6 Books by Andrei Makine
Requirements: MOBI reader, 1.7 MB, 1.8 MB
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: Contemporary Fiction > Russia, France
A Hero’s Daughter:
Set in the Soviet Union from World War II until the early 1990s, A Hero’s Daughter portrays the rise and decline of the Soviet Union through the story of Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov and his family. For his extraordinary bravery and courage beyond the call of duty at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ivan is awarded his country’s highest military honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Married after the war to Tatyana, the medical orderly who found him barely breathing amid a pile of corpses after another apocalyptic battle late in the war, they have a daughter, Olya, who grows up in the glow of her father’s reputation.
In 1980, the beautiful Olya, now seventeen, assigned as an interpreter during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, commits and indiscretion with a French athlete, and throws her straight into the waiting arms of the KGB. As the years roll by, Olya, more and more deeply implicated in espionage, despairs at her fates as a "political prostitute," while her father, equally used by the State, becomes increasingly disillusioned and unruly, until he is arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. Finally the lives of father and daughter intersect in an utterly moving and heartrending conclusion.
Once Upon the River Love:
After taking the Trans-Siberian train to Leningrad to see a film starring the French matinee idol, Jean-Paul Belmondo, three teenaged boys from a remote part of Russia dream of love, adventure, and another world.
Requiem for a Lost Empire:
A nameless, orphaned Russian army doctor is the narrator of Requiem for a Lost Empire, an epic novel that traces three generations of a Russian family through the turbulent political struggles of the twentieth century.
Spanning eight decades –from the October Revolution of 1917 to the Cold War to the fall of Communism –the book follows the narrator’s grand-father, Nikolai, a Red Army deserter who seeks peace and isolation in a remote forest village. Years later, his son Pavel will fight in World War II, become a KGB spy, and, like Nikolai, return to his native Caucasus in a vain attempt to escape the increasing tyrannies of the postwar Soviet era. It is here, amidst the raging warfare, espionage, and crushing poverty, where our narrator is born. Sweeping in its scope and heartbreaking in its truths, Requiem for a Lost Empire is both a harrowing history of the Soviet Union and a loving tribute to the fortitude of its people.
The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme:
"The novel opens in 1942, in a burning, gutted Stalingrad, where the German and Russian armies are locked in a struggle to the death, a battle that ultimately will be decisive in determining the outcome of World War II. Amid these ruins, a French pilot and a nurse, also French, are engaged in a passionate affair that each knows will be hopelessly brief. The pilot, Jacques Dorme, was shot down two years earlier in a dogfight with a German fighter plane as the Nazis overran France. Imprisoned and sent east to a German POW camp, Dorme made a daring escape and crossed Germany stealthily by night until he arrived in an already devastated Russia, where, having proved his mettle as a pilot, he joined a Russian squadron stationed near Stalingrad. But during the brief time they have together there, the love between Dorme and Alexandra builds and blossoms into a relationship they both know comes but once in a lifetime. Several days later, Dorme is reassigned and sent to Siberia, where over the next two years, as a squadron leader, he ferries American planes brought in from Alaska to reinforce the Russian air force. Crossing the polar sky on New Year’s Eve 1944, Dorme crashes into an ice-covered peak in a heroic move to save his fellow pilots." Several decades later, the narrator – a Russian exiled in France, a war orphan haunted by his dark childhood and obsessively searching for his roots – travels back to his native land, where in the icy and treacherous wastelands of Siberia he attempts to discover how his life and that of Jacques Dorme are inextricably intertwined.
Dreams of My Russian Summers:
"Dreams of My Russian Summers" tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and ’70s, and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman, Charlotte Lemonnier, who is his grandmother. Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte’s narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas’s visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband – his grandfather – a victim of Stalin’s purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte’s stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland
Music of a Life:
May 24, 1941: Alexe Berg, a classical pianist, is set to perform his first solo concert in Moscow. But just before his début, his parents — his father a renowned playwright, and his mother a famed opera singer — are exposed for their political indiscretions and held under arrest. With World War II on the brink, and fearing that his own entrapment is not far behind, Alexe flees to the countryside, assumes the identity of a Soviet soldier, and falls dangerously in love with a general officer’s daughter. What follows is a two-decades-long journey through war and peace, love and betrayal, art and artifice — a rare ensemble in the making of the music of a life.
The Life of an Unknown Man:
A deeply moving meditation on memory, history, love, and art by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers.
In The Life of an Unknown Man, Andreï Makine explores what truly matters in life through the prism of Russia’s past and present.
Shutov, a disenchanted writer, revisits St. Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin’s purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky’s life is an inspiration to Shutov — because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man . . .
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