With Requiem for a Lost Empire Andreï Makine has created a panoramic novel of eight decades of Soviet/Russian history starting in 1917. It is a story of extraordinary emotional intensity. For anybody like me with interest in the Russian "condition humaine", this was a must read. While written as ...
On a flower-covered balcony, cooled by Siberia’s dusty summer breezes, a grandmother tells stories to her grandson, the narrator, and granddaughter. But she is not just any grandmother, nor are these just any times. The grandmother is a Frenchwoman and these are the 1960s in the Soviet Union. Ye...
I have read many of Makine’s novels and it is obvious from his beautiful descriptive passages especially describing the countryside, and his characters that he is following in the tradition of the great Russian authors steeped in what is known as “the Russian Soul”. This term has been used in lit...
The book is set mainly in Russia, but also in France, and the author uses some Russian words in the French text that I have retained in this English translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), kolkhoz (a collective fa...
Out-of-date addresses, curiously brief telephone numbers. A whole lapsed world Shutov is trying to bring back to life as he leafs impatiently through the pages of a notebook retrieved from the depths of an old traveling bag. The bag he had with him when he left Russia twenty years ago… A papyrus,...