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Dreams of My Russian Summers #1
Das französische Testament
Jeden Sommer verbringt der kleine Aljoscha die Ferien bei seiner französischen Großmutter Charlotte in dem Städtchen Saranza, am Rande der riesigen sibirischen Steppe gelegen. Eines Tages findet Aljoscha einen Koffer, angefüllt mit Fotos und Erinnerungsstücken aus der Jugendzeit Charlottes in Paris. Dieser Koffer und die Erzählungen seiner Großmutter werden Aljoschas Leben von Grund auf verändern.
Charlotte, die es als junge Rot-Kreuz-Schwester ins bürgerkriegsgeschüttelte Rußland des Jahres 1921 verschlagen hat, läßt in dem Jungen die ganze Poesie des Fin de siècle aus dem Paris ihrer Jugend erstehen und baut in Aljoscha allmählich eine Gegenwelt zum trostlosen Sowjetalltag auf. Außerhalb der wundervollen Ferientage nämlich sieht Aljoschas Leben anders aus: Stalinistische Prachtbautenkälte und Waffenfabriken bestimmen das Bild seiner Heimatstadt, einem Riesenmoloch an der Wolga. Die Schule formt ihre Kinder nach dem Muster junger Sowjetmenschen, westliche Feindbilder werden ihnen eingeprägt und die verzauberten Sommerabende auf dem Balkon der Großmutter rücken bald wieder in weite Ferne.
Ganz behutsam, in epischer Breite, führt uns der 1957 in Sibirien geborene Andreï Makine in die Welt von Charlottes Erzählungen ein. Immer gieriger saugt Aljoscha die Anekdoten der Großmutter in sich auf, die von einem Treffen mit Marcel Proust ebenso zu berichten weiß wie vom Zarenbesuch in Paris, und die ihrem Enkel vermittels Madame Bovary erste zart-erotische Empfindungen einimpft.
Dies alles ist für Aljoscha nicht nur einfach. Die von der Großmutter beschworene Idealwelt droht, ihn seiner eigenen Identität zu berauben. Er wird ein Suchender. Und doch bleibt diese Suche nur ein Stochern im Nebel der Vergangenheit, der sich erst im Verlauf einer späteren eigenen Reise in das Paris seiner Großmutter lichtet. --Ravi Unger
Paperback
First published December 6, 1995
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About the author
Andreï Makine
39 books394 followersAndreï 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.
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.
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May 23, 2017
The story is of a young Russian boy and his older sister who have a French-born grandmother living on the edge of the steppe in Siberia. They live a distance away and visit her only in summers. From her old time stories, her reading of poetry and ancient newspaper articles, their perusal of newspaper and family pictures, she teaches them the language and imbues in them a love of French culture.
The grandmother’s life spanned years from the tsars through Stalin and WW II to the modern era, so we get quite a dose of Russian history as well. A main touchpoint in the story is that the grandmother was alive in 1896 when the tsar and his family visited Paris in a glamorous celebration of royalty, riches and grandeur. At the other extreme we get a dose of the horrors and starvation the Russians endured in WW II.
The young boy becomes obsessed with French culture to the point where his Russian schoolmates shun and bully him, thinking him an oddity. After his mother dies, an aunt moves in with her entire family to care for the two children. In contrast to the elegant French culture he dreams of, these folks are tough rural survivors and now the boy gets a heavy dose of “real Russian culture.” And, with required military training at school, he become a militant pro-fatherland Russian. He dreams of driving a tank and looks back at his French culture phase, wondering what all that foolishness was about. He achieves some resolution in his later years when he himself live in Paris and dreams of bringing his grandmother back there. Yet he realizes that her glamorous Paris, like her language, no longer exists.
There’s a lot about language and how it changes – both French, as it changed from the language the grandmother knew as a child, and Russian, as it changed, Orwell-like, with the burgeoning, insidious communist bureaucracy. There are many references to literature, especially Proust and Madame Bovary.
Here’s a passage that illustrates the author’s style:
“Yes, the building was a faint replica of the fashion of the turn of the century. It was as if all the sinuosities, twists and curves of that architecture had flowed in a stream from its European source and, diluted and partly effaced, had reached the depths of Russia. And in the icy wind of the steppes this flow had become frozen into an apartment block with strange oval bull’s-eye windows and ornamental rose stems around the doorways…”
Quotes I liked:
“Four masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev…all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable.”
“Her body contained a perfumed warmth, a disturbing fragrance, made up of the throbbing of her blood, the polish of her skin, that alluring languor of her speech.”
“Life, in fact, was an endless rough draft, in which events, badly organized, encroached on one another, in which the characters were too numerous and prevented one another from speaking, suffering, being loved or hated individually.”
“Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved.”
“…the translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.”
Translated from the French, this book won the Prix Goncourt in 1995 and made several book-of-the-year lists in the US. Makine is a Russian who came to France on a teacher exchange program and claimed exile.
A very good, very literary book. A bit slow at times, as you would expect from any book with “dreams” in the title!
Painting of Tsar Nicholas II's visit to Paris in 1896 from lookandlearn.com
Photo from pbslearningmedia.org
The grandmother’s life spanned years from the tsars through Stalin and WW II to the modern era, so we get quite a dose of Russian history as well. A main touchpoint in the story is that the grandmother was alive in 1896 when the tsar and his family visited Paris in a glamorous celebration of royalty, riches and grandeur. At the other extreme we get a dose of the horrors and starvation the Russians endured in WW II.
The young boy becomes obsessed with French culture to the point where his Russian schoolmates shun and bully him, thinking him an oddity. After his mother dies, an aunt moves in with her entire family to care for the two children. In contrast to the elegant French culture he dreams of, these folks are tough rural survivors and now the boy gets a heavy dose of “real Russian culture.” And, with required military training at school, he become a militant pro-fatherland Russian. He dreams of driving a tank and looks back at his French culture phase, wondering what all that foolishness was about. He achieves some resolution in his later years when he himself live in Paris and dreams of bringing his grandmother back there. Yet he realizes that her glamorous Paris, like her language, no longer exists.
There’s a lot about language and how it changes – both French, as it changed from the language the grandmother knew as a child, and Russian, as it changed, Orwell-like, with the burgeoning, insidious communist bureaucracy. There are many references to literature, especially Proust and Madame Bovary.
Here’s a passage that illustrates the author’s style:
“Yes, the building was a faint replica of the fashion of the turn of the century. It was as if all the sinuosities, twists and curves of that architecture had flowed in a stream from its European source and, diluted and partly effaced, had reached the depths of Russia. And in the icy wind of the steppes this flow had become frozen into an apartment block with strange oval bull’s-eye windows and ornamental rose stems around the doorways…”
Quotes I liked:
“Four masters of the Kremlin: Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev…all had one quality in common: at their sides a feminine presence, let alone an amorous one, was inconceivable.”
“Her body contained a perfumed warmth, a disturbing fragrance, made up of the throbbing of her blood, the polish of her skin, that alluring languor of her speech.”
“Life, in fact, was an endless rough draft, in which events, badly organized, encroached on one another, in which the characters were too numerous and prevented one another from speaking, suffering, being loved or hated individually.”
“Literature was now revealed as being perpetual amazement at the flow of words into which the world dissolved.”
“…the translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.”
Translated from the French, this book won the Prix Goncourt in 1995 and made several book-of-the-year lists in the US. Makine is a Russian who came to France on a teacher exchange program and claimed exile.
A very good, very literary book. A bit slow at times, as you would expect from any book with “dreams” in the title!
Painting of Tsar Nicholas II's visit to Paris in 1896 from lookandlearn.com
Photo from pbslearningmedia.org
February 16, 2015
The Goncourt prize in France seems to be drawn to Russian writers who can write French better than many French natives.
In 1938 it was awarded to Henri Troyat (né Lev Aslanovitch Tarasov) for his L’Araigne. He later became a Member of L’Académie Française. In 1956 and again in 1975 it was awarded to Romain Gary (né Roman Kacew). And more recently, in 1995, André Makine (a.k.a. Gabriel Osmonde) received this prestigious prize.
Had Nabokov been the son not of an Anglophile but of a Francophile, we would probably have another example.
Le Testament français is my first novel by Makine. It is also his first novel. I am grateful to Fionnuala who drew it to my attention.
This book is autobiographical in a roundabout way since it is in the narration of his own early life that the narrator focuses on the account of someone else’s life, the life of his grandmother. And it is in so doing that the narrator can eventually find himself.
This book has appealed to me in many ways. First and foremost there is its language. Le testament is one of those books that leave a taste in your mouth because its language is so beautiful that you want to detain its words for a little while longer and savor them. The tale is that Makine, when seeking to publish his work in France, had to invent a fictional translator because editors could not believe that such splendid writing in French could be authored by a foreigner.
The second appeal is that ever since I read in my teens, and reread later on, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Forunier, I have developed a weakness for stories narrated by a young person in the French provinces and taking place either just before WWI or during the interwar period. They embody for me, fully, the meaning of the word nostalgia, even if this perfect nostalgia is extraneous to me since neither the period nor the geography belong to my lived experiences.
And finally there is the added theme of the mixed nationalities as a determinant in the formation of the self. These correspond to two countries standing at opposite cultural poles, and yet with many historical links. The young narrator is torn between the dreamed France with its scenes of sophisticated and exquisite Salons and cultural cafés or delicious countryside, and the tangible and rough Russia in the process of transforming itself into a Stalinist state, with its harsh scenes of severe poverty, disturbing cruelty and inhospitable steppes.
In this search for the self through the memories of someone else, the young narrator will try to collect cues from all possible sources and gradually finish the puzzle of his existence, even if some of these hints insist, like it so often happens with old photographs, to remain stubbornly mute.
Le testament français is a cherishable read and I recommended it to any lovers of Proust. Not only is Marcel Proust mentioned twice in the novel as the epitome of the dreamed refined Paris, but the Proustian themes of memories and self searching are consciously explored here again. This time they are given the new element of the divergent pull from both the Russian and French cultures. It is as if this novel were a deliberate tribute to Proust and his French writing, as felt by a Russian soul.
Wonderful.
-------
It has been translated into English (truly)as Dreams of My Russian Summers. It is noteworthy that they have chosen the other cultural pole, the Russian not the French, for the English title. I find that this translated title is too prosaic and has lost the evocative power of the original. I hope the rest of the translation has captured the original lyrical tone.
In 1938 it was awarded to Henri Troyat (né Lev Aslanovitch Tarasov) for his L’Araigne. He later became a Member of L’Académie Française. In 1956 and again in 1975 it was awarded to Romain Gary (né Roman Kacew). And more recently, in 1995, André Makine (a.k.a. Gabriel Osmonde) received this prestigious prize.
Had Nabokov been the son not of an Anglophile but of a Francophile, we would probably have another example.
Le Testament français is my first novel by Makine. It is also his first novel. I am grateful to Fionnuala who drew it to my attention.
This book is autobiographical in a roundabout way since it is in the narration of his own early life that the narrator focuses on the account of someone else’s life, the life of his grandmother. And it is in so doing that the narrator can eventually find himself.
This book has appealed to me in many ways. First and foremost there is its language. Le testament is one of those books that leave a taste in your mouth because its language is so beautiful that you want to detain its words for a little while longer and savor them. The tale is that Makine, when seeking to publish his work in France, had to invent a fictional translator because editors could not believe that such splendid writing in French could be authored by a foreigner.
The second appeal is that ever since I read in my teens, and reread later on, Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain-Forunier, I have developed a weakness for stories narrated by a young person in the French provinces and taking place either just before WWI or during the interwar period. They embody for me, fully, the meaning of the word nostalgia, even if this perfect nostalgia is extraneous to me since neither the period nor the geography belong to my lived experiences.
And finally there is the added theme of the mixed nationalities as a determinant in the formation of the self. These correspond to two countries standing at opposite cultural poles, and yet with many historical links. The young narrator is torn between the dreamed France with its scenes of sophisticated and exquisite Salons and cultural cafés or delicious countryside, and the tangible and rough Russia in the process of transforming itself into a Stalinist state, with its harsh scenes of severe poverty, disturbing cruelty and inhospitable steppes.
In this search for the self through the memories of someone else, the young narrator will try to collect cues from all possible sources and gradually finish the puzzle of his existence, even if some of these hints insist, like it so often happens with old photographs, to remain stubbornly mute.
Le testament français is a cherishable read and I recommended it to any lovers of Proust. Not only is Marcel Proust mentioned twice in the novel as the epitome of the dreamed refined Paris, but the Proustian themes of memories and self searching are consciously explored here again. This time they are given the new element of the divergent pull from both the Russian and French cultures. It is as if this novel were a deliberate tribute to Proust and his French writing, as felt by a Russian soul.
Wonderful.
-------
It has been translated into English (truly)as Dreams of My Russian Summers. It is noteworthy that they have chosen the other cultural pole, the Russian not the French, for the English title. I find that this translated title is too prosaic and has lost the evocative power of the original. I hope the rest of the translation has captured the original lyrical tone.
December 27, 2015
"So I saw things differently; was it an advantage? Or a handicap, a blemish?... I understood that this second view of things would have to be hidden for it could only provoke mockery from others."- Andrei Makïne, Dreams of my Russian Summers
One of my interests in recent years has been in reading books about, and talking to people with cross-cultural upbringings, and it amazes me how much is similar between people who were, like me, brought up in this way. It's even more interesting to encounter a person like this in a literary setting because I think there's so much more we can get down on paper about our lives and inner struggles with identity than we can say in a conversation.
Makine introduces us to a French-Russian boy in this great coming of age story in which the young boy, our narrator, tries to come to grips with his cultural identity through stories, papers, and historical artifacts found in his grandmother's trunk, his observations and experiences. He finds himself shifting identities constantly. Is he French? Is he Russian? Is he both? How much of each is he? Before I'd even properly read the synopsis, I sensed a Proustian quality in Makine's words. Not surprisingly, Proust was mentioned more than a few times in this book. His French Proust-like grandmother is central to the confusion the boy feels about his identity; she represents a romantic, democratic France, which is in stark contrast to a colder, harsher Russia devoid of beautiful architecture because of the wars and Stalinist regime, a Russia still reeling from the atrocities of war.
Ultimately, for those of us with this sort of upbringing, we are on our own journey to find our way. Speaking to others, I've heard of the many ways they've reconciled their identity, for example through music, art, writing, and even sports. I related to our protagonists' journey because of my love of history so I can understand the route the boy chose to learn about himself.
I find it interesting how the narrator not only mythologized France, but also how he finally understood who he was and why he was thus. Makine is a great writer and this is one of my top reads of the year for good reason.
"So that was it, the key to our Atlantis! Language, that mysterious substance, invisible and omnipresent, whose sonorous essence reached into every corner of the universe we were in the process of exploring. This language that shaped men, moulded objects, rippled in verse, bellowed in streets invaded by crowds, caused a young tsarina who had come from the other end of the world to smile...But above all throbbed within us, like a magical graft implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization. Yes, this implant, the French language."
One of my interests in recent years has been in reading books about, and talking to people with cross-cultural upbringings, and it amazes me how much is similar between people who were, like me, brought up in this way. It's even more interesting to encounter a person like this in a literary setting because I think there's so much more we can get down on paper about our lives and inner struggles with identity than we can say in a conversation.
Makine introduces us to a French-Russian boy in this great coming of age story in which the young boy, our narrator, tries to come to grips with his cultural identity through stories, papers, and historical artifacts found in his grandmother's trunk, his observations and experiences. He finds himself shifting identities constantly. Is he French? Is he Russian? Is he both? How much of each is he? Before I'd even properly read the synopsis, I sensed a Proustian quality in Makine's words. Not surprisingly, Proust was mentioned more than a few times in this book. His French Proust-like grandmother is central to the confusion the boy feels about his identity; she represents a romantic, democratic France, which is in stark contrast to a colder, harsher Russia devoid of beautiful architecture because of the wars and Stalinist regime, a Russia still reeling from the atrocities of war.
Ultimately, for those of us with this sort of upbringing, we are on our own journey to find our way. Speaking to others, I've heard of the many ways they've reconciled their identity, for example through music, art, writing, and even sports. I related to our protagonists' journey because of my love of history so I can understand the route the boy chose to learn about himself.
I find it interesting how the narrator not only mythologized France, but also how he finally understood who he was and why he was thus. Makine is a great writer and this is one of my top reads of the year for good reason.
"So that was it, the key to our Atlantis! Language, that mysterious substance, invisible and omnipresent, whose sonorous essence reached into every corner of the universe we were in the process of exploring. This language that shaped men, moulded objects, rippled in verse, bellowed in streets invaded by crowds, caused a young tsarina who had come from the other end of the world to smile...But above all throbbed within us, like a magical graft implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization. Yes, this implant, the French language."
Read
October 18, 2020Several of the books I have been reading recently have been about place.
Together they show how the history of a community and the geography of a region can be combined and recorded so that they remain alive and vibrant rather than gathering dust in the archives.
In Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait, the geographer John Western records the history and geography of the city of Strasbourg on the French/German border through wonderfully immediate interviews with its citizens; the reader actually hears the people's voices.
In Island: Collected Stories, Alastair MacLeod describes Cape Breton as faithfully as any geographer might but although it is fiction, the reader comes to believe that his stories are the true and very poetic account of people and places he knew and loved.
In Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie sets out the story of a tiny community in Northern Ireland. Like Western, he listens carefully to what the people say but what he emphasises is less factual and more story oriented. Like MacLeod, Glassie demonstrates how history can easily become story and how story eventually becomes myth.
History becoming myth is also the theme of Russian writer Andrei Makine’s Le Testament Français. Makine is particularly preoccupied with how memories become distorted in the telling and how the transmitting of them to others can radically change the lives of those others. During the course of this novel, the narrator recounts the evolution of his own thinking about his grandmother’s stories of her youth in France. His reactions vary from passionate interest in every detail of her stories while he was a child, to a cooler and more clinical study of everything French as a teenager and then towards a radical rejection of his French roots as a young adult before veering right back again to the initial obsessive state in middle age when the original stories have finally become myths. A major turning point occurs when he realises that history which doesn’t come alive, which is not infused with poetry and the voices of the participants, is a dry dead thing. Makine clearly believes in honouring the spirit of the original possessor of the memory and the passages in which Charlotte, the narrator’s French grandmother feature are the most beautiful in this book.
Alongside this unique examination of memory and place, Makine weaves a second story of family secrets and the brutal choices that were necessary in order to stay alive in Stalinist Russia. In order to successfully combine these two themes, Makine allows the action of the novel to revolve around two separate points, following a series of elliptical orbits around these points, sometimes straying quite near one, more often following a wide arc away from it but closer to the other so that the reader almost forgets that the first point exists.
Very deftly handled.
Together they show how the history of a community and the geography of a region can be combined and recorded so that they remain alive and vibrant rather than gathering dust in the archives.
In Cosmopolitan Europe: A Strasbourg Self-Portrait, the geographer John Western records the history and geography of the city of Strasbourg on the French/German border through wonderfully immediate interviews with its citizens; the reader actually hears the people's voices.
In Island: Collected Stories, Alastair MacLeod describes Cape Breton as faithfully as any geographer might but although it is fiction, the reader comes to believe that his stories are the true and very poetic account of people and places he knew and loved.
In Passing the Time in Ballymenone, Henry Glassie sets out the story of a tiny community in Northern Ireland. Like Western, he listens carefully to what the people say but what he emphasises is less factual and more story oriented. Like MacLeod, Glassie demonstrates how history can easily become story and how story eventually becomes myth.
History becoming myth is also the theme of Russian writer Andrei Makine’s Le Testament Français. Makine is particularly preoccupied with how memories become distorted in the telling and how the transmitting of them to others can radically change the lives of those others. During the course of this novel, the narrator recounts the evolution of his own thinking about his grandmother’s stories of her youth in France. His reactions vary from passionate interest in every detail of her stories while he was a child, to a cooler and more clinical study of everything French as a teenager and then towards a radical rejection of his French roots as a young adult before veering right back again to the initial obsessive state in middle age when the original stories have finally become myths. A major turning point occurs when he realises that history which doesn’t come alive, which is not infused with poetry and the voices of the participants, is a dry dead thing. Makine clearly believes in honouring the spirit of the original possessor of the memory and the passages in which Charlotte, the narrator’s French grandmother feature are the most beautiful in this book.
Alongside this unique examination of memory and place, Makine weaves a second story of family secrets and the brutal choices that were necessary in order to stay alive in Stalinist Russia. In order to successfully combine these two themes, Makine allows the action of the novel to revolve around two separate points, following a series of elliptical orbits around these points, sometimes straying quite near one, more often following a wide arc away from it but closer to the other so that the reader almost forgets that the first point exists.
Very deftly handled.
February 16, 2019
Dreams of My Russian Summers is my second book by Russian-born French novelist, Andrei Makine, and I was once again entranced by the elegance of his lyrical prose. Makine was born and raised in Russia but he wrote this book in French while he was living in France. The version I read was translated into English by Geoffrey Strachan. There were lines and passages I loved and read over a few times because they were breathtakingly beautiful. I can only imagine how much more luscious and gorgeous it must have been in the original language.
As the title suggests, the novel had a dreamlike quality. The story captured the memories of the narrator, Aloysha, a Russian with a French heritage, from the age of 10 to about 35. The novel was built dominantly on memories of summers his younger self had spent in Saranza on the Russian steppes with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he adored. Leafing through old photo albums and an old suitcase of newspaper clippings of significant historic events, the young narrator and his sister began to piece together their grandmother’s past and that of their great-grandmother (Albertine who married a Russian doctor). They shed light on the family’s prehistory that dated back to the watershed of the 1917 revolution which brought the tsars to power. The narrator recalled how ‘Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away...’
I imagined ‘summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes...’ as Charlotte shared stories of bygone days living at different times in these two countries. This novel read like a tale of two countries that slowly unfolded from the period before WWI to the 1970s. We learned about Neuilly, a village in Russia with its izbas, herds of cattle and cockerel, as well as about the visit by Tsar Nicolas II to the French president in Paris and the lavish banquet menu, promise of peace and cooperation, which did not materialize. Without exaggeration, Charlotte also described life in Siberia during WWI (wrecked lives and mangled bodies) and starvation in the years following the war when she survived the long winters on dried plants - a Siberian soup concocted from stems, grains, and roots.
For the adolescent narrator, Charlotte’s romanticized version of Nicolas II was contrary to what he learned in history class about Nicholas the Bloody. His love for France that Charlotte imparted became for him a barrier toward full acceptance into Russian society. He was unpopular and ostracized by his schoolmates. He began to question his own love of French culture and felt resentful toward his grandmother. For much of his life, the narrator agonized over his identity. He was sandwiched between a beautiful French past and a harsh Russian present. In his own words: “This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate...”; “This life was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one’s eyes, plug one’s ears, stop oneself thinking.” The story traced the change in his thoughts and feelings toward French culture and the resolution of his conflicts.
In many ways, I believe, this novel has autobiographical influences. The adult narrator put his memories of his grandmother into a book, titled ‘Charlotte Lemonnier: Biographical Notes’. He published several novels; however, his earlier novels written in French were rejected by publishers who did not believe that a Russian could write French. The novels received due recognition only after he claimed to have had them translated from Russian to French. This was reminiscent of Makine’s own heartache as a writer. According to Wikipedia, '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.'
Dreams of My Russian Summers is a novel that has to be read slowly with all of one’s senses. The vivid prose allowed one to picture, amongst other things, the ring of izbas (log houses) and the decapitated church with the cupola and cross lopped off by Russian revolutionaries, and smell the fragrance left by the taiga (pine trees). Makine’s writing, intoxicating and yet delicate, is a veritable treat. Published in France in 1995, it won two top French awards: the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.
As the title suggests, the novel had a dreamlike quality. The story captured the memories of the narrator, Aloysha, a Russian with a French heritage, from the age of 10 to about 35. The novel was built dominantly on memories of summers his younger self had spent in Saranza on the Russian steppes with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he adored. Leafing through old photo albums and an old suitcase of newspaper clippings of significant historic events, the young narrator and his sister began to piece together their grandmother’s past and that of their great-grandmother (Albertine who married a Russian doctor). They shed light on the family’s prehistory that dated back to the watershed of the 1917 revolution which brought the tsars to power. The narrator recalled how ‘Adult life, in all its tedium and all its disturbing seriousness, stopped our breath with its smell of dust and things shut away...’
I imagined ‘summer evenings filled with the scented breeze of the steppes...’ as Charlotte shared stories of bygone days living at different times in these two countries. This novel read like a tale of two countries that slowly unfolded from the period before WWI to the 1970s. We learned about Neuilly, a village in Russia with its izbas, herds of cattle and cockerel, as well as about the visit by Tsar Nicolas II to the French president in Paris and the lavish banquet menu, promise of peace and cooperation, which did not materialize. Without exaggeration, Charlotte also described life in Siberia during WWI (wrecked lives and mangled bodies) and starvation in the years following the war when she survived the long winters on dried plants - a Siberian soup concocted from stems, grains, and roots.
For the adolescent narrator, Charlotte’s romanticized version of Nicolas II was contrary to what he learned in history class about Nicholas the Bloody. His love for France that Charlotte imparted became for him a barrier toward full acceptance into Russian society. He was unpopular and ostracized by his schoolmates. He began to question his own love of French culture and felt resentful toward his grandmother. For much of his life, the narrator agonized over his identity. He was sandwiched between a beautiful French past and a harsh Russian present. In his own words: “This country is monstrous! Evil, torture, suffering, self-mutilation, are the favorite pastimes of its inhabitants. And still I love it? I love it for its absurdity. For its monstrosities. I see in it a higher meaning that no logical reasoning can penetrate...”; “This life was a continual heartbreak. The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became. As if to love it, one had to tear out one’s eyes, plug one’s ears, stop oneself thinking.” The story traced the change in his thoughts and feelings toward French culture and the resolution of his conflicts.
In many ways, I believe, this novel has autobiographical influences. The adult narrator put his memories of his grandmother into a book, titled ‘Charlotte Lemonnier: Biographical Notes’. He published several novels; however, his earlier novels written in French were rejected by publishers who did not believe that a Russian could write French. The novels received due recognition only after he claimed to have had them translated from Russian to French. This was reminiscent of Makine’s own heartache as a writer. According to Wikipedia, '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.'
Dreams of My Russian Summers is a novel that has to be read slowly with all of one’s senses. The vivid prose allowed one to picture, amongst other things, the ring of izbas (log houses) and the decapitated church with the cupola and cross lopped off by Russian revolutionaries, and smell the fragrance left by the taiga (pine trees). Makine’s writing, intoxicating and yet delicate, is a veritable treat. Published in France in 1995, it won two top French awards: the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.
July 9, 2024
Voto = ⭐⭐⭐ 1/2
Amici e parenti sanno della mia relativamente recente predilezione per gli scrittori russi dell’ottocento ma anche della mia continua e quasi spasmodica ricerca di romanzi e racconti di scrittori russi del novecento e contemporanei e ogni volta che riesco a mettere le mani su un “nuovo” autore non vedo l’ora di cominciarne la lettura: è stato il caso anche per questo “Testamento Francese” di Andrei Makine, nato in Russia (1957) ma poi trasferitosi trentenne in Francia dove con questo romanzo ha vinto il Premio Gouncort. E’ un’opera questa a tratti affascinante con una indimenticabile protagonista femminile, la nonna del protagonista, divisa tra l’amore per la Russia in cui ha vissuto la maggior parte della sua avventurosa vita adulta e quello per la Francia, sua terra natale in fine secolo XIX° dei cui ricordi favoleggia con il nipote narratore che da ragazzo trascorre nell'isba della nonna le vacanze estive. Peccato che nell’ultimo terzo il romanzo entri, per quello che è il mio modo di vedere, in una “secca” narrativa un po' noiosa e che solo nel finale si riscatti con un inaspettato, magistrale colpo di scena.
Amici e parenti sanno della mia relativamente recente predilezione per gli scrittori russi dell’ottocento ma anche della mia continua e quasi spasmodica ricerca di romanzi e racconti di scrittori russi del novecento e contemporanei e ogni volta che riesco a mettere le mani su un “nuovo” autore non vedo l’ora di cominciarne la lettura: è stato il caso anche per questo “Testamento Francese” di Andrei Makine, nato in Russia (1957) ma poi trasferitosi trentenne in Francia dove con questo romanzo ha vinto il Premio Gouncort. E’ un’opera questa a tratti affascinante con una indimenticabile protagonista femminile, la nonna del protagonista, divisa tra l’amore per la Russia in cui ha vissuto la maggior parte della sua avventurosa vita adulta e quello per la Francia, sua terra natale in fine secolo XIX° dei cui ricordi favoleggia con il nipote narratore che da ragazzo trascorre nell'isba della nonna le vacanze estive. Peccato che nell’ultimo terzo il romanzo entri, per quello che è il mio modo di vedere, in una “secca” narrativa un po' noiosa e che solo nel finale si riscatti con un inaspettato, magistrale colpo di scena.
April 24, 2015
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. Yet on that balcony, the USSR disappears and the children are immersed in another reality—the reality of memories of things and worlds past. They speak in French, and the language, the words, become part of the magic, incantations for summoning mood and memory.
Behind the glittering, shifting, ever-present, never-changing France-Atlantis, Charlotte holds other memories at bay and these the narrator learns only indirectly, eavesdropping on adult conversations over the winter, as his parents and their friends and relatives gather to smoke and drink vodka and talk of the Frenchwoman who chose to live alone in Siberia.
These darker, winter stories coalesce into another narrative in which Charlotte cares for the wounded of the Great War; lives through the horrors of the famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union; the constant hunger kept at bay with watery soup made from dried plants—or worse things, of which Charlotte knows, but does not partake; the last train for the east amid German bombing; and the ‘wrong’ suitcase—the one that holds memories, clippings of old newspapers, not biscuits.
Only the narrator and his grandmother emerge fully shaped from the shining fragments of memory, and only Charlotte is likable. But the sense of places and times are vivid, even in broken pieces, like the Beaux-Art cherubs knocked off Charlotte’s balcony by Soviet workmen eager to erase the decadent past. One of the cherubs shatters in a thousand pieces on the sidewalk below, but the second of the pair lands in a bed of dahlias and is rescued and preserved by the children.
In the book’s third section, the narrator is entering adolescence and feels somehow an alien in his own being (as most adolescents do at times). Estranged from his French self he finds himself drawn to the Russian side of his identity and as he does so the tone and tempo of the book, even the sentence structure changes becoming for a time simpler and more linear.
And then comes a crisis, a first awkward encounter with a girl, and the narrator flees from his embarrassment—runs away to Charlotte to stand with her again on the balcony, talk of poetry and find, in one last summer with her, a calm center for his soul. Even in that summer's terrible moments—a scene in which we encounter a group of quadruple amputees—Charlotte seems to have a gift for finding and bestowing peace. Now at last we learn the narrator’s name, Alyosha. In Charlotte’s presence, “All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past…Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun….A planet where the death of this woman with her big grey eyes became inconceivable.”
In truth, I wish the book had ended with that summer, for Alyosha without Charlotte is not an easy person to be with--solitary, self-absorbed, and often incoherent. In the book's fourth section, some 20 years later, Alyosha has been living in the west, on the edge of destitution and perhaps insanity, and finds his way to Paris. His only moments of clarity come from memories of Charlotte and her Paris life, and from the hope that he might bring her to live with him. These final 30 pages contain a couple of interesting twists, but I think the story would have been stronger without them.
Three and a half stars, rounded up because I loved Charlotte. This is not a book that everyone will enjoy nor is it without flaws; it is too fragmented and often rather too full of itself and its literary antecedents (mostly Proust, it would seem). Yet I am very glad to have met Charlotte and to have glimpsed, in tiny glittering shards, her many lives and worlds.
Content rating PG for two brief sexual encounters (not particularly graphic) and several wartime and Soviet era scenes of very graphic horror.
The choice of events was more or less subjective. Their sequence was chiefly governed by our feverish desire to know, by our random questions…for us the exact chronology mattered little! Time in Atlantis knew only the marvelous simultaneity of the present.
…still in this present, which never passed away, we came upon a quiet little bistro, the name of which Charlotte spelled out to us, smilingly, as she recalled it: Au Ratafia de Neuilly. “This ratafia,” she would elaborate, “the patron served it in silver scallop dishes…."
We were discovering that a meal, yes, the simple intake of food, could become a theatrical production, a liturgy, an art....
In truth, we were beginning to lose our heads: the Louvre; Le Cid at the Comédie-Française; the deputies in a boat; and the comet; and the chandeliers, falling one after the other; and the Niagara of wines; and the president’s last embrace…And the frogs disturbed in their winter sleep! We were up against a people with a fabulous multiplicity of sentiments, attitudes, and viewpoints, as well as manners of speaking, creating, and loving.
Behind the glittering, shifting, ever-present, never-changing France-Atlantis, Charlotte holds other memories at bay and these the narrator learns only indirectly, eavesdropping on adult conversations over the winter, as his parents and their friends and relatives gather to smoke and drink vodka and talk of the Frenchwoman who chose to live alone in Siberia.
These darker, winter stories coalesce into another narrative in which Charlotte cares for the wounded of the Great War; lives through the horrors of the famines in Stalin’s Soviet Union; the constant hunger kept at bay with watery soup made from dried plants—or worse things, of which Charlotte knows, but does not partake; the last train for the east amid German bombing; and the ‘wrong’ suitcase—the one that holds memories, clippings of old newspapers, not biscuits.
Only the narrator and his grandmother emerge fully shaped from the shining fragments of memory, and only Charlotte is likable. But the sense of places and times are vivid, even in broken pieces, like the Beaux-Art cherubs knocked off Charlotte’s balcony by Soviet workmen eager to erase the decadent past. One of the cherubs shatters in a thousand pieces on the sidewalk below, but the second of the pair lands in a bed of dahlias and is rescued and preserved by the children.
In the book’s third section, the narrator is entering adolescence and feels somehow an alien in his own being (as most adolescents do at times). Estranged from his French self he finds himself drawn to the Russian side of his identity and as he does so the tone and tempo of the book, even the sentence structure changes becoming for a time simpler and more linear.
For at last I was coming back to life. Living in the happy simplicity of orderly actions: shooting, marching in file, eating millet kasha from aluminum mess tins. Letting oneself be carried along in a collective movement directed by others, by those who knew the supreme objective, who generously relieved us of all the burden of responsibility, making us light, transparent, clear.
And then comes a crisis, a first awkward encounter with a girl, and the narrator flees from his embarrassment—runs away to Charlotte to stand with her again on the balcony, talk of poetry and find, in one last summer with her, a calm center for his soul. Even in that summer's terrible moments—a scene in which we encounter a group of quadruple amputees—Charlotte seems to have a gift for finding and bestowing peace. Now at last we learn the narrator’s name, Alyosha. In Charlotte’s presence, “All at once I saw! Or rather I felt, with all my being, the luminous tie that linked this moment full of iridescent reflections to other moments I had inhabited in the past…Linked together thus, these moments formed a singular universe, with its own rhythm, its particular air and sun….A planet where the death of this woman with her big grey eyes became inconceivable.”
In truth, I wish the book had ended with that summer, for Alyosha without Charlotte is not an easy person to be with--solitary, self-absorbed, and often incoherent. In the book's fourth section, some 20 years later, Alyosha has been living in the west, on the edge of destitution and perhaps insanity, and finds his way to Paris. His only moments of clarity come from memories of Charlotte and her Paris life, and from the hope that he might bring her to live with him. These final 30 pages contain a couple of interesting twists, but I think the story would have been stronger without them.
Three and a half stars, rounded up because I loved Charlotte. This is not a book that everyone will enjoy nor is it without flaws; it is too fragmented and often rather too full of itself and its literary antecedents (mostly Proust, it would seem). Yet I am very glad to have met Charlotte and to have glimpsed, in tiny glittering shards, her many lives and worlds.
Content rating PG for two brief sexual encounters (not particularly graphic) and several wartime and Soviet era scenes of very graphic horror.
October 17, 2020
I’m very disappointed in this novel. I did not like it at times mostly because I was bored…the author seemed to dither on and on…get to the point! The story is supposed to be about at least in part the narrator’s grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, a Russian born of a Russian father and a French mother. She speaks fluent French and so does her grandson, the narrator of the story, Alyosha. He visits his grandmother who lives on the steppes of Russia in Siberia every summer, as he grows from a young boy to a young man. She tells him stories of her life (and his) as the story unwinds. The stories time frame is from around the time of the Russian Revolution through Stalin and through Brezhnev (~1917-~1980s).
One problem is that a huge part of the plot is revealed near the end and it went right over my head. I don’t understand the significance of it. Or maybe it was not germane to the plot — and so maybe I did not need to understand it. If so, the book was more boring than what I have perceived it to be.
What makes me feel bad is that I must have missed something that others caught — this won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis in 1995. Ergo, it must be very good, and I failed to appreciate it. ☹ Also, I loved one of his later novels, Music of a Life — that one was 4.5 stars for me. Oh well, back to reading… 😐
Reviews:
From a blog-site: https://januarymagazine.com/fiction/m...
From a blog-site: http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fus...
One problem is that a huge part of the plot is revealed near the end and it went right over my head. I don’t understand the significance of it. Or maybe it was not germane to the plot — and so maybe I did not need to understand it. If so, the book was more boring than what I have perceived it to be.
What makes me feel bad is that I must have missed something that others caught — this won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis in 1995. Ergo, it must be very good, and I failed to appreciate it. ☹ Also, I loved one of his later novels, Music of a Life — that one was 4.5 stars for me. Oh well, back to reading… 😐
Reviews:
From a blog-site: https://januarymagazine.com/fiction/m...
From a blog-site: http://brothersjudd.com/index.cfm/fus...
February 23, 2015
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 10, 2010
It's a French novel. It's a Russian novel. It's a French novel about Russia. It's a Russian novel about France. It's all of those things. As a Hungarian-American, I am almost never unaware of my own dual nature. So too is Alyosha, the narrator of this tale of his encounters in Saranza, Western Siberia, with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier.
Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers is a wonderful autobiographical novel about never quite being a unified whole, but part of a centrifugal multiple entity that alternately fascinates and repels one.
Andrei Makine's Dreams of My Russian Summers is a wonderful autobiographical novel about never quite being a unified whole, but part of a centrifugal multiple entity that alternately fascinates and repels one.
June 18, 2024
Alioshka pasa sus vacaciones en la aldea siberiana con su abuela, Charlotte. Las jornadas son matizadas con las narraciones y recuerdos de Charlotte, su infancia y juventud francesa, acompañadas de recortes periodísticos y fotos del ese período, a principios del Siglo XX. Y a través de ello, incorporan no sólo la lengua, sino también una sensibilidad, una estética; siempre recuerdo el lema de la Alianza Francesa: "El francés no es sólo una lengua; es una forma de ver al mundo". Pero ¿Qué hace esta francesa en una aldea siberiana? ¿Cómo se compatibilizarán en Alioshka la refinada educación francesa con la pasión, el sufrimiento y el fuego de su alma rusa?
La novela recorre, a través de los recuerdos y las vivencias, desde la época del Zar Nicolás II, la Revolución soviética, la primera y segunda Guerra Mundial y llega hasta el período del derrumbe de la Unión Soviética, en una vida llena de peripecias y sorpresas.
Una muy buena novela, sobria, aunque entrañable, que toca entre otras cosas, esta histórica amistad entre Francia y Rusia, a pesar de sus profundas diferencias.
Andrei Makine nació en Rusia en 1957, y comenzó su carrera de escritor durante su exilio francés. Aunque ha escrito su obra en francés, para lograr la publicación de su primera novela, debió "inventar" una versión en ruso y una seudo traducción. Le fue otorgado en Premio Goncourt por El testamento francés.
La novela recorre, a través de los recuerdos y las vivencias, desde la época del Zar Nicolás II, la Revolución soviética, la primera y segunda Guerra Mundial y llega hasta el período del derrumbe de la Unión Soviética, en una vida llena de peripecias y sorpresas.
Una muy buena novela, sobria, aunque entrañable, que toca entre otras cosas, esta histórica amistad entre Francia y Rusia, a pesar de sus profundas diferencias.
Andrei Makine nació en Rusia en 1957, y comenzó su carrera de escritor durante su exilio francés. Aunque ha escrito su obra en francés, para lograr la publicación de su primera novela, debió "inventar" una versión en ruso y una seudo traducción. Le fue otorgado en Premio Goncourt por El testamento francés.
October 16, 2016
Andrei Makine’s beautifully dappled style, the conflagration of colours which leap from the page and the obsession with memory and the past recalls Proust (who makes an appearance in the novel); Makine lacks Proust’s genius, yet ‘Dreams of My Russian Summers’ reverberates with beauty and pathos.
The story follows the story of a young Russian who is torn between the exoticism, grace and individuality of French culture, as represented by his French grandmother, Charlotte, and the autocracy and brutality of Soviet Russia, which sought to do away with individualism in favour of collectivism-gone was the idiosyncratic genius of Tolstoy and Chekhov, in its place was the cruelty of the Soviet state and the promotion of the collective will and shallow populism. The narrator’s French grandmother, Charlotte, is the light with which he is able to gain his sense identity outside of the shackles of the Soviet state.
The narrator coalesces photos and anecdotes of his grandmother with the vibrancy of his own imagination, to re-imagine France as his grandmother would have experienced it; from the libidinous President to the picture of three mysterious women, his re-imagining of his grandmother’s past is they key to unlocking his own sense of individuality, of re-discovering something outside of the mundaneness of his life;
“The second memory was do distant that it could not be dated. There was not even a precise me in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants and silvery lines crossing the blue density of air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads….for in my grandmother’s stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory; the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of those fields of lavender and even those gossamers floating in perfumed air.”
The narrator eventually moves to France, his search for his grandmother’s past becomes fully realised as a journey of self-discovery as he finds the France of his imagination does not correspond to the reality, that it was not France, or Russia or any other tangible object that he was seeking, but rather the wonders of the imagination and memory which allow him to recreate and re-live the past of his grandmother.
The story follows the story of a young Russian who is torn between the exoticism, grace and individuality of French culture, as represented by his French grandmother, Charlotte, and the autocracy and brutality of Soviet Russia, which sought to do away with individualism in favour of collectivism-gone was the idiosyncratic genius of Tolstoy and Chekhov, in its place was the cruelty of the Soviet state and the promotion of the collective will and shallow populism. The narrator’s French grandmother, Charlotte, is the light with which he is able to gain his sense identity outside of the shackles of the Soviet state.
The narrator coalesces photos and anecdotes of his grandmother with the vibrancy of his own imagination, to re-imagine France as his grandmother would have experienced it; from the libidinous President to the picture of three mysterious women, his re-imagining of his grandmother’s past is they key to unlocking his own sense of individuality, of re-discovering something outside of the mundaneness of his life;
“The second memory was do distant that it could not be dated. There was not even a precise me in its nebulousness. Just the intense sensation of light, the aromatic scent of plants and silvery lines crossing the blue density of air, which many years later I would identify as gossamer threads….for in my grandmother’s stories I was to rediscover all the elements of this memory; the autumn sun of a journey she made to Provence, the scent of those fields of lavender and even those gossamers floating in perfumed air.”
The narrator eventually moves to France, his search for his grandmother’s past becomes fully realised as a journey of self-discovery as he finds the France of his imagination does not correspond to the reality, that it was not France, or Russia or any other tangible object that he was seeking, but rather the wonders of the imagination and memory which allow him to recreate and re-live the past of his grandmother.
June 30, 2020
Cuốn này khiến tôi nhớ tới Biển của John Banville quá. Một cuốn hư cấu mà khi đọc lại mang cảm tưởng tác giả đã dốc ngược toàn bộ trái tim ký ức cả đời mình để viết. Và lại viết quá thơ, quá sâu sắc. Rất hiếm cuốn mang tới cảm giác mình sống trong không gian tác giả dựng lên như thế này. Và bà Charlotte này đáng yêu quá. Tôi muốn có thể được như vậy tới cuối đời. Và cái nước Nga, nó có gì mà khiến người ta lưu luyến và đau khổ quá mức như vậy? Nhưng ai cũng có thể có một nước Nga như thế trong mình, nơi mình luôn có một cuộc sống kép tại đó, bên cạnh cuộc sống hiện thực. Tôi cũng vậy, tôi luôn sống cùng lúc ở hai nơi.
April 7, 2019
čudesno topla, nježna, senzibilna literatura.... fina, baš fina. svojevrsni hommage charlotte, baki francuskinji, kroz kojeg makine preispituje svoj ruski i francuski identitet kroz odrastanje - od dječaka koji skupa sa sestrom praznike provodi kod bake slušajući njene priče, poeziju na francuskom i kopajući po njenom koferu uspomena, preko dječaštva pa do svog osobnog razvoja i unutarnjeg konflikta između ta dva identiteta koji se jedno drugome suprotstavljaju, ali i međusobno nadograđuju. kroz tu priču provlače se trajne i nepremostive razlike između istoka i zapada, između rusije i francuske. a njegova zanesenost bakom, njenom elegancijom, stoicizmom, karakterom -koju eksplicitno iskazuje i shvaća tek u zrelijoj dobi- jednostavno je dirljiva.
neću izdvajati posebno rečenice koje su me se dojmile... bilo bi to masakriranje uravnoteženog, pjevnog i bogatog makineovog rječnika. tek, sebi za uspomenu, vadim jednu: "znala je da se ovaj život, usprkos boli, može proživjeti, da je kroz njega trebalo prolaziti polako od tog sutona s prodornim mirisom stručaka do beskrajnog mira ravnice s cvrkutom ptice izgubljene na nebu, da, idući od tog neba do njegova duboka odsjaja koji je osjećala u prsima kao nešto živo i prisno.".
i mislim da se više nikad neću naći pred objektivom a da ne pomislim u sebi "petite pomme". :)
neću izdvajati posebno rečenice koje su me se dojmile... bilo bi to masakriranje uravnoteženog, pjevnog i bogatog makineovog rječnika. tek, sebi za uspomenu, vadim jednu: "znala je da se ovaj život, usprkos boli, može proživjeti, da je kroz njega trebalo prolaziti polako od tog sutona s prodornim mirisom stručaka do beskrajnog mira ravnice s cvrkutom ptice izgubljene na nebu, da, idući od tog neba do njegova duboka odsjaja koji je osjećala u prsima kao nešto živo i prisno.".
i mislim da se više nikad neću naći pred objektivom a da ne pomislim u sebi "petite pomme". :)
June 30, 2017
This is such a wonderful book that my words could never do it justice. The reflections on time, memories and his grandmother are beautifully written and almost poetic. I would love to know how much of this book is autobiography. The main character's trajectory seems to closely line up with what I have read about the author, but I would love to know if these are true memories of his grandmother. One of my favorite books.
October 18, 2020
How one comes to maturity can involve a long but disconnected procession of events, many of which are elusive and in Andreï Makine's excellent novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, the detailed memories involve fragments rather than clear & specific moments of recollection. Piecing the fragments together to form a tapestry that causes the story to become lucid is the task on the novel's narrator but also that of the reader. I found the novel to resemble a Proustian journey of very gradual enlightenment that might frustrate some readers but which I enjoyed very much.
How identity or sense of self is determined in the lives of each of us can involve more than a little mystery but especially so for someone whose life & identity straddles 2 countries, 2 different languages & an influential but "hybrid" grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, a woman with one foot in Russia, the country where she has lived for ages, enveloped in an odd sort of cocoon & the other in the long-ago France of her youth.
"Beyond the dates & anecdotes of family legend, we could hear life welling up in all of its sorrowful beauty. The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves." Charlotte Lemonnier, age 11 in 1914 in France at the onset of WWI and age 20 in post-revolutionary Russia in 1923 wanders through time & space, eventually becoming "not entirely a Russian babushka" & enduring extreme hardship en route.
The Makine novel involves a process of reclamation as the French narrator listens to his grandmother's stories & deciphers the contents of her "Siberian suitcase" while spending summers with her in Russia. The contents of her duffel involve various newspapers, photos & other ephemera that document Charlotte's life but also are ultimately grafted on to the identity of the narrator. Over several summers of encampment with Charlotte Lemonnier in the Russian village of Saranza, the narrator not only pieces together his grandmother's life but also begins to confront just who he is:
In reading Makine's novel a 2nd time & recalling very little about my initial encounter with it a decade or more before, I began to consider more fully the importance of language in shaping not only one's memories but one's life experiences; the bifurcation or divergence between French & Russian causes the narrator to become adrift during his time with Charlotte. I recalled for example that Proust's magnum opus is usually translated as a "Remembrance of Times Past" in English but as "Times Lost" in French. The narrator becomes caught up not only in an attempt to recapture the past with Charlotte but almost to become a participant in it, something he terms a "Franco-Russian curse".
Charlotte's lost Atlantis had ensnared him but also enabled him "to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments." And he declares that "through the silent work of memory, I must learn the notation of these moments--learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, live conscious of this timelessness."
Toward the end of Dreams of My Russian Summers Andreï Makine's narrator spends several days in a delirium stumbling into the midst of an old cemetery vault in Paris belonging to the Bevals & Castelots, families with whom he has no connection, something that recalled an epileptic seizure described by Dostoyevsky. This occurs following his last visit to Charlotte Lemonnier, though the narrator had been planning another, also hoping to allow Charlotte to revisit her French roots, only to be informed of her death.
At the point of his delirium, the narrator had an altered sense of reality, where "time had acquired an extraordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte's past, it seemed that I had never experienced the present so intensely."
Makine's novel is hardly an "action book" but rather one that examines with great finesse interior spaces & the role of memory in our lives. *Initial photo image within review is of Andreï Makine in Paris.
How identity or sense of self is determined in the lives of each of us can involve more than a little mystery but especially so for someone whose life & identity straddles 2 countries, 2 different languages & an influential but "hybrid" grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, a woman with one foot in Russia, the country where she has lived for ages, enveloped in an odd sort of cocoon & the other in the long-ago France of her youth.
"Beyond the dates & anecdotes of family legend, we could hear life welling up in all of its sorrowful beauty. The France of our grandmother, like a misty Atlantis, was emerging from the waves." Charlotte Lemonnier, age 11 in 1914 in France at the onset of WWI and age 20 in post-revolutionary Russia in 1923 wanders through time & space, eventually becoming "not entirely a Russian babushka" & enduring extreme hardship en route.
The Makine novel involves a process of reclamation as the French narrator listens to his grandmother's stories & deciphers the contents of her "Siberian suitcase" while spending summers with her in Russia. The contents of her duffel involve various newspapers, photos & other ephemera that document Charlotte's life but also are ultimately grafted on to the identity of the narrator. Over several summers of encampment with Charlotte Lemonnier in the Russian village of Saranza, the narrator not only pieces together his grandmother's life but also begins to confront just who he is:
I had to recreate the topography of its high places & holy places through the thick fog of the past. But the greatest initiation was to understand how one could be French. Charlotte had imprisoned me in this fantasy world of the past while I cast absent-minded glances back at my real life. I no longer belonged either to my time or my country.Makine's prose is eloquent in reframing the past & merging it with the narrator's present life; his description of Charlotte's horrible wartime experiences & her gradual recognition of her long-absent husband, twice declared dead, as they walked toward each other on a country road is stunningly projected. A similar tableau is cast when the ravaged Charlotte is kept alive on a frigid night by the warmth of a dying saiga (antelope), shot & like Charlotte left for dead on a desolate stretch of land.
On this little nocturnal circus & I felt wonderfully foreign to Russia & like a bear after a long winter was awakening within myself. The woman brought with her a ponderous & powerful breath of Russian life--a strange amalgam of cruelty, compassion, drunkenness, anarchy, invincible joie de vivre, tears, willing slavery, stupid obstinacy, & unexpected delicacy....With growing astonishment, I discovered a universe previously eclipsed by Charlotte's France.
In reading Makine's novel a 2nd time & recalling very little about my initial encounter with it a decade or more before, I began to consider more fully the importance of language in shaping not only one's memories but one's life experiences; the bifurcation or divergence between French & Russian causes the narrator to become adrift during his time with Charlotte. I recalled for example that Proust's magnum opus is usually translated as a "Remembrance of Times Past" in English but as "Times Lost" in French. The narrator becomes caught up not only in an attempt to recapture the past with Charlotte but almost to become a participant in it, something he terms a "Franco-Russian curse".
Charlotte's lost Atlantis had ensnared him but also enabled him "to glimpse the mysterious consonance of eternal moments." And he declares that "through the silent work of memory, I must learn the notation of these moments--learn to preserve their timelessness amid the routine of everyday actions, live conscious of this timelessness."
Toward the end of Dreams of My Russian Summers Andreï Makine's narrator spends several days in a delirium stumbling into the midst of an old cemetery vault in Paris belonging to the Bevals & Castelots, families with whom he has no connection, something that recalled an epileptic seizure described by Dostoyevsky. This occurs following his last visit to Charlotte Lemonnier, though the narrator had been planning another, also hoping to allow Charlotte to revisit her French roots, only to be informed of her death.
At the point of his delirium, the narrator had an altered sense of reality, where "time had acquired an extraordinary density for me. Despite living in Charlotte's past, it seemed that I had never experienced the present so intensely."
Makine's novel is hardly an "action book" but rather one that examines with great finesse interior spaces & the role of memory in our lives. *Initial photo image within review is of Andreï Makine in Paris.
June 18, 2019
Îmi lipsesc cuvintele pentru a putea descrie sentimentele pe care le-am experimentat citind această bijuterie literară....
”-Mai ştii că astă-toamnă am văzut un stol de păsări călătoare?
– Da, au zburat deasupra curţii, apoi au dispărut.
– Aşa e, dar ele continuă să zboare, undeva, în nişte ţări îndepărtate, numai că noi, cu vederea noastră prea slabă, nu putem să le vedem. Aşa e şi cu cei care mor…”
”-Mai ştii că astă-toamnă am văzut un stol de păsări călătoare?
– Da, au zburat deasupra curţii, apoi au dispărut.
– Aşa e, dar ele continuă să zboare, undeva, în nişte ţări îndepărtate, numai că noi, cu vederea noastră prea slabă, nu putem să le vedem. Aşa e şi cu cei care mor…”
July 20, 2021
"Testamentul francez" mi-a confirmat a doua oara ca rezonez cu poezia prozei, cu sensibilitatea lui Andrei Makine.
In indepartata stepa ruseasca, unde viata trista, in culori gri, este un sir de tragedii si deziluzii, viata unui copil este colorata de mirajul Frantei.
"Viata aceea se dovedea acum esentiala. Trebuia, inca nu stiam cum, s-o fac sa infloreasca in mine. Trebuia, printr-un efort tacut al memoriei, sa invat gamele acelor clipe. Sa invat sa le pastrez vesnicia in rutina gesturilor zilnice, in toropeala cuvintelor banale. Sa traiesc, constient de vesnicia aceea."
Un autor la care ma voi intoarce cu nerabdare.🙂
In indepartata stepa ruseasca, unde viata trista, in culori gri, este un sir de tragedii si deziluzii, viata unui copil este colorata de mirajul Frantei.
"Viata aceea se dovedea acum esentiala. Trebuia, inca nu stiam cum, s-o fac sa infloreasca in mine. Trebuia, printr-un efort tacut al memoriei, sa invat gamele acelor clipe. Sa invat sa le pastrez vesnicia in rutina gesturilor zilnice, in toropeala cuvintelor banale. Sa traiesc, constient de vesnicia aceea."
Un autor la care ma voi intoarce cu nerabdare.🙂
January 30, 2019
Note that this is an English translation which retains the French title. My expectations were raised having read The Life of an Unknown Man earlier this year, but this was just as impressive - a beautiful reflective mixture of memory and imagination.
December 27, 2023
Pirmas sakinys: Dar būdamas vaikas spėjau, kad ši ypatinga šypsena kiekvienai moteriai buvo mažytė keista pergalė.
Pirmą kartą "Prancūzišką testamentą" skaičiau 1996-97 m., kai jis pirmą kartą buvo išleistas lietuvių kalba. Tuomet romanas sužavėjo ir viena priežasčių buvo ta, kad pasirodė, kad pagaliau užsienietis (Andrei Makine laikiau ne rusų autoriumi) parašė vakariečių skaitomą romanas apie tikrąją Rusiją: "keistą žiaurumo, graudulio, girtumo, netvarkos, nenugalimo gyvenimo džiaugsmo, ašarų, nuolankaus vergiškumo, buko užsispyrimo, netikėto subtilumo mišinį..." (154 p.) Tačiau tada dar buvo vilties, kad ta šalis pasiriks "europietišką, sveiku protu paremtą ramų gyvenimą, <...> Vakarus, racionalius ir šaltus, kuriems rusai jaučia nepagydomą apmaudą." (191 p.)
Po 25 m. antrą kartą skaitant romaną manyje buvo daugiau pykčio: tiek dėl pačios rusijos, tiek dėl to, kaip romantiškai ši šalis mistifikuojama net ir tų, kurie iš jos bėgo pasitaikę pirmai progai, geriau skurdo ir valkatavo Paryžiuje nei grįžo į "didingą ir šlovingą šalį": "<...> perskėlė realybę pusiau. Kaip tos moters kūną, kurį stebėjau pro du skirtingus langelius: viename buvo moteris balta palaidinuke, rami ir labai kasdieniška, kitame – didžiulis užpakalis, visa kita šiame kūne atrodė nereikalinga." (191 p.).
Romane įtikino bręstančio vaikino patirtys, patiko Andrei Makine žaidimas autobiografiškumu (kiek knyga yra autobiografiška – didelė intriga skaitytojams ir kritikams), pasakojimo stilius ir pabaiga ().
Skeptiškiau nuteikė samprotavimai apie tai, ką ir kaip reikia rašyti, naivus svaigimas "dėl viso, kas prancūziška, kuris jau ne vieną šimtmetį būdingas daugelio Rytų Europos šalių inteligentijai" (Aleksandara Fomina, "Literatūra ir menas").
Klausimas, į kurį taip ir neradau atsakymo, – kas Šarlotei yra/buvo Prancūzija?
"Prancūziškas testamentas" 1995 m. laimėjo Gonkūrų (Prix Goncourt) ir Mediči (Prix Médicis) premijas – du iš penkių reikšmingiausių literatūros apdovanojimų Prancūzijoje.
Pirmą kartą "Prancūzišką testamentą" skaičiau 1996-97 m., kai jis pirmą kartą buvo išleistas lietuvių kalba. Tuomet romanas sužavėjo ir viena priežasčių buvo ta, kad pasirodė, kad pagaliau užsienietis (Andrei Makine laikiau ne rusų autoriumi) parašė vakariečių skaitomą romanas apie tikrąją Rusiją: "keistą žiaurumo, graudulio, girtumo, netvarkos, nenugalimo gyvenimo džiaugsmo, ašarų, nuolankaus vergiškumo, buko užsispyrimo, netikėto subtilumo mišinį..." (154 p.) Tačiau tada dar buvo vilties, kad ta šalis pasiriks "europietišką, sveiku protu paremtą ramų gyvenimą, <...> Vakarus, racionalius ir šaltus, kuriems rusai jaučia nepagydomą apmaudą." (191 p.)
Po 25 m. antrą kartą skaitant romaną manyje buvo daugiau pykčio: tiek dėl pačios rusijos, tiek dėl to, kaip romantiškai ši šalis mistifikuojama net ir tų, kurie iš jos bėgo pasitaikę pirmai progai, geriau skurdo ir valkatavo Paryžiuje nei grįžo į "didingą ir šlovingą šalį": "<...> perskėlė realybę pusiau. Kaip tos moters kūną, kurį stebėjau pro du skirtingus langelius: viename buvo moteris balta palaidinuke, rami ir labai kasdieniška, kitame – didžiulis užpakalis, visa kita šiame kūne atrodė nereikalinga." (191 p.).
Romane įtikino bręstančio vaikino patirtys, patiko Andrei Makine žaidimas autobiografiškumu (kiek knyga yra autobiografiška – didelė intriga skaitytojams ir kritikams), pasakojimo stilius ir pabaiga ().
Skeptiškiau nuteikė samprotavimai apie tai, ką ir kaip reikia rašyti, naivus svaigimas "dėl viso, kas prancūziška, kuris jau ne vieną šimtmetį būdingas daugelio Rytų Europos šalių inteligentijai" (Aleksandara Fomina, "Literatūra ir menas").
Klausimas, į kurį taip ir neradau atsakymo, – kas Šarlotei yra/buvo Prancūzija?
"Prancūziškas testamentas" 1995 m. laimėjo Gonkūrų (Prix Goncourt) ir Mediči (Prix Médicis) premijas – du iš penkių reikšmingiausių literatūros apdovanojimų Prancūzijoje.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 31, 2021
I don't think I'm a good judge of this book . . . it needs someone with more background in French and Russian literature and a greater appreciation of language to understand it. Author is Russian but now lives in France and writes in French. I seem to need a more developed plot and characters than this provides.
Story revolves around a Russian boy (autobiographical?) who falls in love with pre-WWI French language and culture through the stories of his French grandmother, Charlotte. Going into his teens, he identifies more with Russia but then he goes back and forth as the pull of his grandmother's stories and character speak to him.
I do appreciate a strong sense of place and history in a novel and a few times, this did come alive for me. I liked the descriptions of the Russian steepes and the little train chugging through them. Time of novel seemed to be in the 1960s; the occasional stories from Russia & WWII were very moving. There's a very powerful story of the subdued homecoming of the grandfather from the war in the middle of the book . . . I was very moved by it. His wife helps him with his bath and sees all the injuries and wounds to his body and thinks of her beloved husband, father of her children, and how his body is now a stranger to her.
A very reflective book with some lines that I will try to remember: "memories a cage that holds us prisoners" (p. 120) and "how can all these passions, griefs, and loves leave so little trace" (p. 121).
It may be that later, as I think more about the book, I would give it a higher rating but the first half of it was really difficult to get through and I'm not sure that I understood the ending.
Story revolves around a Russian boy (autobiographical?) who falls in love with pre-WWI French language and culture through the stories of his French grandmother, Charlotte. Going into his teens, he identifies more with Russia but then he goes back and forth as the pull of his grandmother's stories and character speak to him.
I do appreciate a strong sense of place and history in a novel and a few times, this did come alive for me. I liked the descriptions of the Russian steepes and the little train chugging through them. Time of novel seemed to be in the 1960s; the occasional stories from Russia & WWII were very moving. There's a very powerful story of the subdued homecoming of the grandfather from the war in the middle of the book . . . I was very moved by it. His wife helps him with his bath and sees all the injuries and wounds to his body and thinks of her beloved husband, father of her children, and how his body is now a stranger to her.
A very reflective book with some lines that I will try to remember: "memories a cage that holds us prisoners" (p. 120) and "how can all these passions, griefs, and loves leave so little trace" (p. 121).
It may be that later, as I think more about the book, I would give it a higher rating but the first half of it was really difficult to get through and I'm not sure that I understood the ending.
June 28, 2023
A so-so read for me. There were parts of this book I liked but the flow was stilted, and I was a bit confused about what had happened in the past. This may have been a tilt towards memories being unreliable, but it bamboozled me.
What was good was the portrayal of the relationship between a young man and his (French) grandmother, and how it changes as he grows up in rural Russia.
What was good was the portrayal of the relationship between a young man and his (French) grandmother, and how it changes as he grows up in rural Russia.
October 30, 2025
Histoire d'un Russe qui écrit en français, histoire d'un Russe en France ou d'un français en Russie, tout se mélange. De part sa grand mère, le narrateur a une certaine vision de la France, qui l'obsède depuis la Sibérie où il vit jusqu'à ce qu'il confronte ses souvenirs, les photos, les coupures de presse de l'époque à sa propre expérience française. C'est fin et très joliment écrit du début à la fin.
January 5, 2011
The first thing to say about Le Testament Francais is that it is pretentious. Published elsewhere in English as Dreams of My Russian Summers, Andrei Makine's novel seems to be somewhat auto/biographical, although a quick poke around google shows this as something of a questionable claim.
Regardless of the truth of the story and its pretensions, Le Testament Francais is one of the most beautifully written and translated books I have ever read. Each word seems carefully picked to bestow maximum weightiness to the book, and maximum beauty to each passage. At the core, Le Testament Francais is about an ego-centric teenage boy who grows up understanding things through his "French graft", the stories that his French grandmother tells him as he grows up behind the Iron Curtain in Russia.
Le Testament Francais is in the vein of books like Catcher in the Rye with a self-obsessed narrator, growing up differently to the people around him. And occasionally while reading this book I wanted to set it on fire, or rip it up or something. It does get terribly self-indulgent. But it is still beautifully written, and despite calling himself a French writer, the book ends in a heartbreaking, but beautifully fitting Russian manner.
Regardless of the truth of the story and its pretensions, Le Testament Francais is one of the most beautifully written and translated books I have ever read. Each word seems carefully picked to bestow maximum weightiness to the book, and maximum beauty to each passage. At the core, Le Testament Francais is about an ego-centric teenage boy who grows up understanding things through his "French graft", the stories that his French grandmother tells him as he grows up behind the Iron Curtain in Russia.
Le Testament Francais is in the vein of books like Catcher in the Rye with a self-obsessed narrator, growing up differently to the people around him. And occasionally while reading this book I wanted to set it on fire, or rip it up or something. It does get terribly self-indulgent. But it is still beautifully written, and despite calling himself a French writer, the book ends in a heartbreaking, but beautifully fitting Russian manner.
January 17, 2011
C'est ma deuxième lecture du merveilleux roman d'Andreï Makine. Ce roman se mérite les prix Gongourt, Médicis et Gongourt des lycéens. Quel plaisir de relire ce roman qui décrit la relation d'un jeune garçon russe dont l'identité est forgé en partie par sa grand-mère française qui vit dans un village isolée de la Sibérie. Les relations, les vies et les choix se révèlent plus complexes et tragiques que ce que le garçon avait pressenti.
Une écriture riche et juste. Des paysages et des vies à la grandeur des grands espaces.
Une écriture riche et juste. Des paysages et des vies à la grandeur des grands espaces.
June 27, 2017
Fascinating view into the series of accidents that come together to form a person's identity. I learned a little bit of what it is to be Russian, a little of what it means to be French, and something about the historical attraction that the Russians have had for French culture - I always thought that was odd, but I understand it a little more now. Well worth the read. I spite of the title, it's all in English, except for an occasional word of French or Russian; most of those are explained in the preface, but Google Translate takes care of the rest.
December 17, 2015
Marcel, we need a date asap.
January 12, 2022
b.e.a.u.t.i.f.u.l
July 8, 2022
Felul în care A. Makine își așterne gândurile pe hârtie este inconfundabil. Atât de profund și rafinat- te transpune în mijlocul narațiunii, simțind și cel mai mic detaliu descris.
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