3 books by Andreï Makine
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Overview: Andreï Makine was born in Krasnoyarsk, Soviet Union on 10 September 1957 and grew up in city of Penza, a provincial town about 440 miles south-east of Moscow. As a boy, having acquired familiarity with France and its language from his French-born grandmother (it is not certain whether Makine had a French grandmother; in later interviews he claimed to have learnt French from a friend), he wrote poems in both French and his native Russian. In 1987, he went to France as member of teacher’s exchange program and decided to stay. He was granted political asylum and was determined to make a living as a writer in French. However, Makine had to present his first manuscripts as translations from Russian to overcome publishers’ skepticism that a newly arrived exile could write so fluently in a second language. After disappointing reactions to his first two novels, it took eight months to find a publisher for his fourth, Le testament français. Finally published in 1995 in France, the novel became the first in history to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis plus the Goncourt des Lycéens.
Genre: Historical Fiction
A Woman Loved
Catherine the Great’s life seems to have been made for the cinema. Countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades, betrayal, revenge, murder – there is no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray the real Catherine, her essential, emotional truth. When he is dropped from the film he initially scripted – his name summarily excised from the credits – Erdmann is cast adrift in a changing world. A second chance beckons when an old friend enriched by the capitalist new dawn invites him to refashion his opus for a television serial. But Erdmann is made acutely aware that the market exerts its own forms of censorship.
While he comes to accept that each age must cast Catherine in its own image, one question continues to nag at him. Was the empress, whose sexual appetites were sated with favours bought with titles and coin, ever truly loved? In his search for an answer, Erdmann will find a love of his own that brings the fulfilment that filmmaking once promised him.
Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer
Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer is the moving tale of two families, those of Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov, fathers of the young pioneers. Inseparable, both men have survived the devastating war against the Germans, with all its horror and senseless carnage. Yakov – or Yasha, as he was known – emerged physically intact but scarred forever from the moment he had been lifted out of a mountain of frozen bodies at a camp in liberated Poland. Pyotr, a skilled sniper who operated behind the German lines, lost both his legs, not at the hands of the Germans but as an "unfortunate artillery mistake" by his own forces." "During these postwar years of hardship and repression, the two families try to piece together their shattered lives. Arkady and Alyosha grow up and go their separate ways, Arkady to Leningrad and mathematics school, Alyosha the narrator to the Savorov military academy, later to become an army officer who takes part in the grisly Afghanistan war. Eventually both emigrate to the West, Arkady to the States, Alyosha to Paris. It is to Arkady that, in the opening pages of this masterful novel, Alyosha addresses these remembrances of their parents’ ordinary heroism and their gradual awakening from the counterfeit glories of the Soviet dream.
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina
With Proustian relish, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina works backward in time, peeling away history like so many layers of onion skin to reveal Olga’s true crime. Like Makine’s celebrated previous novels, Dreams of My Russian Summer and Once, Upon a River Love, the events recounted here are seen through the gauzy film of memory. Olga is a casualty of history: Her father was killed in the Russo-Japanese war; her mother thereafter consumed by grief. Olga barely survives her teenage years and is brutally raped during the First World War. She emerges an adult, yet a cultural refugee. Despite a fortuitous marriage to a dashing prince and a new life in Paris, she will always feel that life is to "be a solemn and melancholy wake for the past." (Makine, who is Russian and now lives in France and writes in French, powerfully evokes what it means to be caught between two cultures.)
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