” (citation). The reader does not know Marina has Alzheimer’s at this point, the quote alludes to her declining memory while giving the reader an experience they can relate to. Everyone has lapses in memory. Unfortunately in Marina’s case it is the case this foreshadowed the reader finding out she has Alzheimer’s. The disease results in progressive memory loss. Deens writing helps paint a picture of what living with Alzheimer’s is like. The book is written from two points of view. One is a narrator that is never named and the second is Marina when she is older. During the flashbacks the point of view is still as marina only younge...

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... blue dress and quickly she is taken back to the Hermitage as she is taking down the portrait of Gainsborough's Duchess of Beau fort and her robin’s egg blue dress. The color blue seems to transport her back almost to another reality back in her memory palace. A time when she was living under The Hermitage in Leningrad, her job was to remove and pack away the thousands and thousands of delicate painting in the museum. She was tasked with removing the paintings from their frames which they then left hanging on the walls was they took shelter in the basement. The empty frames were a big symbol in the book as this is where Marina constructed her memory palace a place she often found herself slipping to as she got older. The frames are empty almost like Marinas short term mental capacity but she fills the emptiness with what she knows, the artwork that was once there.