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Summer In The Winter Garden |
| By Natasha Templeton
(Random House, New Zealand, 1999) Reviewed by Dave Perry |
“ adezhda is back at the beginning.” And so begins Natasha Templeton’s second novel, Summer In The Winter Garden. Nadezhda is revisiting the country that has shaped her. Her last experience of Russia was retreating with the Germans as they were pushed back by the advancing Russians. Nadezha lives in New Zealand and is in Russia to do an academic work on poet Anna Akhmatova. Akhmatova’s haunting poetry prefaces many of the chapters of the novel.
Although Summer In The Winter Garden starts in the present, most of the novel is concerned with the past. Its pages are filled with the harrowing tale of the Shubin family during the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Much of the narrative concerns the lives of Nadezhda’s mother Sofya and her sister Katya. Their mother, Anna Palovna, also has a large part to play in the story. Anna is the family matriarch, her religious heritage lives at the heart of her morality and ethical viewpoints. She resents the Bolshevik heretics and loves to tell Nadezhda about religious tradition. Anna Palovna represents the old Russia. Her husband died during the 1917 revolution. Sadly, her life will be eclipsed by the new Russia of Stalin and the violence of Hitler’s invasion. Sofya and Katya are characters who come to symbolize the strength and courage of the Russian people during World War II. Sofya suffers at the hands of the NKVD and Katya looks after Nadezhda’s two children, Vera and Nadezdha, during the struggle for Leningrad. The personal cost of the purges and the war to both sisters makes bleak reading, but serves to demonstate the strength of the human spirit under the deprivations of war, hunger, and climactic harshness. Templeton’s minor characters, like Sofya’s husband Alexei, Katya’s husband Misha, and the tragic lovers Slava and Nina, are all well-constructed and thoroughly believable victims of this well-crafted story. At times the weather forces itself to the foreground of Summer In The Winter Garden. The Russian winter of 1942 was supposed to be one of the worst in its history. Unfortunately for the inhabitants of Leningrad, the harsh winter chose to visit during one of the worst sieges in the history of warfare. Leningrad became cutoff and the only supply line to the city was across the frozen Lake Ladoga. The inhabitants of Leningrad where left to struggle with the privations of sub-zero tempertures, Nazi bombardment, and famine. Party officials chose to destroy food stores and then evacuate their families from the doomed city. At the height of the siege, thousands of Leningrader’s died each day from hunger. The trials faced by the Shubin family must have been typical of the fate of many Russians during World War II. Russia suffered the highest cost in terms of lives lost than any other nation. Essentially, though, this is the story of a family in a time of great crisis. There will always be the strong and the weak in any family, and the war and purges of Stalinist Russia bring these strengths and flaws to the foreground for the Shubins. In the end, the human spirit is what dominates Summer In The Winter Garden. There is one line in the story that comments on the fact that, even during the worst of the famine, children still found moments to smile. Templeton’s book is a winner and will be enjoyed by anyone interested in history, family, and the triumph of the human spirit.
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