Dreams of My Russian Summers
“The unsayable! It was mysteriously linked, I now understood, to the essential. The essential was unsayable. Incommunicable. And everything in the world that tortured me with its silent beauty, everything that needed no words, seemed to be essential. The unsayable was essential.” ― Andreï Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers
This is a beautifully-written novel about a young man who spends the summers in Siberia with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, along with his sister. The narrative is told as a semi-autobiographical story by Andrei Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty years old. Charlotte, who became trapped there following the death of her Russian husband, shares a world of memories with the children, including memories of France before World War II. Charlotte's sheer Frenchness raises serious suspicions in the eyes of her neighbors and the authorities in the very paranoid realm of Soviet Communism.
The boy is divided as he grows up between his love of his grandma and the lovely world she conjures and his urge as a young child to fit in and embrace his Russian heritage. In his perspective, the French aspect of his character reflects a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty, while the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a type of barbarism and a potential for violence. His perception, however it may be flawed, convinces him that the Soviets have good reason to be afraid of their Frenchness.
This is a beautifully-written novel about a young man who spends the summers in Siberia with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, along with his sister. The narrative is told as a semi-autobiographical story by Andrei Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty years old. Charlotte, who became trapped there following the death of her Russian husband, shares a world of memories with the children, including memories of France before World War II. Charlotte's sheer Frenchness raises serious suspicions in the eyes of her neighbors and the authorities in the very paranoid realm of Soviet Communism.
The boy is divided as he grows up between his love of his grandma and the lovely world she conjures and his urge as a young child to fit in and embrace his Russian heritage. In his perspective, the French aspect of his character reflects a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty, while the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a type of barbarism and a potential for violence. His perception, however it may be flawed, convinces him that the Soviets have good reason to be afraid of their Frenchness.
"I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present."
Living in the West, it is casually assumed that progressives are often the only ones whose souls contain humanism and the good. For Makine and his narrator, the exact reverse is true; at that time, it was necessary to look to the East to find ideals and a culture that exalted human beings, whereas the Soviet Union's progressives did everything in their might to put them out of existence.
It is not surprising that Makine's story occasionally comes out as being somewhat vague and opaque given how deeply personal memory is. He sometimes leans a little too heavily on Proustian and Nabokov connections; a few fewer references to cork-lined chambers and moths wouldn't hurt; we get the point. Furthermore, I'm not enough of a Francophile to find it funny rather than emotional when someone speaks fondly of France. However, I would recommend the book due to the beauty of the writing, a few striking pictures, and the way the plot alludes to the tragedy of 20th-century Russia.
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