Andreï Makine

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A La Recherche du Pays Perdu: Andreï Makine's Russia

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SOURCE: Taras, Ray. “A La Recherche du Pays Perdu: Andreï Makine's Russia.” East European Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2000): 51-79.

[In the following essay, Taras presents critical summaries of Makine's five published novels and connects the works to “the political values central to his narrative of Russia.”]

Andrei Makine is “Russian, but he is not a Russian writer.” This is because “Makine the Russian wrote a novel in French since he was not up to writing it in Russian, and we Russians can only make sense of it in its translation from the French.” Yet “he does not seem a foreigner to us and, putting my hand over my heart, it is clear he isn't a Frenchman.” Who is Makine, then? Tatyana Tolstoya concludes her Russian-language review of Makine by asserting that he is “a philological half-breed, a cultural hybrid, a linguistic chimera, a literary basilisk.”1

Makine was born in Siberia in 1957 but went to Paris as a translator in 1987, obtained asylum, and has lived in France since. He struggled to establish a literary career there; as Tolstoya observed: “After the fall of the iron curtain, practical Russians left for America, idealists for France.”2 As a child in Siberia, French had been his “grandmother tongue” anyway, he claimed.3 Proficiency in a foreign language distinguished Makine during his Soviet childhood and adolescence: “It made a dreamer of him.”4 Tolstoya recalled how “Dreams of France are an old Russian tradition.”5

Like many a Soviet émigré, he suffered greater deprivation in his first years abroad than in his Soviet homeland. He was still able to complete three novels in quick succession in the early 1990s. In seeking a publisher for them, Makine discovered that French fascination for Russia was equal to his own for France. After one publishing house insisted on seeing the original Russian version of a submitted manuscript, he concluded that marketing himself as a Russian writer offered advantages. He therefore hurriedly translated the French-language typescript into his native language. A further irony is how indisputably French the content of his works, above all the appropriately-titled Le testament français,6 has been. This book was published in France in 1995 and was awarded both the Prix Goncourt—the first time a non-Frenchman had won it—and the Prix Medicis for best foreign fiction—the first time any novelist had won the two awards for the same novel. The French-Russian pas-de-deux is further symbolized by the American edition's title: Dreams of My Russian Summers.7 In the U.S., it was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award but in his native Russia the novel received negative reviews (described later).

Makine thus represents the complete bilingual novelist who also strives for a bicultural consciousness (discussed in the conclusion). His is the dual psycho-linguistic reality of the narrator of Dreams [Dreams of My Russian Summers] who participates in two realities, Russian and French. He complies with Mikhail Bakhtin's stricture that “With each literary-verbal performance, consciousness must actively orient itself amidst heteroglossia, it must move in and occupy a position for itself within it, it chooses, in other words, a ‘language’.”8 Makine does not mix languages, only cultures, thereby demonstrating that a heteroglossic text is not a multilingual one. There is intense competition for space in Makine's memory, culture, and identity. He exists in a polarized but hybrid world of cultural and, especially, political consciousness.

Makine purposefully identifies with Marcel Proust, who appears in Dreams as a tennis player and café-goer on the Boulevard Bineau in Neuilly, just north of Paris. With Proust he shares a literary style grounded in stream-of-consciousness, and an aesthetic quest for interpreting time as endless. But Makine has deep roots in the modern Russian literary tradition. Even though he has made his impact as a francophone writer, it is his search for the Russia he left behind, a tormented, once-great empire, the twentieth century's most pitiful pays perdu, that is the driving force of his novels. Towards the end of Dreams he makes reference to his own work as being located between Lermontov and Nabokov. Except for the effervescence of his verse, it is difficult to see the linkage to Lermontov. With Nabokov he shares total mastery of a second language. Critics have compared Makine to Chekhov in terms of finely-spun plots, and to Pasternak in the far reach of a single novel and its depiction of revolution and war.9

Depending on what aspect of his novels we focus on, other comparisons can be made. Most of his novels can be considered gulag literature, like Solzhenitsyn's best works.10 He can also be situated in the tradition of Russian epic war literature, most recently exemplified by Aksyonov's trilogy.11 Several of Makine's books are explicit coming-of-age stories, similar to Rybakov's Children of the Arbat.12 Elements of the grotesque appear regularly enough to include Makine in the Slavic tradition of horror literature, such as Kosinski's The Painted Bird.13 The evocative accounts of life in the Russian interior offer similarities with the village literature of Rasputin.14 The sheer lyricism and wistfulness of the writing evokes Paustovsky,15 the focus on private lives, especially of the intelligentsia, bring to mind Trifonov.16 The descriptions of forests, rivers, and wildlife are as shimmering as those of Prishkin.17

If his works can be read in a variety of traditions, this article undertakes a political reading of them, in particular highlighting the relationship between the individual and the state. Because much of his work remains unknown to both Slavists and an English-language readership, I offer plot summaries of Makine's five published novels to 2000—one written in Russian, four in French, only three of which had appeared in English—and tie them to the political values central to his narrative of Russia. I also identify a few of the literary devices he employs to conduct his search for meaning in Russia's tortured twentieth-century political experience. Because the search is mediated through the encounter with France, I propose that Makine can be understood as the foremost Russian-born literary representative of the politics of transnationality and creator of the border text.

A SON OF THE SOVIET UNION: POLITICAL BEGINNINGS

Makine's first novel, published in France in 1990 and written in Russian, was called La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique.18 The French translation did not do justice to his command of prose which may have convinced him to write in French from then on. On the other hand, this Russian-language novel reveals Makine at his most Slavic and least francophile. La fille is also his most overtly political work, and we thus encounter a Makine that is indisputably a son of the Soviet Union.

DARWIN AND STALIN

The main character of La fille is not the daughter but the father, Ivan Demidov. If she is depicted as a product of the Soviet Union, Ivan is presented as its defender. During the Great Patriotic War he is found by a nurse, barely alive, on a battlefield littered with corpses. What distinguishes him from the other grievously wounded are identity papers revealing that he is a recipient of the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. The USSR at war was a horrific time: “When he regained consciousness after four days in a deep coma, through a white fog that smothered his eyes in a gluey and painful veil he made out the picture of Darwin.”19

Ivan had grown up in a society where red banners announced “Thank you, comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.”20 The war broke out when he turned seventeen. One day German soldiers arrived in his village and, while he watched from a hiding place, one of them bayoneted his baby brother, Kolka, then posed for a trophy photo. On hearing this story, Tania, the nurse who had saved his life, was reminded of her own village. When it had been retaken by the Soviet army, two young girls were found dead, shot by the Russian polizei, collaborators of the Germans. For many, childhood in the Stalin era was not a happy experience.

Ivan took part in the defense of Moscow. During the battle an officer exhorted: “Comrade Stalin is in Moscow. Moscow will not fall!” And the political commissar added the warning: “Behind us is Moscow! Further retreat is impossible!”21 Makine explains what that really meant: “Behind us was not Moscow but the machine guns of the rearguard teams, those bastards from the NKVD.” Even the 28 soldiers of the Panfilovtsy regiment who threw themselves under German tanks to stop the advance on Moscow—“What other choice did they have, my God?”22

During his convalescence, Ivan had taken Tania down to the river—where so many important events occur in Makine's world—and promised to marry her when the war was over. Tania was wounded just before it ended and was told that a pregnancy would threaten her life. But Ivan kept to his promise and the couple moved to the village of Goritsy (“sadness”) where she soon gave birth to a son, given the name Kolka after Ivan's brother. If Hitler's barbarous army had taken the life of the first Kolka, Makine has Stalin's perverse economic priorities, exacerbated by the drought of 1946, claim the life of the second. Ivan vented his anger before the local soviet, throwing rocks at its loudspeaker until it was silenced.

The couple then moved to Borissov, in the Moscow region, where Ivan took a job as a truck-driver. There were changes in the Kremlin as well: the new leader, Khrushchev, announced that communism would be built in twenty years. Gagarin became the first man in space, and “at the end of this happy year,”23 the Demidovs had a second child, Olia. Her story is that of the corrupting politics of the post-Stalin years.

HEROES AND NOBODIES

Makine's most political novel dramatizes the changing fates of citizens living in a directed society. Ivan encountered the disparate realities of different Soviet periods most dramatically, but entire generations shared the experience. One day in spring 1946, the raikom party secretary came to inspect the Goritsy kolkhoz and lost his temper when he noticed that rocks lay scattered over an arable field. The rocks, he was told, were human skulls: “It was here that our men tried to break the encirclement and were caught in a crossfire,” the kolkhoz leader said gravely. The party secretary choked back his anger and piped back: “You're always telling me stories. What a lovely collection of Heroes you have in this area! You're all slouches here, hiding behind your past exploits!”24

Makine describes many encounters between war veterans and cynical communist party officials bemusedly speaking about “the war heroes.” The new Soviet leadership exploited their reputation so as to enhance its own political legitimacy. Symbolically, it was Ivan who, in the early Khrushchev years, was told to cart away a statue of Stalin. Heroes of the Stalin era were the ones ordered to remove the last traces of Stalin.

Officially, war veterans were held in great esteem. Posterity demanded of them a caricaturized version of past struggle. Thus Ivan was interviewed on television about the battle of Stalingrad, even though he had not fought in the city. He reminisced: “And after the battle I went into … there was a small forest there … I looked and saw a spring. The water was so pure! I leaned over and saw my reflection … and it was so strange, you know. I looked at my reflection and didn't recognise myself.” A voiceover interrupted to equivocate: “The native land … the earth of the Fatherland. … This is what lends strength to the exhausted soldier. … It is from this inexhaustible spring that the Soviet combatant gains renewed exhilaration.”25

A rare reference in La fille to the Paris Makine would embrace as his own concerned a Soviet reporter investigating what people near Place de Stalingrad knew about the battle. The reporter had to carry out his interviews some distance from the square because “nobody but Blacks and Arabs” were found there—“Everyone will think that we filmed this in Africa, not Paris.”26 We can feel the anxiety in the young Russian writer between his long-imagined Paris, conceived in Russia, and his real encounter with it.

VICTIMS OF THE ERA OF STAGNATION

Makine's Russia never escapes turbulence, whether in the Stalin period or the 1980s. The interview with Ivan was televised on the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Tania did not see the program because she queued up for butter in a neighborhood store. As a veteran's wife, she had the right to go to the front of the queue, but was jeered by the others: “We've been here three hours with the children”; “I had a son killed in Afghanistan … I'm waiting like everybody else.”27 As she left the store she was crushed by the crowd and died the next day, May 9. The reader is invited to ponder whether life had improved in Russia decades since the war ended.

The contempt for and victimization of the wartime generation by Brezhnev-era apparatchiks is most poignantly symbolized by Olia, the child that Tania and Ivan had so desperately longed for. Brought up on the fabulous and terrifying wartime stories of her parents, she inherited their reality of both benefits and costs. As the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union, she was admitted into the highly-competitive foreign languages program at the Maurice-Thorez Institute. In 1980, that most international of years for the USSR—the year of the Moscow Olympics—a still-naive Olia had an affair with a visiting French athlete. Quickly the KGB became involved. Given her illustrious background, it would not be fair, one official reasoned, to expel Olia from the Institute. Her future lay in mastering foreign languages, doing translation work for the Center for International Commerce and, en passant, escorting foreign businessmen and officials on their visits to the Soviet capital. Makine presents the reader with a stark truth: by the 1980s, being the daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union qualified one to become a highly-paid prostitute.

Ivan discovered this truth for himself when he observed Olia in a hotel lobby escorting a foreigner. He mumbled to himself: “Go on, my girl. Go serve them. For us that's all that's left, to serve them, some in bed, others at the counter.”28 He ran amok in a Beriozhka store—the institutional symbol of Russia's prostitution to the West. The next day all-knowing Radio Liberty reported the story in full, together with the names of everyone involved. At his trial, Ivan cried out accusingly: “You made a prostitute out of my daughter!”29 The father-daughter relationship in Russia deserves separate, careful analysis.

Broken by the death of his wife and the prostitution of his daughter, Ivan turned to vodka. He obtained needed cash by selling off his wartime medals to black-marketeers. Even the Central Committee heard of this and wondered: “How could it be! The Hero of Stalingrad has become an alcoholic trafficking in the war medals he was awarded.”30 Ivan just held on to his Hero of the Soviet Union Star, even though he knew that it, too, had been cheapened by its conferment on Brezhnev.

KGB CONTROLLERS IN THE LATE SOVIET PERIOD

Makine left Russia at a time when the communist party was losing control over Soviet society. In the West, this was viewed as the simultaneous demise of the KGB. But La fille describes the continued presence of the KGB in the lives of Russian citizens. Probably Makine's most direct exposition on the Soviet political system comes in La fille. He offers a eulogy full of irony for Yuri Andropov, regarded by many at the time as a new Felix Dzerzhinsky. But for Makine

He knew that the majority of Politburo members deserved to be put against a wall and shot. He knew that the Interior minister with whom he talked amiably on the phone was a criminal of the state. He was aware of the sum that each of his Politburo members had stashed in Western banks—he even knew which banks they were. He knew that feudalism had been reinstated in Central Asia a long time ago, and the real place for those responsible should be prison. He understood that Afghanistan was becoming the American scenario in Vietnam. He knew that in the northwest of the country, there was no bread in the villages. He knew that for a long time the country had been ruled by a small mafia family which hated him and scorned the people. He knew that if the ruble was a convertible currency, half the leadership would be living in Miami or somewhere else a long time ago. He understood that the dissidents in prison or in exile didn't know a hundredth of what he knew and that they only talked about very anodine matters. He knew so many things about this mysterious society that one day he let slip a comment at the Plenum that “We do not know the society in which we live.”31

Makine reveals a grudging respect for Andropov and the secret police. Olia, too, fell into raptures when her handler offered a deal allowing her to continue with “translation” work: “She had never felt so young and so free. As before, she mused with admiration: ‘The KGB can do anything’!”32 Was the KGB a better father to her, and for many other Russians? Her roommate, Svetka Samoilova, tried to bring her to her senses: “No one is keeping you here. The KGB? Oh, sure they need you! All they have to do is whistle and people will come from all over the Soviet Union and fight to take your pretty little place.”33

Makine's recognition of the all-powerful role of the KGB extends to his understanding of Gorbachev's rise to power: “In Russia, it was always necessary to play this opening comedy of humility just so as to climb up to the throne. … Gorbachev did the rounds with the old mafiosi of the Politburo, the ones he had to eliminate.”34 At the end of the novel, it was Olia's current French client who puzzled: “Russia is a country of paradoxes. Who started all this business with perestroika? A protege of Andropov. … The KGB as originator of democratization and openness? This has to be science fiction!”35

La fille is the story not of a totalitarian state but of a thoroughly-corrupted society. Ivan died during his trial, overcome by humiliation and despair. To pay for his burial in their home village, Olia found only one way to raise the 100 rubles needed to pay off two moonlighting gravediggers—sell the Hero of the Soviet Union Star. The only person offering a reasonable price was Alik, an Azerbaijani black-marketeer. But was Olia so different from him? Soon back at work sleeping with a French official, she yearned: “‘It would be good if he paid me in hard currency. I'd be able to buy back Dad's Star …’.”36

THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM: DISCOVERING EUROPE

Because Makine was still immersed in Russian culture, his first novel contains none of the bittersweet nostalgia that permeates his subsequent work beginning with Once upon the River Love.37 This novel has both a more remote Russian setting and a more pervasive Western theme. In it the symbol of a pendulum is repeatedly employed to describe the pull of two worlds, for Russia as well as for Makine personally.

The pendulum acquires political meaning when used to explain a temporal phenomenon: “The pendulum kept the measure of passing time. … Ever since our childhood, however, the pendulum seemed to have stuck. It was as if its immense weight had become entangled in the innumerable lines of barbed-wire fencing stretched across its path.”38 Later, Makine's narrator discussed the objective of democratization in terms of this motif: “The gigantic pendulum must be activated! Time, our time, the dictatorship's unhappy victim, must be set free!”39 Finally, the Soviet Union's imminent collapse is also depicted by this metaphor: “It was swinging more and more freely, and now its movement back and forth across the immense empire was becoming threatening.”40 Yet the primary significance assigned by Makine to the pendulum is as a marker of a cultural divide, a clash of civilizations.41

RUSSIA AS WHORE

The three boys who are the main characters in River Love are from the Siberian village of Svetlaya (an ironic use of “light” or “world”), where the three essential matters are “timber, gold, and the chill shadow of the camp.”42 The village is on the Olyei river, a tributary—literally and metaphorically—of the powerful Amur and its regional center, Nerlug. The relationship between the two rivers is important: on the Olyei, “the unleashing of the springtime spate had none of the devastating power of the Amur.”43 This symbolism escapes English novelist and critic William Boyd, who proposed that the title “Once upon the River Love does indicate something of the book's intensely romantic and wistful tone, though the River Love (Amur in Russian, Amour in French—no pun possible in English) doesn't really feature much in the plot.”44 In fact, it is at the very center of Makine's story. The inferiority of “the East” is emphasized: “The left bank was us, Svetlaya, the East. The right bank was Nerlug, with its brick houses and the Red October cinema. In short, a more or less civilized city, antechamber to the Western World.”45 Mitya, the narrator, expressed resignation about this: “There's nothing we can do about it. Asia holds us with its infinite spaces; with the endlessness of its winters.”46

The map of the world was different for boys growing up in Siberia. For Mitya, the main character, “Anything that was located to the west of Lake Baikal was already redolent of the Western World.”47 His two friends reached for the pendulum motif to explain this geographical Weltanschauung:

SAMURAI:
“We are the pendulum … between the two. Russia is a pendulum.”
UTKIN:
“In other words, nowhere at all. Neither one thing nor the other.”
SAMURAI:
“to be neither one thing nor the other is also a destiny.”(48)

Makine's fondness for Russia despite—or perhaps precisely because—of her hybrid Eurasian political and cultural character permeates through all his novels but especially this one. However, this affection has limits. Mitya's first sexual experience was with a red-haired prostitute who loitered at the local railway station. Before leaving Siberia, he decided to see her one last time. Why? “A visit to the prostitute should draw a line through the saga of Asia. A farewell with no going back.”49 The Asian component to Russia offered unrequited love, and so he thought: “I had, as it were, a subdued desire to possess her one more time, to drink all those bitter tears from her magnificent body and then to kill both of us. Ultimately, I both abhorred and worshipped her.”50 Later Mitya overheard the villagers talking disparagingly about the death of the woman. That “decided me: I must go away. Leave the village, escape from Nerlug, never again set eyes on that country where ultimately the saga of the old Chinese would triumph over the elegance of the Western World and its adventures.”51

One does not find love on the tributary of the Amur, Makine tells us. What passes for love in “the East” is exposed when held up to the light. Thus, during Mitya's first encounter with the prostitute, “in the midst of my feverish thrashings on her great body, the light shone. Absurdly, the electricity had come on again.”52 Love meant nothing more in Svetlaya than to “have” a woman. It differed little from what little Mitya once saw: “an enormous bull was heaving itself up onto the cow's rump with ponderous and ferocious clumsiness.”53

THE WEST AS INVINCIBLE AGENT 007

When Makine casts Jean-Paul Belmondo as a powerful bull having his way with women on the silver screen, it is to illustrate the otherness of the West. “We saw a strength that took pride in itself with no thought for the result; the gleam of muscles that were not concerned to break productivity records. … From now on we had a name for this marvelous ‘in itself’: Western World.”54 Although perhaps not intended by Makine, the Russian inferiority complex with regard to the West is punctuated by the contrast between Russians making love and a French actor faking making love.

The political power of the West, even when exerted merely by a series of action movies, elicits awe. “Belmondo settled in, established his headquarters at the Red October, just halfway between the squat building of the local militia and KGB and the Communard factory, where they manufactured the barbed wire that went to all the camps in that region of Siberia.”55 Just the poster of a smiling Belmondo “was going to play a hell of a trick on the city authorities one day. … For already, to their surprise, the filmgoers no longer shuddered at the sight of those gray uniforms, or felt any unease before the horrible trucks with their vile hedgehogs of steel.”56 The steel was used to reinforce the perimeter of the nearby gulag.

Critic Richard Bernstein argued that “It is the very pointlessness of Belmondo's exploits, contrasted with the inevitable newsreels of medal-pinning ceremonies in the Kremlin and the mandatory reports on the looming radiant future, that gave them their irresistible iconoclastic force.”57 Such an interpretation is to underestimate the impression made by a French Rambo upon boys who had trudged through the taiga on snowshoes, dressed in sheepskin coats and smelling of cedar wood, to see Belmondo for the seventeenth time. As Boyd deduced, “Not surprisingly, it is to the West that the three boys ultimately travel, each to live out, in his own way, the Belmondian archetype.”58 Furthermore,

to those trapped behind the Iron Curtain the pull and fascination of the West was overpowering and all-consuming. Once upon the River Love is testimony both to the ultimate folly of totalitarianism and to the intrinsic glamour of the movies. It shows how a run-of-the-mill Belmondo caper is far more effective at undermining the implacable ideology of Communism than any heartfelt pleas for democracy and individual freedom.59

As always for Makine, the best of the West is French, the rest plain capitalism. The trans-Siberian railway running through Svetlaya contained coaches with “extraterrestrials, which is what people from the Western World were to us.”60 But the local railway passengers decried the Japanese for “stripping our taiga bare.”61 As for the U.S., Mitya's childhood friend Utkin ended up in Brighton Beach, married to an Amerindian and thus sharing a common Eurasian lineage. He pondered: “the Americans often remind me of monkeys playing with a clockwork toy. They press a button, the spring functions, the little plastic man starts turning somersaults. The object is achieved.”62

Makine rarely provides a flattering portrait of America. By contrast, he cannot be cynical about Russia, even the Russia dominated by its Asian dimension. He movingly describes a wolf killed by some loggers: “And at the corner of its proud eye there was a great frozen tear.”63 Towards the end of the novel he returns to this symbol: “childhood had become no more than a faint echo—like the memory of that great frozen tear in the eye of the wolf stretched out full length on the blue-tinted snow of the evening.”64 In an observation that can apply to Makine's own leaving of Russia, Bernstein concluded that “the world left behind, the ‘beauty and silence’ that prevailed along the River Amur, held both the seeds of youthful revolt and the treasures of youthful awareness.”65 Makine's longing is for both Russia and the youth he left behind.

THE RADIANT PAST: MEMORY IN MAKINE

The francisization of Makine's works takes place not only with his switch to writing in French, but in locating his narrator in France. This begins with Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu.66 Ostensibly an émigré novel—it is Paris of the 1980s and Kim shares his memories of growing up in Sestrovsk, a small community outside Leningrad, with his childhood friend Arkadi—in practice, it is a social history of twentieth-century Russia, concerned with recording the effects of key political caesurae on the lives of average Russians rather than heroes of the USSR.

THE YOUNG PIONEER IN PARIS AND SESTROVSK

Kim and Arkadi were impressionable Young Pioneers marching towards the radiant future promised by Soviet propaganda: “And we march along the footpaths in the fields, our legs downy with dust. Always straight ahead of us. Always towards this radiant horizon.”67 The cinema, Soviet propaganda's new weapon of choice (but inadvertently a Western one, too, as River Love demonstrated) came to the village, and the inhabitants watched the opening newsreel. In tortured letters spelling out “The Threat of Atomic War,” a map identifies U.S. bases from which fast-moving arrows dart towards the USSR. “‘What bastards, these Americans!’ grumbled someone seated at the dominos table. ‘And to think I hugged them on the Elbe’.”68

The young boys were not as susceptible to Soviet propaganda as the war veteran:

We weren't little imbeciles who were intoxicated by abstract beauty and the ideal of some “ism.” On the contrary, everything that we cherished in this world was very material, concrete, palpable. From our parents we learned a cool indifference to the ideological torrent pouring out daily from the airwaves, newspapers, and rostrums.69

In their early teens, they were made aware by their discreet parents of some of the blank spots in Soviet history. Kim in particular was torn between the nostalgic intoxication of his wonder years and the approaching end to innocence: “Now we know everything. … The pathways were nothing but corridors between barbed wire. Watchtowers were hidden behind the forests. They had us circling so as to give us the impression that we were advancing. Now we know.”70 At fourteen, Kim and Arkadi parted ways, the first entering a military school, the second a mathematics institute. They planned to meet the following summer but never saw each other until the meeting many years later in France.

Makine is fond of irony, and it was at a newly-opened Pioneer camp that the political socialization of youth is shown as irrevocably breaking down. As in Dreams, the boy stumbled upon an indelible scene of “illicit” sex: the camp supervisor herself, Ludmila, was being fondled by a visiting communist party official. He panted: “Oh but you are beautiful. No, there's no afterwards. Let me. … Listen, we're not Pioneers anymore. … Oh but I'm so attracted to you! But that's a bourgeois prejudice. Unfasten it yourself if I'm hurting you.”71 Suddenly the camp's floodlights came on—exposing the spuriousness of love as in Mitya's encounter with the prostitute in River Love. Ludmila struggled to put on her tightly-fitting skirt just as the Pioneer leaders rushed to salute her with: “Always ready.”72

WAR AND COMBAT CULTURE

One objective of communist systems was to instill a combat culture within society. In a struggle between two opposing blocs, militancy was a crucial quality. But as with much else in the USSR, there were twists to how goals were attained. For Makine, the Great Patriotic War and the Afghanistan war prevented former combatants from ever becoming civilians in different ways.

Kim had served in Afghanistan in the early 1980s and, like much of Soviet society, was scarred by the war. Hearing the sudden blast of a pneumatic drill while walking down a street, he threw himself to the ground and reached for the machine-gun that wasn't there: “We will never be normal people,” he grumbled.73 One of Makine's most powerful stories is of a raid by Kim's company on an Afghani village on a sweltering summer afternoon. Grenades were lobbed into every dwelling. In one of these Kim spotted a bundle of wriggling rags—“a burnt infant among men crushed by fatigue and hate.” Kim took the child with him but regretted it during a night march. “She seemed to sense that I had committed a stupidity in taking her. As we crossed rocky gorges the following night, she became silent. Yes, she stopped moaning as if she did not want to provoke other people's anger.”74 Years later, Kim recalled the incident: “thinking about that burnt face, neither Islam nor Gorbachev has any importance.”75

The two boys often wondered what their fathers talked about. Much of the time, they were reminiscing about World War II. Yasha, Arkadi's Dad, was Jewish. He recalled how during the war the Germans once made him empty a wagon—a “moving abattoir” in which people had been gassed—of corpses into a furnace. The German officer used the word “cargo” to describe the corpses. “There was no hate in his voice. And that was the most terrifying thing. As I climbed inside the wagon with another prisoner, the pressed bodies had been crushed by this same absence of hate.”76

Kim's father, Piotr Evdokimov, had been a sharpshooter among the partisans during the war. He had grown up in a combat culture: “One lived in a ‘besieged fortress of socialism’ and every citizen had to know how to shoot accurately.”77 But Piotr, who became an invalid after a wartime leg injury, came to hate hunting. Makine again skillfully uses the symbol of a wounded animal to highlight the cruelty of killing. Piotr recalled a wounded hare, “hearing the horrible cry and seeing the eyes full of real tears,”78 as the hunter came to finish it off.

The impressionable children had a different reaction to stories about the war. After an unexploded wartime bomb found in their courtyard was detonated, the boys returned to find human bones scattered everywhere. At first they concluded that these were the remains of the heroic defenders of Leningrad during the great siege. But then Kim discovered a flattened eagle made of metal, and Arkadi a croix de guerre. These were remains of Germans.

With shouts and encouragement we hoisted one of us up with the great idea—to poke one of the skulls onto a broken branch. “What are you doing, idiots?” Yasha intervenes. “Why? They're Germans,” one of the boys replies. “They are the dead.” Yasha asserts.79

In peacetime, Piotr became a shoemaker but continued to face unspoken tragedies. One day his son noticed a particularly fashionable pair of shoes left for repair. From time to time his father would polish them, but “The owner still didn't come for them. He never did. And for the first time I felt the anguished depth of cities, of spaces where a man could melt away, disappear just like that while leaving his shoes in a little junk room of an unknown communal apartment.”80

The boys' fathers died one springtime, four weeks apart. The Jewish camp survivor and the Russian sharpshooter had made up an integral whole, in wartime and peacetime. The last scene in Confession is a recollection of the two fathers, Yasha carrying the invalid Piotr towards a river—a symbol of Russianness in Makine's writings: “They walk and seem alone on the face of the earth. … All alone in the primeval and happy infinity of this plain. All alone in the immensity of this Northern sky.”81

RUSSIA AS BABUSHKA

A theme that Makine made into the centerpiece of Dreams is the babushka, more specifically, grandmother, as the representation of twentieth-century Russia. In Confession he writes: “For we sang of our joie de vivre. … The joy of being born, of living, and of knowing that there is nothing better in this whole world than the soft words of a woman with coarse hands sitting in a room emanating the snowy freshness of frost-covered laundry.”82

The story of Kim's mother, Luba, is told at the end of the novel, in this way filling in the boys' last blank spot of history—the gulag. “In a Siberian izba, with frozen milk delivered by a snow-covered sled,”83 Luba's father was arrested one night by the NKVD. Her mother had just enough time to pack her own things before also being taken away. Luba was placed in an “orphanage for children of traitors of the country” where she “spent her childhood, the war, typhus, famine.”84

No less dramatic was the childhood of Arkadi's mother, Faiana Moisseievna. In a chronological coincidence often created by Makine, Faiana was left alone with her grandmother on June 21, 1941, the day her parents left by train for Kiev. Two years later she and her grandmother were trapped in the siege of Leningrad. The old woman died of cold, and Faiana was taken in by Svetlana, a “woman of joy” living in their apartment bloc. Offering herself to soldiers in the city, she eked out a living for the two of them. For Makine, there are many ways to behave patriotically: “Should she, like others, break her back in the factory for fourteen hours a day for a loaf of bread? Or dig anti-tank trenches? Or, worse, climb up on icy rooftops to put out incendiary bombs?”85 Makine embraces a humanism that is in conflict with Soviet historiography.

PERESTROIKA AND ARRIVISME

Perestroika was not concerned with the intrinsic beauty of a babushka spinning stories in an izba smelling of fresh laundry. It offered opportunities for people like Arkadi, attracted to “the kitsch of the American way of life:”

a life on the sunny peninsula that had once posed such a threat to the tropical communism of Cuba, a ravishing blonde for a wife, a house full of important objects whose use he does not always remember, a car equipped with a car phone—who would believe that this elegant man with the greying hair and the relaxed smile is a former company drummer fascinated by the radiant future?86

One evening someone would ask an awkward question about Arkadi's past. The narrator surmised: “You will talk more quickly, more loftily, explaining, justifying. … You will repeat my confession! Then in the embarrassing silence, you will get up and without saying another thing you leave, hearing behind you the voice of your wife: ‘Don't pay any attention. … He's been struck by nostalgia. … You know, these Russians. … With the life they had over there’.”87

LE PAYS PERDU ET LE PAYS TROUVé

Makine's greatest literary achievement, overshadowing its political narrative, is Le testament français. The “Russian summers” in the U.S. title refer to the time spent by the narrator—Alyosha (whose name appears just once, at the end of the novel)—visiting his grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, in the village of Saranza on the edge of the Russian steppes. The French testament, in turn, refers to Charlotte's birth in France in 1903, her youth in that country, and her first lover who gave her a brown pebble, souvenir of the battle of Verdun. On a visit to Russia in 1921 to find her mother, she was trapped by revolution and war. Among her earliest memories of France of the Belle Epoque was of Proust playing tennis. These events are juxtaposed with her experience in Russia: famine, repression, war, the interminable cold of Siberia.

These motifs are why this novel has not been well received in Russia. Maya Zlobina asserts that “Makine's Russia is imprinted with the stamp: ‘Foreign Made’.” She declaims the kitsch depiction of Russia with its bears, steppes, and never-ending snow that serve as stereotypes.88 Tolstoya makes the same point: “He describes Russia the way his imagined Frenchman would … ‘Siberia,’ ‘Russian agents,’ ‘the steppes,’ a pasteboard Stalin, a pasteboard Beria (how can you do without him?), pasteboard gulags.”89 In Russia he would have won no literary awards, she claims. But we would all be the poorer for it, she admits, and grudgingly adds that he deserves the renown and riches bestowed upon him in his adopted country. Sour grapes? Indeed, though readers—in the West and Russia, too—must remember that Makine offers a border narrative that departs from realism. On the other hand, perhaps the Russian reaction is a form of literary ressentiment.

RESSENTIMENT

The novel highlights the contretemps between Charlotte's two separate lives. On his annual visits to his grandmother, during the warm evenings while sitting on the balcony and inhaling “the breath of Russia,”90 the boy was taken away on flights of imagination by stories about Nicholas and Alexandra's visit to Paris in 1896, and the uncommon death of Felix Faure, the French president who died in the arms of his mistress. Alyosha became enchanted with the French language and culture of his grandmother, and his wondrous love for the Frenchwoman was metamorphisized into his own stream of memory and reverie about France.

Ideas expressed in French seemed more daring and rebellious to Alyosha. Natasha Fairweather insightfully averred how “Le testament français describes in florid, high French the author's equal love for his grandmother and her native tongue. … Makine's attraction to France was always essentially literary: a love affair with a language.”91 French better expressed the essential truths of life than Russian, illustrated by the grandmother's reminiscences of the magical land called “Atlantis”—an embellished and romanticized France. We are reminded of Liah Greenfeld's use of Nietzsche's notion of ressentiment—Russia's whimsical idealization of the West with a simultaneous “acknowledgement of the fact that comparison with the West in general was unflattering to Russia.”92

ACCURSED RUSSIA

Life and death in Russia were more harrowing than in France. Perhaps because of this, the narrator admitted that “The Russian side of her life interested me less.”93 From Charlotte the boy learned secrets about Russia's past—human misery, famine, cruel injustices, the gulag. This was “the invisible Russia—a continent encircled by barbed wire and watchtowers.”94 Delicate Charlotte experienced a catalogue of personal hardships there. She joined the Red Cross as a nurse, then set off to Siberia to find her aged mother, whom she found living off the land like a peasant. Charlotte was told that they would never be given exit visas and could be arrested as spies: after all, “foreign interventionist forces and internal class enemies were engaged in undermining reconstruction in the young Soviet republic.”95

So Charlotte remained in Russia, married, had children. Her father disappeared in Central Asia, and her husband, Fyodor, was taken away by Stalin's police one New Year's Eve. He was reported dead twice during the war but, in the end, returned home in order to die. Charlotte was raped by an Uzbek and left for dead, saved only by the dying warmth of a wounded desert antelope whose large eye was full of tears. Her circumstances resembled that of the victims of Stalin's henchman—“Beria and the young women whose lives ended with their rapists's last gasp of pleasure.”96

Tolstoya is correct that Charlotte “is Russia herself. Raped (by a criminal), loving (her husband), tormented by her adopted country and incapable of leaving it (and not wanting to).” More specifically, “The grandmother incarnates everything in the Russian fate: filth, love, dreams, absolution, patience, saintliness, torment.”97 As for the narrator, “The more horrible the truths about Russian life he learns, as he grows older, the more Russian he feels.”98 Alyosha reflected:

Yes, I was Russian. Now I understood, in a still confused fashion, what that meant. Carrying within one's soul all those human beings disfigured by grief, those burned villages, those lakes filled with naked corpses. Knowing the resignation of a human herd violated by a despot. And the horror of feeling oneself participating in this crime.99

The novel is a multi-tiered love story, and love figures as one of the many double-entendres in it—most graphically exemplified in the boy's voyeurism. He observed a prostitute at work on a boat, through one porthole seeing her “calm and even drowsy face,” through the other “that heavy movement of the hips.”100 But it is “an indestructible love” for homeland, “the inexplicable, unshared, tortuous love for Russia,” that is the most important of the love stories.101 Atavistic love for Russia, aesthetic for France.

Some twenty years later, the narrator left Russia for Paris. “The snowbound empire was waking up, opening itself up to the rest of the world. The country would soon change its name, its regime, its history, its frontiers. Another country would be born. We were no longer needed.”102 In France he struggled to become a writer, and was so poor that he slept in the crypt of a cemetery—possibly autobiographical sketches of Makine himself. The narrator's plans for bringing Charlotte from the USSR were stumped by French immigration authorities, and he began to live a different kind of exile from the one he left behind. He remained in contact with Charlotte through an intermediary, Alex Bond—short for Alexei Bondarchenko—one of the new breed of Russian businessmen who “butchered their names, American style.”103

One day Bond brought him a parcel which contained Charlotte's last testament. It revealed how Alyosha had been born in a gulag, his mother an inmate guilty of “anti-kolkhoz propaganda,” his father one of the abusive prison guards. “Then the woman died, crushed by a tractor, a few months after the amnesty, decreed at the time of the thaw.”104 Charlotte adopted the child. The hereditary Frenchness the boy had thought was his was, in the end, an imagined Frenchness grafted by Charlotte. His real inheritance was Russia's tragic twentieth-century history.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT IN MAKINE

The most Chekhovian of Makine's novels is Le crime d'Olga Arbélina, published in 1998.105 A narrator—this time, an old man rather than young boy—relates the life story of Princess Olga Arbelina, who in 1939 settled in Villiers-la-Foret, a short train ride from Paris. The sizeable Russian émigré community here, which referred to itself as the “Golden Horde,” was enhanced with the arrival of a person having the stature of a princess. Olga's husband, Prince Arbeline, had been a “Georgian Don Juan”106 and soon left her for Parisian life.

Olga was the same age as the century and embodied its history: a youth brought to an abrupt end by war, a hasty flight from Russia on the penultimate boat leaving from a Black Sea port for Constantinople, wanderings through different lands, downward social mobility, a schizophrenic, incomplete integration into a new host society. She concluded that “our lives were in the image of the beginning of this sick century. We wanted to resemble it.”107

In 1947, she faced a series of calamities even as France was experiencing the first year of real normalcy since the war; one newspaper headlined “La France sort enfin du provisoire.”108 But Russia eludes and transcends the cycle of history marking Western countries, as Makine outlines in Le crime.

THE CRIME

Olga's first appearance in the novel is dramatic: barely clothed, her breasts only partially concealed by a badly-torn dress, she was kneeling over a man who had drowned and had been washed up on the river bank. Or had she killed him? Bystanders could not remember having seen the two Russians—the dead man was Serge Goletz—together. Did they share a secret that had led to this tragedy?

Only at the end of the novel do we learn what brought these two people together. Goletz had been an army doctor fighting the Bolsheviks in the civil war until taken prisoner by them and forced to serve in their army for two years. Days before his death, he visited Olga for the first time and declared his love for her. Aware that she might not reciprocate, he intimated that he knew a dark secret of hers. Olga agreed to go for a boat ride with him soon thereafter.

Olga's crime was not his murder, however, but an incestuous relationship with her hemophiliac son, not named in the book. The most lyrical and moving passages in the novel describe the beauty of the French (Russian) winter as she peered through the frosty window-pane at the snow-covered forest, in the presence of her teenage son lying asleep in their communal bed. As a young girl spending her summers on the family estate in Ostrov (“island”), Olga had had a crush on her male cousin, also a hemophiliac. Makine intimates the tragedy of a chronic love for a diseased Russia.

At this point we think we know what secret Goletz knew about Olga and why she wanted to kill him. But as with Le testament français, the last pages of the book are replete with unanticipated twists. The secret Goletz knew, the police inquiry was told by one of his confidants, was the shady property transactions of Olga's husband; Goletz may have known nothing about the incest. But Olga's physical revulsion towards him, coupled with the imagined fear of his knowing about her relationship with her son, made her want to kill this former officer who had served both sides in the Russian civil war, this doctor who dealt with armies of death. She convinced herself she had killed him, attempted suicide, and while in hospital was forced to sign a court order transferring custody of her beloved son to her ex-husband.

THE PUNISHMENT

Unsure how long the boy still had to live, Olga's ex-husband decided to take him to Russia. It was during the first storm of winter of 1947. Returning Russian émigrés were immediately separated at the railway station into adults and children. “The adults continue the road for the east, crossing the Urals, climbing above the arctic circle, as far as the camps of the great North. The young under age sixteen are judged still capable of extirpating their ‘bourgeois past’ in the reeducation colonies.”109 The protesting father was quickly killed, the son taken away into the hinterland. On discovering their fates, Olga resolved to continue living in the hope that “he is somewhere under the skies, staring at the trees, observing the light, hearing this wind.”110

Olga's close friend Li (short for Lilas) followed the same route for the northern gulags when she returned to Russia in 1947. Li had sympathized with the socialist cause. Her social origins (“fille de parents pauvres”) should have held her in good stead with the communist authorities. When Olga described the decadence of upperclass life in the Russia of her youth, Li replied: “You know, I never really knew that life. In the trenches you mostly see death.”111 A terrible scar across her face permanently marked her lowly place in society, regardless of the political regime in power.

In sum, nationality (Georgian), class background (poor), and military service (army doctor for both sides) do not avert human tragedy in both Makine's geographic and metaphoric Russia. Yet it is love—even if it is improper, or perhaps because it is—precisely for an ailing Russia that lends one life.

BLEEDING RUSSIA

Olga's entire life could be understood as punishment for having been born in Russia. As revolutionary fervor in the country increased during the First World War, her family and peers took refuge in masked balls.

One didn't know who was who. The great wind of liberty made them all drunk … this poet who is getting up at the back of the ballroom, a glass of champagne in his hand, is a well-known revolutionary. And this man holding the waist of a woman with nearly bare breasts is an agent of the police. The singer already signaling to the pianist is taking part in the conspiracy against the tsarina's vile favorite.112

During the war, as Olga was being raped by a soldier, a man with dark Oriental eyes shot the attacker dead. He said mockingly to her: “That was your first love, that little guy.”113 Her cynical deliverer was her future husband. Liberator and oppressor were rolled into one in this man, as has been the case in Russia's history from Lenin to Yeltsin.

The most explicit symbol of a suffering Russia is, of course, the hemophilia of Olga's son. Makine has Olga recount the exact nature of this illness, stressing in particular its hereditary character. He even includes a diagram outlining how it is passed down from one generation to the next, unavoidable, incurable.114 Russia's elite, we are told, was flawed by a disease that involved bruising, then bleeding, whenever its carrier received a knock of any kind. Olga read a passage from a book on the subject highlighted by her son:

The hemophiliac must be an official, not undertaking manual work …


Ninety percent of hemophiliacs do not reach their twenty birthday …


Transmission may skip over a generation or two …


This blood loss would certainly bring about death if not for repeated transfusions.115

Russia is a state of hemophilia, uncontrollably bruising and bleeding from knocks it has suffered. It cannot attain a mature age and even when it is unafflicted for a generation, the bleeding begins again, requiring a round of revolutions to stem it.

MAKINE ON LIBERTY

If Russia suffers from a political illness, for Makine it follows that the ideas of liberty and order, as they are conceived in Russia, must also be warped. Olga reminisced to Li: “You remember, at school, before the revolution, the plank of wood that the principal fastened to the backs of those who didn't sit straight. So that they'd hold themselves erect. … And then, one fine day, no more planks! The newspapers spoke of liberty and emancipation.”116 Olga remembered her first masked ball that first springtime after the backs of schoolgirls had been liberated:

She surprised a man and a woman accoupled in an armchair. And like millions and millions of people in that period, she discovered that a certain order was cracking, ready to crumble, or that in fact there was no order or rectitude, just a slavish habit that attached them, like planks on the backs, to laws called natural.117

There was no order in the ancient regime. There would be no liberty in the nouveau regime. There was only the timeless reality of a fornicating couple discovered in the brief interval between regimes.

Thus Makine's Russia does not possess rectitude, even when it imposes it. It has no order or natural law governing it, unless it be fornication. Or, more in the spirit of Makine, for cultural as opposed to political Russia, its eternal law is the poignant love of a mother for her son. It is a tormented, treasonous, unnatural law, but it is also the ability of its citizens to hold it dear despite these failings. Makine's Russia is familial, rodina, before it is otechestvo.

MAKINE'S HYBRID CONSCIOUSNESS

Makine's literary product is characterized by a consciousness of two realities, that of Russia of primarily the Soviet period and that of France at the corresponding time. It provides support for Bakhtin's conviction that “consciousness awakens to independent ideological life precisely in a world of alien discourses surrounding it, and from which it cannot initially separate itself.”118 The identity of many of Makine's principal characters, above all of Charlotte, is transposed to a border space between the cultures of Russia and France. As with Peruvian writer Jose Maria Arguedas' indigenista novel Deep Rivers,119 so in Makine's works “we can situate ourselves at the extreme border, with a view towards the inside as well as to the outside, leaving an open space on either side of the periphery to dialogue with the text.”120

In this respect Makine can be regarded as the author of the “border text,” simultaneously highlighting the importance of and deterritorializing the border between East and West. According to Neil Larsen, “the border text thinks, speaks and writes from the border itself. The polarization is not only inverted but internalized.”121 Makine's pendulum swings from a border over two civilizations. Studying the border text has particular heuristic value today, for “Borders … may very well be the spaces that hold the answers to ongoing explorations of national and transnational identities.”122

Makine's oeuvres propose a theory of art that outlines how stories of individual lives transcend boundaries of language, class, and nationality. His characters refute the existence of a suffering, divided Europe. Instead, in the character of Charlotte and others with hybrid consciousness, the spirit of courage and honor triumphs over the barbarism of war and totalitarianism. Makine's project has been to escape Russian and French nombrilisme and discover a European border of aesthetic and political dimensions.

Notes

  1. Tatyana Tolstoya, “Russkii chelovek na randevu,” Znamia, no. 6, 1998. Tolstoya would probably approve, therefore, of the French rather than Russian spelling of his name in this article. I wish to thank Irina Stakhanova and Karin Sarsenov for helpful comments on an earlier draft.

  2. Tatyana Tolstoya, “Love Story,” New York Review of Books, November 20, 1997.

  3. Quoted in Natasha Fairweather, “A ‘Frenchman's’ Tale from the Russian Steppe,” St. Petersburg Times, June 2-8, 1997.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Tolstoya, “Love Story.”

  6. Andrei Makine, Le testament français (Paris: Mercure de France, 1995; Folio paperback ed., 1997).

  7. Andrei Makine, Dreams of My Russian Summers, translated by Geoffrey Strachan (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1997) (hereafter, Dreams).

  8. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1990), p. 295.

  9. Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago (New York: Pantheon, 1997).

  10. For example, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (New York: Noonday Press, 1991).

  11. Vassily Aksyonov, Generations of Winter (New York: Vintage, 1995); The Winter's Hero (New York: Random House, 1996). The last volume has not yet been published in English.

  12. Anatoli Rybakov, Children of the Arbat (New York: Dell, 1992). In Makine's Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu, the timeframe and narrator's age correspond more closely to Reidar Jonsson's My Life as a Dog (New York: Noonday Press, 1993).

  13. Jerzy Kosinski, The Painted Bird (New York: Grove Press, 1995).

  14. Valentin Rasputin, Farewell to Matyora (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995); Siberia on Fire (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989).

  15. Konstantin Paustovsky, Story of Life (New York: Pantheon, 1985).

  16. Yuri Trifonov, Another Life; The House on the Embankment (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).

  17. Mikhail Prishkin, The Root of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1980); Nature's Diary (New York: Viking, 1987).

  18. La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique (“Daughter of a Hero of the Soviet Union”), translated by Francoise Bour (Editions Robert Laffont, 1990; Folio paperback ed., 1996).

  19. Ibid., p. 14. The translations into English are mine.

  20. Ibid., p. 18.

  21. Ibid., pp. 24-25.

  22. Ibid., p. 25.

  23. Ibid., p. 26.

  24. Ibid., p. 44.

  25. Ibid., p. 81.

  26. Ibid., p. 75.

  27. Ibid., p. 79.

  28. Ibid., p. 170.

  29. Ibid., p. 194.

  30. Ibid., p. 128.

  31. Ibid., pp. 71-72.

  32. Ibid., p. 89.

  33. Ibid., p. 107.

  34. Ibid., p. 125.

  35. Ibid., p. 207.

  36. Ibid., p. 210.

  37. Andre Makine, Once upon the River Love, translated by Geoffrey Strachan (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1998); first published in French as Au temps du fleuve Amour (Le Felin, 1994).

  38. Once upon the River Love, p. 12.

  39. Ibid., p. 196.

  40. Ibid., p. 207.

  41. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remarking of World Order (New York: Touchstone Books, 1998).

  42. Ibid., p. 14.

  43. Ibid., p. 165.

  44. William Boyd, “Rowing from Siberia to Brighton Beach,” New York Times Book Review, September 6, 1998.

  45. Once upon the River Love, p. 25.

  46. Ibid., p. 145.

  47. Ibid., p. 24.

  48. Ibid., p. 146.

  49. Ibid., p. 156.

  50. Ibid., pp. 159-160.

  51. Ibid., p. 183.

  52. Ibid., p. 54.

  53. Ibid., pp. 36-37.

  54. Ibid., p. 98.

  55. Ibid., p. 127.

  56. Ibid., p. 128.

  57. Richard Bernstein, “In a Land Where Love Had No Place,” New York Times, July 15, 1998.

  58. Boyd, “Rowing from Siberia to Brighton Beach.”

  59. Ibid.

  60. Once upon the River Love, p. 41.

  61. Ibid., p. 140.

  62. Ibid., p. 203.

  63. Ibid., p. 43.

  64. Ibid., p. 178. A Soviet novelist who also skillfully used the wolf as symbol was Chingiz Aitmatov, The Place of the Skull (New York: Grove Press, 1989).

  65. Bernstein, “In a Land Where Love Had No Place.”

  66. Andre Makine, Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu (Confessions of a Fallen Flag-Bearer) (Paris: Belfond, 1992; Folio paperback ed., 1996).

  67. Ibid., p. 11.

  68. Ibid., p. 70.

  69. Ibid., p. 105.

  70. Ibid., p. 12.

  71. Ibid., p. 114.

  72. Ibid., p. 117.

  73. Ibid., p. 17.

  74. Ibid., p. 133.

  75. Ibid., p. 132.

  76. Ibid., pp. 22-23.

  77. Ibid., p. 57.

  78. Ibid., p. 57.

  79. Ibid., p. 87.

  80. Ibid., p. 56.

  81. Ibid., pp. 158-159.

  82. Ibid., p. 109.

  83. Ibid., p. 125.

  84. Ibid., p. 127.

  85. Ibid., p. 140.

  86. Ibid., p. 150.

  87. Ibid., p. 151.

  88. Maya Zlobina, “Zarubezhnaya kniga o rossii,” Novy Mir, no. 10, 1996.

  89. Tolstoya, “Russkii chelovek na randevu.”

  90. Makine, Dreams, p. 19.

  91. Fairweather, “A ‘Frenchman's’ Tale from the Russian Steppe.”

  92. Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 228. On how the West helps define Russia, see Russianness: Studies on a Nation's Identity (Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis, 1990).

  93. Makine, Dreams, p. 69.

  94. Ibid., p. 143.

  95. Ibid., p. 58.

  96. Ibid., p. 149.

  97. Tolstoya, “Love Story.”

  98. Ibid.

  99. Makine, Dreams, p. 146.

  100. Ibid., pp. 163-164.

  101. Tolstoya, “Love Story.”

  102. Makine, Dreams, p. 207.

  103. Ibid., p. 223.

  104. Ibid., p. 237.

  105. Andre Makine, Le crime d'Olga Arbélina (Paris: Mercure de France, 1998).

  106. Ibid., p. 37.

  107. Ibid., p. 175.

  108. Ibid., p. 257.

  109. Ibid., p. 288.

  110. Ibid., p. 288.

  111. Ibid., p. 173.

  112. Ibid., p. 132.

  113. Ibid., p. 137.

  114. Ibid., p. 110.

  115. Ibid., p. 109.

  116. Ibid., p. 171.

  117. Ibid., p. 172.

  118. Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel,” reprinted in David H. Richter, ed., The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends (Boston: Bedford Books, 1998), p. 534.

  119. Jose Maria Arguedas, Deep Rivers, translated by Frances Horning Barraclough (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1994).

  120. Kenya C. Dworkin y Mendez, “Beyond Indigenism and Marxism: The Deterritorialized Borders of Jose Maria Arguedas' Deep Rivers,South Eastern Latin Americanist, vol. XLII, no. 1 (Summer 1998), p. 10.

  121. Neil Larsen, “Foreword,” in D. Emily Hicks, Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minneapolis Press, 1991), p. xvi.

  122. Dworkin y Mendez, “Beyond Indigenism and Marxism,” p. 10.

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