The Power of Art Theme Analysis

Art in the novel is powerful in a variety of ways. Lina is a talented artist, and much of the narrative of Between Shades of Grey is structured around her deep connection to drawing. Lina connects to the world using her art—she can best express herself using images, and understands her world better when she sees it out on the page. And, at the same time, art can speak the truth: as it does when Lina is asked to draw the portrait of an NKVD commander and her artistic vision sees snakes sliding from his skull; or in her caricature of Stalin; or even in the stick map that a man draws to communicate with a relative about where he has been enslaved. The testament to the power of art’s truth is clear in the camp guard’s reaction to it: Lina knows that if she were to actually draw the NKVD commander with snakes slithering from his skull it would result in her death; just as her father knows her caricature of Stalin, if seen, would as well; and just as the man who drew the stick map was killed by the guards.

But art is powerful in the novel not just as a tool of truth-telling—it is also life-affirming, and life-giving. Though Lina knows it is wisest to stop her drawing based on the dangers her own art has exposed her to, and especially after the death of the man who drew the stick map, she cannot. For her, to draw is to live, and she does not want to live a life without art. In the novel, art is the flavor of life, necessary for a life worth living beyond the utilitarian needs of food and water and shelter. Though Lina is able to physically persevere through her Soviet enslavement, it is her connection to art—and what it means to both her and the people around her—that give them something to live for beyond the sake of survival.

And finally, as shown in the epilogue of the novel, art both endures and connects: the novel is, in the end, a product of Lina’s drawings: She documents her journey through the labor camps using sketches of what she sees and feels, and hopes to have these images passed along to her father to indicate her whereabouts and the fact that she is alive. Ultimately, under circumstances not explained in the narrative, the drawings end up in the soil, dug up forty years later and used as evidence (within the world of the novel) to reveal the otherwise hidden Baltic genocides and to return to the people who suffered that genocide a kind of eternal life in art.