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The Siege

(The Siege #1)

Helen Dunmore

4.03 · Rating details · 5,292 ratings · 489 reviews

Called "elegantly, starkly beautiful" by The New York Times Book Review, The Siege is Helen Dunmore's masterpiece. Her canvas is monumental -- the Nazis' 1941 winter siege on Leningrad that killed six hundred thousand -- but her focus is heartrendingly intimate.

One family, the Levins, fights to stay alive in their small apartment, held together by the unlikely courage and ...more

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Paperback, 304 pages

Published November 22nd 2002 by Grove Press (first published 2001)

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Jul 30, 2015 Dorie - Cats&Books :) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: all-time-favorite, historical-fiction

The novel revolves around five interwoven lives during the war when Leningrad was completely surrounded by the Germans. Winter came and there was no food or coal, it was a brutal winter and one half of the population of the city perished.

There are fantastic descriptions of what the city looked and felt like. The heroism of the people who were described was incredible. There is so much history to be learned for this book, love, determination, heroism, redemption, survival, it's all there.

Another ...more

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Jul 05, 2018 Katie rated it really liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction

First and foremost, I'd describe The Siege as a very claustrophobic novel. It takes place in Stalingrad during the German assault but I rarely had a sense of a city in this book. It often felt like the characters were living in virtual isolation in the midst of some dystopian wasteland. It always felt the world was far removed. When a character left the apartment I saw not city streets but a kind of anonymous rural landscape. I was never quite convinced the author could see Stalingrad; not once ...more

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Dec 05, 2019 Phrynne rated it really liked it

This turned out to be a deeply absorbing and fascinating story about the seige of Lenigrad. It describes in detail the terrible trauma of living through such an ordeal when half the population of the city died from starvation and the cold, and their bodies were buried in mass graves.

In The Siege we follow the day to day lives of a family living at the point of starvation and surviving on things such as wallpaper paste and tea made from water and a teaspoon of honey. At one point they eat a guin ...more

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Jan 04, 2018 Roger Brunyate rated it it was amazing

Shelves: history, russia-east-europe, ww2

Waiting for Spring

Helen Dunmore's marvelous novel (surely her best*) begins with Spring in 1941:

And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the current swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea.

It will end with Spring a year later, but by that time a large part of the Leningrad population will have died of cold or malnut Waiting for Spring

Helen Dunmore's marvelous novel (surely her best*) begins with Spring in 1941:

And then, just when it seemed as if summer would forget about Leningrad this year, everything changed. Ice broke loose from the compacted mass around the Strelka. Seagulls preened on the floes as the current swept them under bridges, and down the widening Neva to the sea.

It will end with Spring a year later, but by that time a large part of the Leningrad population will have died of cold or malnutrition, as the German armies hold the city in a relentless siege.

Dunmore begins gently, almost lyrically, in a small dacha outside the city. Not that everyday life is easy. Her protagonist, 23-year-old Anna Mikhailova Levin, has had to abandon her studies as an artist to look after her baby brother Kolya, when her mother died in childbirth five years before. Her father, a writer, has been blacklisted by the Soviet Writers' Union, so Anna must work in a daycare nursery to support them, suffering under a boss whose strict adherence to socialist doctrines does not disguise her dislike of children. It is a period when nobody dare speak openly, for fear of denunciation and arrest. But Russia still has a pact with Germany and war seems far off.

By the end of summer, all has changed. Germany invades Russia, and Leningrad is marked for destruction. The city's food warehouses are firebombed, its supply lines are cut, and strict food rationing is imposed. The citizens are mobilized to dig ditches, build defenses, work in factories, but slowly everything grinds to a halt; everyone now has one business only, survival. Anna holes up in a tiny apartment with Kolya, her father, and two others from outside the family: one is Marina Petrovna, a blacklisted actress and her father's old friend; the other, Andrei, is a young medical student, and Anna's first love. For love blooms against all odds; there may be little romance in two fully-dressed unwashed emaciated bodies huddling together for warmth, but there is something deeper: responsibility and caring. And the political climate changes also:

Words are regaining their meanings, after years of masquerade. Hunger means hunger, terror means terror, enemy means enemy. It is not like trying to read mirror writing any more. Everything gets clearer day by day, as siege and winter eat into their lives. The coils of Soviet life are losing their strength. There's only the present left, and it has burned away both past and future.

Dunmore's ability to paint simultaneously a vast canvas and an intimate portrait has naturally been compared to Tolstoy. But as the situation worsens, many succumb to the inevitable, but others find an impossible will to survive, I though more of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Dunmore does not quite reach his spiritual transcendence, but she has the same deep belief in the human spirit. Spring does come, and the authorities find ways to get some food in and inhabitants out. The siege will continue for eighteen more months, but its grip has been loosened. The survivors have rediscovered their humanity.

*The others I have read, in my personal order of preference, are: Zennor in Darkness, A Spell of Winter, and Talking to the Dead. ...more

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Jan 22, 2018 Roman Clodia rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

...The Fuehrer has decided to have Leningrad wiped from the face of the earth.

Such a harrowing read as Dunmore gives us an insight into what it was like to live through the first winter of the siege of Leningrad. In another author's hands this might have been lush with romantic melodrama, but Dunmore keeps it clean and cold, allowing the details to speak for themselves: Kolya's childish whining as he cannot understand why he can't have another spoonful of precious hoarded jam; the quiet yet ...more

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Jul 25, 2012 Lara rated it it was amazing

As I read this book on my couch after dinner, drinking a beer and enjoying the warm summer night, I found myself tensing against a monstrous cold that had become so physical that I couldn't unfeel it despite my knowledge that it was only words on paper.

In The Siege, Dunmore weaves together the huge and small stories of the siege of Leningrad in a way that reminded me of The Grapes of Wrath and The Book Thief. It's very effective; the grand descriptions of the land and the cold create a mythical ...more

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Feb 08, 2018 Nadin Adel rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: novel, borrowed

"The high-up ones start things, but it's us who have to finish them off."

The bottom line of all wars!

I have always liked reading novels reflecting the war and the wounds it inflicts on ordinary people's lives. This is a story celebrating love, life and survival through the second world war, World War II.

First, as a rookie reader in history, let's start with some information to backup our historic background information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_W...

And know more about the siege of Leningrad (which is currently known as Saint Petersburg) from here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_o...

Leningrad, the city that showcased the scenes of our passionate story of fear, courage, loss, and love!

How this country suffered due to the siege and lost its population in the process. Suffering from winter and starvation. Seeing your dear ones die in front of your eyes, cold-bloodedly!

It is the story of Anna, the girl who lost her mother when her younger brother was born, Kolya. Living in Russian country with routine life that kills every dreamer, while knowing nothing about what the fate hides for them.

Anna's father, the writer who is abandoned and rejected, due to his pertinence and thoughts. He is a man with a background.

Vera, Anna's mother, who died before the story even starts, and starting with her death a series of complications for Anna. Anna is stuck to be mother-like from an early stage of her life. Taking care of Kolya became her job, and actually, what she is living for.

Andrei, the man that meets Anna's father during the war, as a doctor, he keeps him alive healing his wounds fighting the Germans, and keeps his writings safe to deliver it back to his daughter, Anna. Where they meet for the first time.

Marina, the banned actress. The lady that fought for what she loved. The actress who has many stories to tell. One for the audience, and the other which is the only true story. A love story!

All these characters, the war forces them to live under one ceiling, in one home. There home!

Who can tell that wars can bring any good. Wars only destroys humanity. Nourishes hatred within our souls.

...more

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Apr 01, 2017 Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2008

Story set immediately before and during the first year of the Siege of Leningrad - it focuses around 5 characters: a dissident writer Mikhail, his nursery-school teacher daughter Anna, his son Kolya (as his Doctor wife - the strong willed Vera - died in childbirth, Anna effectively is Kolya's mother) and Marina (a reclusive and discredited artist friend of Mikhail, who comes to live with them after the siege and who it becomes clear was a once lover of Mikhail) and Andrei (a Doctor who works on Story set immediately before and during the first year of the Siege of Leningrad - it focuses around 5 characters: a dissident writer Mikhail, his nursery-school teacher daughter Anna, his son Kolya (as his Doctor wife - the strong willed Vera - died in childbirth, Anna effectively is Kolya's mother) and Marina (a reclusive and discredited artist friend of Mikhail, who comes to live with them after the siege and who it becomes clear was a once lover of Mikhail) and Andrei (a Doctor who works on a volunteer force with Mikhail, visits Anna to tell her he is wounded but OK and then gradually becomes her lover and eventually moves into their appartment). Another two characters (literally in a fable from the Napoleonic attack on Russia told by her father) and figuratively throughout are hunger and the winter.

The book is mainly in the present tense which seems to fit well the immediacy of the story and the day-to-day (if not hour-to-hour nature of their existence and fight for survival). Anna is normally the main character (despite the book being written in the third person) so the occasional sections shifting to another character (in particular the passages switching to Pavlov - the logistical planner for Leningrad's hopelessly inadequate food supplies - can jar).

Similarly as the siege takes hold and food supplies dwindle and almost disappear the book and characters close in on themselves and their appartment and on simple survival and the need for sustenance and this fits the author's terse but poetic writing style.

A haunting tale which I found incredibly engrossing (at the time one of my very young children wasn't eating very well and I found it hard to not somehow think that this was a crucial matter of her health; also I was tired and felt reluctant to succumb to sleep because it might be like surrendering to the cold and not waking up again) as well as beautifully written. The story is extremely readable - easy to and best read in a few sittings.

Some of the details are terrible - such as the baby opposite who dies of malnutrition from its young mother's inadvertent ignorance and neglect, the bodies left dead in houses (given the cold there and the impossibility of burial). The description of cold and hunger and its physical and psychological effects (with Andrei acting as an excuse to introduce scientific detail) are shocking but compelling.

There are great reference to Russian literature (especially Pushkin), the author describes the Baltic seasons beautifully and gives a good insight into Stalinist Russia. ...more

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Aug 04, 2020 Fiona rated it liked it

Shelves: historical-fiction, e-books, just-not-for-me

The 3 star rating reflects my reaction to this book rather than its quality. I can appreciate that this is not a book to be enjoyed as such given its horrific subject matter but I really didn’t enjoy the experience of reading it. I found the narrative stilted and too episodic and I didn’t feel particular empathy for any of the characters. It was always going to be depressing but I found it turgidly so by halfway through and I am very grateful to have finished. Having read other reviews, I’m defi ...more

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May 22, 2015 Caroline Bock rated it really liked it

Excellent historical novel, which opens in 1941 Leningrad at the precipice of the German invasion, is the story of Anna, an artist and her family and their survival in the siege. Moving. Terrific read for anyone interested in historical dramas of this time period, or who just like a gripping, beautifully written story of survival and love.

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Jan 26, 2016 Craig rated it really liked it

Odd to be reading this book when the radio is reporting women and children starving in the besieged Syrian town of Madaya. We never learn the lessons of history.

This book tells the story of another siege. That of Leningrad in 1941. It was encircled by the invading German army for an incredible three years during the second world war. The book tells the story of the Levin family. Principally 23 year old Anna, who has to care for her wounded and enfeebled father Mikhail, and her 5 year old brother ...more

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Dec 05, 2016 Claire Huston rated it really liked it

Beautiful and rightfully bleak. 4/5 stars.

This review was originally posted on my book blog.

I got a copy of this from the library. It sat on the table and stared at me for four weeks. I couldn’t bring myself to progress past the opening page on which there is a reproduction of the order from Nazi High Command for Leningrad (St Petersburg) to be wiped off the face of the earth. I had a feeling reading this one would take strength, and I was right.

Obviously, any book which attempts to faithfully r ...more

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Mar 11, 2019 Heidi rated it really liked it

Shelves: read-in-2019, ww2

I am a big fan of historical fiction set during WWII and will never miss the opportunity to explore this topic from new angles. The Siege of Leningrad features in one of my all-time favourite historical novels, The Bronze Horseman series by Paullina Simons, and I was very keen to explore it through the eyes of another author.

Dunmore’s writing style is unique and compelling and she manages to put a whole new perspective on that terrible historical event for me. Whilst we do have an MC in Anna Le I am a big fan of historical fiction set during WWII and will never miss the opportunity to explore this topic from new angles. The Siege of Leningrad features in one of my all-time favourite historical novels, The Bronze Horseman series by Paullina Simons, and I was very keen to explore it through the eyes of another author.

Dunmore’s writing style is unique and compelling and she manages to put a whole new perspective on that terrible historical event for me. Whilst we do have an MC in Anna Levin, a 22-year old Russian girl who lives in a small apartment with her father and younger brother, Dunmore’s novel explores the effects on the siege on the general population of Leningrad by giving small snapshots into many other lives that have been affected by cold, hunger and fear. Her vivid descriptions of the era and the terrible conditions instantly transported me into a harsh and unforgiving landscape where death claimed hundreds of thousands of people over one terrible winter. I particularly appreciated the viewpoint of the man having to make decisions on how to distribute the dwindling rations fairly to a starving population, which beautifully described the terrible decisions that had to be made behind the scenes. It is obvious that Dunmore has done her research, and her descriptions of the physical manifestations of hunger and malnutrition are realistic and haunting.

If I had to describe this novel with one word only, it would be: humbling. It is difficult to imagine the pain and terror of a population under siege, people starving and freezing to death and unable to escape the trap of a bombarded and surrounded city. Yet Dunmore manages to convey these feelings perfectly in her novel, which plays out like a series of short black-and-white newsreels that will haunt you for a long time to come. I found Dunmore’s style of giving us a large, sweeping picture of the city and its inhabitants interspersed by more intimate moments with Anna and her family very effective in conveying the terrors of war. In Anna we have the embodiment of resilience and the human will to survive, which managed to make the overall theme one of hope when it seems that all is lost. All in all, I thought that The Siege was an interesting, flawlessly researched and well written novel that will appeal to lovers of historical fiction with an interest in WWII. I now look forward to reading the next book in the series, which follows Anna’s life after the war.

*blog* *facebook* *instagram* ...more

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Jul 14, 2012 Michele Brenton rated it did not like it

I've been given this as a book club read. I've read the first chapter and I am distinctly unimpressed.

I don't like books that break the fourth wall. It annoys me, destroys the illusion and makes me feel patronised. It was bad enough when Enid Blyton did it - but I can't stomach it in an adult read unless it is done for comedic effect or it is a memoir/first person narrative and the writer is speaking in real time. I can't accept it in a piece of work firmly set in the 1940s.

This single sentence ...more

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Sep 03, 2010 Esil rated it really liked it

I wavered between 3 and 4 stars. Given its subject matter, it's hard for me to say that I enjoyed this book. I certainly found it interesting and very well written. Dunmore intensely evokes the horror of the circumstances of people in Leningrad in 1941. And in this respect, it is essentially a book about hunger; how hunger and starvation defined every moment and feeling of the characters in that time and place. The writing even simulates the lightheadedness, disjointed thinking and hallucination ...more

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May 14, 2014 Steven Z. rated it really liked it

On June 22, 1941 Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. The Germans surprised the Russians who suffered enormous casualties and retreated into the interior. The Russians had been warned by the British of Nazi intentions, but Joseph Stalin ignored the British, reasoning that London wanted to create another front in its war against Germany. Stalin did expect Hitler to break the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939 but he believed he had more time to prepare. Stalin was i
On June 22, 1941 Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. The Germans surprised the Russians who suffered enormous casualties and retreated into the interior. The Russians had been warned by the British of Nazi intentions, but Joseph Stalin ignored the British, reasoning that London wanted to create another front in its war against Germany. Stalin did expect Hitler to break the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August, 1939 but he believed he had more time to prepare. Stalin was in such shock as German troops marched through Russia that he disappeared for ten days, probably fearing that why would the Russian people support a murdering dictator, but the reality was that Stalin, was their murdering dictator and Hitler was not! The support for Stalin and the “Russian Motherland” emerges in Helen Dunmore’s novel, THE SIEGE which takes place during the siege of Leningrad that lasted from September 1941 to 1944. As New York Times reporter, Harrison Salisbury labeled the events in Leningrad, “The 900 Days,” the title of his book about the city that suffered the death of over 650,000 people. Dunmore’s novel provides insight into the lives of every day Russians as they struggled through starvation, fear of German artillery shells and bombs, the lack of any bureaucratic relief by city officials, and the constant paranoia that they could not trust their own government. The reader is presented with a number of characters; the family of Anna, her younger brother Kolya who she raises after her mother died in child birth, and her father Mikhail, a writer and poet who has been rejected by the Soviet Writers Union because he has not adapted to the tenets of socialist realism, and Marina, an aging actress who comes to live with them. We are also exposed to Andrei; a young doctor who reports the horrors of the siege from Leningrad’s remaining hospitals, and other characters like Dimitri Pavlov, who is sent from Moscow to address the city’s food shortages. Pavlov realizes that Leningrad, a city mostly of islands, similar to Stockholm, is now a “stone island,” and “has got to depend upon its own resources” to survive. (198) what are those negligible resources? A government ukase suggests the nutritional value of wallpaper paste that once boiled can provide sustenance for those who are starving.
The story is set when Mikhail’s wife Vera dies in childbirth, thrusting motherhood on her daughter Anna before the German invasion. The paranoia of Stalin’s Russia before the arrival of the Germans is readily apparent from the outset of the book. Anna, a nursery school teacher assistant, fears raising her voice at work as Kolya is play acting the Russian Civil War between the White and Red soldiers because she might be heard by her boss who she fears will denounce her. The Great Terror of the 1930s is in the air as it seems everyone is afraid that someone will denounce them to the authorities. Stalin has warned his people that “wreckers, traitors, enemies, and saboteurs….had infiltrated the Party itself, and were among the elite, masking themselves as irreproachable Party activists and committee members. But how could you ever prove it wasn’t a mask, Anna wonders. Only by ripping off your own flesh…” (21)

Dunmore provides a description of how Leningraders attempted to deal with the German advance through Anna’s eyes as she works on digging trenches and tank traps. The bombing of food warehouses and Leningrad’s geographical isolation make any defensive preparations useless in dealing with the siege. Leningrad’s citizens are urbanites who only know how to forage for food by queuing up at food centers, not by using what the earth provides. One might ask why Leningraders were able to survive as well as they did, probably because they had experience of starvation in the 1930s when Stalin’s collectivization policies created the lack of food. In a way Stalinist agricultural policies might be considered somewhat normal in the minds of Soviet citizens. The queuing before the war for food and goods created a mentality that was put to good use during the siege and created the false hope that food would soon be available. Leningrad’s main problem was its “impossible arithmetic” for a city with 3.5 million people with little food resources other than wallpaper paste and boiling leather to obtain fluid to make soup. Leningrad is a city of “a million flailing hands” as people constantly reach for food. (146)

To best understand Leningrad’s plight I would recommend that the reader place a map of Leningrad in front of them to understand how difficult it was to supply the city. Lake Ladoga to the east was useful once it froze during the winter months, but the Germans made it very hazardous for any truck convoys as they continued to bomb the ice. The result is the grim process of the black market that Anna has to deal with to obtain anything. People become animals as they try to survive. In a way the best means of survival is sleep because it provides an escape from hunger. As Anna points out “you should never wake anyone once they’ve gotten away, deep into their dreams, where there is food.” (189)

The relationship between Anna and Andrei is a tender one that is developed nicely by the author. Considering the conditions one would think that love would have difficulty flourishing, but in this instance Anna and Andrei’s needs are such that their relationship becomes a life line for survival. Having survived the winter of 1941-1942, Leningraders were greeted by spring and improved food rations and supplies. Dunmore describes the scenes of people planting vegetables in city parks and the optimism that those who were still alive would survive the German siege. Dunmore leaves the reader in the spring of 1942, but for the remaining population of Leningrad the war would continue for two more years. If you find the time to read THE SIEGE, Dunmore’s sequel THE BETRAYAL will not disappoint. If you are interested in the history of the siege of Leningrad I would recommend Michael Jones’ LENINGRAD: STATE OF SIEGE
...more

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Feb 09, 2019 Carole P. Roman rated it it was amazing

Harrowing tale about the siege of Leningrad. Anna Levin is the overworked daughter of a writer, who's been blacklisted from the Soviet government for producing inciteful work. Her mother dead these past five years in childbirth has left her to take care of both her little brother and disengaged father. She works a menial job as a nursery school aide and feels worthless compared to her intellectual parents. War changes everything. Anna is forced to become the leader of her small family, scavengin ...more

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Oct 30, 2020 Aubrey rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: reality-check, antidote-think-twice-all, reviewed, prose-prose-prose, 1-read-on-hand, antidote-think-twice-read, 4-star, r-2020, r-goodreads

3.5/5

Now we know that they don't just want to defeat us. They want to destroy us. Nothing in Leningrad matters to them at all. Not a stone, or a child. Carthage must be destroyed.
But there's freedom in knowing it. We can't make deals with them any more. So much for our pact. We have no choice left. We have to resist.

It's a heroic struggle, of course it is. Everything's heroic. You can take that for granted, but it's not the point.

I may lower the rating for this some time in the future. It ac 3.5/5

Now we know that they don't just want to defeat us. They want to destroy us. Nothing in Leningrad matters to them at all. Not a stone, or a child. Carthage must be destroyed.
But there's freedom in knowing it. We can't make deals with them any more. So much for our pact. We have no choice left. We have to resist.

It's a heroic struggle, of course it is. Everything's heroic. You can take that for granted, but it's not the point.

I may lower the rating for this some time in the future. It acts on a principle similar to that of 'Fugitive Pieces' and various other works that take on monumentally tragic events of history with especially pretty prose or clever philosophizings. It's not as if such subjects have to be treated with a no-nonsense approach on the level of narratology, but such an overemphasized aesthetic can interfere with a reader's own engagement with the piece, much as a sad scene in a movie can be turned ridiculous by too swelling an orchestral accompaniment in the background. Reading this in the wake of at least one work that unsuccessfully attempted to do this with the Holocaust, I've become aware of my own bias in the matter, so when it comes to this work that managed to slip by my otherwise cynical defenses with the right rhythm, word choice, and pacing, shouldn't I be as strict with it as I was with others (especially when this work isn't coming to me through translation)? Were it not for the writing, would I have been more critical of the odd flatness that comes from the noble/evil character dichotomy, or the British inflections that jarringly reminded one of where this story was actually coming from? Hard to say, but then again, what is a tale if not its writing?

The history of Leningrad, Petrograd, St Petersburg may stretch back to the moment Peter put his iron mark on the marshes of the Neva, but you can't eat history.

So here we are in the middle of nowhere, in the path of the German advance, equipped with entrenching tools instead of the machine-guns and rifles we need, but still arguing about the martyr status of the Decembrists' wives. Nothing, to me, more effectively sums up both our strength and our weakness.

While I haven't read many books of Russian history and even fewer on the siege of Leningrad, I've enough under my belt to be able to see the difference between a script translated direct from the people's source and the one that, ultimately, is cobbled together from notes, pictures, and experiences that will forever be drawn fifth or sixth hand on a cultural level, if that. Now, Dunmore names Ginzburg's Journey into the Whirlwind and its sequel as one of her sources, and I can see that shining through especially in the quote above. Still, as horribly as she draws the build up and break down of the German's march on Russia in WWII, it still comes off as oddly sanitized in many places. Even on a fictional level, it would hardly fit in to the written timeline of the country between Goldman's Living My Life (the unabridged Vol II, mind you) and Alexievich's Secondhand Time for reasons I cannot adequately define even to my own levels of satisfaction. As one can tell from the numerous quantity of quotes I've chosen to include, this was certainly a pleasurable read on the simple level of first word's glance, but the fact that I already have the sequel on my shelves is the result of past levels of interest, not present ones. Would it have helped had the characters been less uniform or the plot been less straightforward in its tragedy, despite my usually not paying much attention to either, or did this need more causal meanderings that tried to take on eternity in addition to this period of time in Leningrad in its determinations of which truths have worth and which do not? I can think of any number of works whose attempts at any of these methods have miserably backfired, so, all I can say is, while I enjoyed this on its surface level, I know I'd derive far more holistic engagement out of reading the works it lists as its sources.

The problem is that when so many are dying, the death penalty loses its edge.

You have a certain idea of yourself: what you'll do, and what you won't do. It's hard enough to hold on to it.

This review is basically 'I liked it, but are the reasons for why I liked it good enough,' which is so pointlessly exhausting that I should stop while I'm still ahead. The work isn't something that I see sustaining itself in the future, but it serves as an introduction to this period of Russian history to someone who's not ready to venture in the world of translation and/or nonfiction. It's tragic alright, but oddly unmoored from the reality it springs from; it's not as if I expected the characters to be arguing politics or quoting poets every two seconds, but there was just something missing from the Soviet view that I've picked up glimpses of in various nonfictional tracts. Not the weakest book award nominee that I've read, but it does show the marks of having been tailored as such, which also isn't helped by the fact that this could very well be shelved with the young adult works in the author's repertoire were it not for a few sexually explicit discussions of the human body. An easy enough read then with some noteworthy turns of phrase, but there are many more works that render the subject material better, and this would have done more for me back when I first added it nearly a decade ago then it does now.

From every row of wooden houses, from every apartment building, shop, museum, library, factory, hospital, orphanage, school, the corpses of winter have now been removed, leaving empty, sunlit apartments, unswept doorsteps, classes without their teachers, teachers with classes of ten children instead of thirty, empty seats at library desks, shops that don't open, poems that will not be written, operations that will fail to be performed, and little boats that will not, this season, be uncovered, repainted, and launched from shallow sandy shores on to the waters of the Baltic.

...more

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Jul 28, 2010 Liviu rated it it was ok

Shelves: mainstream, read_2010

Since the sequel was just longlisted for the Booker and I dimly remembered reading and disliking this one a long time ago, i wanted to make sure and indeed I remembered it well; the main issue of the novel for me and the one that basically made it a fail is the world building; the 1941 Leningrad just does not feel Russian or Soviet; it can be "city generic TM" under very "nasty circumstances TM" in which "characters TM" try and survive...

It may have literary qualities, but it would have better ...more

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Dec 06, 2019 JimZ rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Unfortunately Helen Dunmore passed away on June 5, 2017. I did like The Siege....my favorite amongst the books I read of hers. As I recall she was one of the earl winners of the Orange Prize.

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Jan 26, 2014 Amelia rated it it was amazing

Shelves: historical-fiction, amazingwhatyoufindincharityshops, inspiring-moving-thought-provoking

As a rule, I'm not one of those people who believes we have to be happy for being born into a time and part of the world where most people have healthcare, running water, heating, food on their tables... It's hard enough being depressed without feeling guilty about it too. But books like The Siege really bring it home that actually we are lucky. It is set during the blockade of Leningrad during which an estimated 1.5 million people died. It is a tale of survival, but not everyone survives. The l ...more

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Mar 01, 2020 Leah rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, abandoned, 2020

OK, I accept that most people think this is wonderful so it can't be the book - it must be me. But I'm bored out of my skull and can't bear to go on with it. I feel nothing for any of these characters. They simply haven't come to life. At 34%, there is no story - just endless descriptions of life with the occasional untragic tragedy thrown in in an attempt to up the emotional impact. But there is no emotional impact about the deaths of people we have been told nothing about. It's like the guys i ...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Chris Demer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-novel

This is a wonderful story of love amid deprivation and war during the siege of Leningrad. All the more meaningful because I have visited St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and taken the walking tour of the siege.
The Author exquisitely describes the life there - in the summer at the dacha and the planting, writing, drawing. And then the return to the city and the growing awareness that the Germans have surrounded it, constantly shelling, but more importantly cutting off the food supply to millions of pe ...more

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Jun 04, 2017 Nancy rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: historical-fiction, ww2, russia

I've read several of Helen Dunmore's historical fiction novels and they're all good but there always seems to be something missing at the end. This one was no different. I found the story of the siege of Leningrad really interesting. There is no doubt that it is one aspect of World War II which I didn't know a great deal about. The characters were good and the tension which builds over that long winter of 1941/42 was compelling. But I found the ending was a bit of a damp squib. A pity, really as ...more

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Nov 24, 2011 Fionnuala added it

Impressive for the way Dunmore conveys what it must have been like to live through a seige, in this case the seige of Leningrad during WWII. Less impressive when it comes to the characters. I failed to believe in them fully and I don't know why. Was it because she used names from Tolstoy which caused me to make comparisons subconsciously? I would appreciate hearing other people's reactions. ...more

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Jun 10, 2015 Roddy rated it it was ok

Contrary to what is said on the cover, "The Seige" is none of the following:

Magnificent.
Brilliantly imagined.
Profoundly moving.
What you would expect of the result of a long fascination with Russian history, it's people and culture.

It is dull.

If you want to read profound writing on human deprivation and suffering then you'd be better off with Primo Levi or a good history book. ...more

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Jun 11, 2010 Dem rated it liked it

Review to follow

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Jan 19, 2021 Jessica Haider rated it really liked it

Shelves: life-during-wartime, fiction, historical-fiction, hazy-shade-of-winter

I enjoy reading winter reads in January. The Siege by Helen Dunmore was published almost 20 years ago and was short listed for the Women’s Fiction Prize. It tells the story of Anna, a young woman living In Leningrad with her father and baby brother during the winter when the city has under Siege by the Germans. This was a brutal and emotional yet beautiful read about love and perseverance during wartime.

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Jan 21, 2018 Mark rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Helen Dunmore’s novel ‘The Siege’ is a fantastic novel. A piece of historical fiction that will forever stand as a defining work and fitting testament to the endurance of the human spirit in the face of unbelievable suffering of millions of ordinary people in Leningrad, soldiers and citizens, at the hands of two odious regimes in the Nazi-Soviet conflict of World War Two. She tells the story of the siege which lasted for 872 days with appalling human suffering and extraordinary loss of civilian Helen Dunmore’s novel ‘The Siege’ is a fantastic novel. A piece of historical fiction that will forever stand as a defining work and fitting testament to the endurance of the human spirit in the face of unbelievable suffering of millions of ordinary people in Leningrad, soldiers and citizens, at the hands of two odious regimes in the Nazi-Soviet conflict of World War Two. She tells the story of the siege which lasted for 872 days with appalling human suffering and extraordinary loss of civilian life from the intimate perspective of the Levins, a small dysfunctional family of the Russian intelligentsia.

With the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ (Alexander Solzhenitsyn) this Helen Dunmore text should be essential reading for any student studying Twentieth Century Dictatorships or Stalin and the Soviet State.

Better than any textbook that tries to explain the mind set of petty officialdom and the evils of totalitarianism, by defining the role of the NKVD and by producing facts and figures counting the millions of innocent folk incarcerated in police cells, or banished to Siberia, and more vivid than any horrific accounts of Beria and his henchmen creating a climate of paranoia through encouraging an evil system of neighbours reporting and denouncing one another, this novel shows the Petrograd citizens stubbornly and bravely fighting their corner despite realising they have been misled. Their idealism betrayed. Their ideological beliefs and their sinister police state laid bare and shown to be a flawed regime, blind to its own ineptitude and mindless depravity.

Through sheer will power, bravery and resourcefulness Leningrad citizens are shown desperately clinging to life, despite the ruthless efficiency of the German Army, now encircling the city and pounding the outer suburbs with shell fire, but the Russian people find the resilience to continue the struggle refusing to submit.

The authenticity of Dunmore’s visceral narrative lays bare the crushing dead weight of bureaucratic political correctness, that penetrated the psyche of all Russian citizens, with its crushing inhuman formality, obliterating common sense and human decency by its blind slavish adherence to misguided officialdom. Petty officials adhere to the party line as they lay down their lives.

Dunmore conveys through marvellous passages of description the human spirit in its darkest corner. The reader feels the onset of the Russian winter, and by extraordinary degree virtually experiences the plunging thermometer, in a way that the bald statistics (say, Pavlov in charge of the City Administration needed 200 tons of supplies per day, and was only getting 50, or that the temperature had fallen to minus 40 or that 40,000 fatalities were expected every month) never could.

The descent of the poor Leningrad souls into the living hell of slow starvation in their beautiful but blighted city, paralysed without power, and trapped without heat and food, is a haunting depiction that makes this epic work wide ranging in its scope and magnificent in its achievement. Anna Mikhailova and her little brother, Kolya, Andrei and Evgenia, Marina Petrovna and Mikhail Levin, and his long dead long suffering wife, Vera, will all live long in the memory.

This is truly great literature. ...more

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Jun 13, 2011 Joyce Bostock rated it it was ok

I couldn't get into this book. ...more

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About Helen Dunmore

Helen Dunmore

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I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. In a large family you hear a great many stories. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints I was born in December 1952, in Yorkshire, the second of four children. My father was the eldest of twelve, and this extended family has no doubt had a strong influence on my life, as have my own children. In a large family you hear a great many stories. You also come to understand very early that stories hold quite different meanings for different listeners, and can be recast from many viewpoints.

Poetry was very important to me from childhood. I began by listening to and learning by heart all kinds of rhymes and hymns and ballads, and then went on to make up my own poems, using the forms I’d heard. Writing these down came a little later.

I studied English at the University of York, and after graduation taught English as a foreign language in Finland.

At around this time I began to write the poems which formed my first poetry collection, The Apple Fall, and to publish these in magazines. I also completed two novels; fortunately neither survives, and it was more than ten years before I wrote another novel.

During this time I published several collections of poems, and wrote some of the short stories which were later collected in Love of Fat Men. I began to travel a great deal within the UK and around the world, for poetry tours and writing residences. This experience of working in many different countries and cultures has been very important to my work. I reviewed poetry for Stand and Poetry Review and later for The Observer, and subsequently reviewed fiction for The Observer, The Times and The Guardian. My critical work includes introductions to the poems of Emily Brontë, the short stories of D H Lawrence and F Scott Fitzgerald, a study of Virginia Woolf’s relationships with women and Introductions to the Folio Society's edition of Anna Karenina and to the new Penguin Classics edition of Tolstoy's My Confession.

During the 1980s and early 1990s I taught poetry and creative writing, tutored residential writing courses for the Arvon Foundation and took part in the Poetry Society's Writer in Schools scheme, as well as giving readings and workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons and every other kind of place where a poem could conceivably be welcome. I also taught at the University of Glamorgan, the University of Bristol's Continuing Education Department and for the Open College of the Arts.

In the late 1980s I began to publish short stories, and these were the beginning of a breakthrough into fiction. What I had learned of prose technique through the short story gave me the impetus to start writing novels. My first novel for children was Going to Egypt, published in 1992, and my first novel for adults was Zennor in Darkness, published in 1993, which won the McKitterick Prize. This was also my first researched novel, set in the First World War and dealing with the period when D H Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived in Zennor in Cornwall, and came under suspicion as German spies.

My third novel, A Spell of Winter, won the inaugural Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996, and since then I have published a number of novels, short story collections and books for children. Full details of all these books are available on this website. The last of The Ingo Quartet, The Crossing of Ingo, was published in paperback in Spring 2009.

My seventh novel, The Siege (2001) was shortlisted both for the Whitbread Novel Award and the Orange Prize for Fiction. This was another researched novel, which grew from a lifelong love of Russian history, culture and literature. It is is set in Leningrad during the first year of the siege of the city by German forces, which lasted for 880 days from the fall of Mga on 30th August 1941. The Siege has been translated into Russian by Tatyana Averchina, and extracts have been broadcast on radio in St Petersburg. House of Orphans was published in 2006, and in 2008 Counting the Stars. Its central characters are the Roman poet Catullus, who lived during the last years of the Republic, ...more

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“They wanted spring, of course they wanted it, more than anything. They longed for sun with every pore of their skin. But spring hurts. If spring can come, if things can be different, how can you bear what your existence has been?” — 10 likes

“They stand close for a while, not touching, but breathing each other's breath. The city is silent now, as if for peace.” — 1 likes

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