Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel [Paperback]

Andrei Makine (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1998

Hailed as extraordinary from coast to coast and winner of both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, France's top literary prizes, the national bestseller Dreams of My Russian Summers traces a sentimental journey that embraces many of the dramatic events in Russia during the twentieth century. Here is a poignant story of a Soviet boy's ascent into manhood in the 1960s and 1970s, and his extraordinary affection for his mysterious grandmother who seems to have been there for all the pivotal historical events. This epic tale is full of tenderness and passion, pain and heartbreak; mesmerizing, in every way.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Each summer, Andrei Makine's narrator and his sister leave the Soviet Union for the mythical land of France-Atlantis. That this country is a beautiful confabulation, a consolation existing only in his maternal grandmother's mind, makes it no less real. Though Charlotte Lemonnier lives in a town on the edge of the steppe, each night she journeys to a long-ago Paris, telling tales that the children then translate with their more Russian minds: "The president of the Republic was bound to have something Stalinesque about him in the portrait sketched by our imagination. Neuilly was peopled with kolkhozniks. And the slow emergence of Paris from the waters evoked a very Russian emotion--that of fleeting relief after one more historic cataclysm ..."

Makine's first novel is a singing tribute to the alchemy of inspiration, but it is no less familiar with the sorrows of reality. And it is only as he gets older that the narrator begins to piece together his grandmother's far more tragic past--her experiences in the Great War, the October Revolution, and after. Dreams of My Russian Summers is a love letter to an extraordinary woman (it's hard not to see the book as autobiographical) as well as to language and literature, which the boy turns to in avoidance of history's manipulations. It has all the marks of an instant classic. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

The first of Makine's four novels to appear in English, this autobiographical novel won the 1995 Prix Medicis for Best Foreign Fiction as well as France's prestigious Prix Goncourt, never before awarded to a non-Frenchman. Its coming-of-age story describes young Andrei's summers with his French grandmother Charlotte in the remote Russian village of Saranza. She came to Russia as a Red Cross nurse during World War I and fell in love with a Russian lawyer who went off to the front and later died a premature death from his war wounds. Charlotte and Andrei spend many summer evenings sharing her memories of turn-of-the-century Paris. As the adolescent Andrei struggles with his identity?is he Russian or French?he discovers that it was possible for Charlotte to live in such a foreign land and retain her "Frenchness" because of her love for her husband. Andrei finally reconciles these contrasting facets of his identity and eventually emigrates to France. Makine has fashioned a deeply felt, lyrically told tale. For all general library collections.?Lisa Rohrbaugh, East Palestine Memorial P.L., Ohio
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Touchstone (August 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684852683
• ISBN-13: 978-0684852683
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #711,276 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lyrical memories of idyllic summers past, April 3, 2004

By 

Peggy Vincent "author and reader" (Oakland, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel (Paperback)

Andrei Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has written an prose ode to his French grandmother, a memorable account of life in Communist Russia as lived by the woman who gave him joy, comfort, and permission to dream of other worlds.
Each summer, Andrei and his sister visited this grandmother at the edge of Russia's vast steppes, and in the evening she told them stories of her past. Trapped in Russia after the revolution, she married a Russian and became a hardworking Soviet wife and mother - but she never lost the Frenchness of her utmost being. Slowly, over the years, she reveals harsh truths to young Andrei - but always with a lyrical and dreamlike quality that makes reading this book feel as though you're inhaling pure, gauzy poetry.

37 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Beautiful Fragility of a Reverie, September 25, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel (Paperback)

Andrei Makine, the author of the lyrically, poetically gorgeous book, Dreams of My Russian Summers has been compared to Nabokov, Chekhov and Proust. Although these comparisons are meant to be flattering, they are grossly unfair, for Makine is an extraordinarily talented writer; an original, comparable to none.

The Russian summers of the title are those the narrator and his sister spent visiting their grandmother, Charlotte, in the town of Saranza on the eastern edge of the steppes.

Charlotte was born in France in 1903 and was subsequently trapped in Russia in 1921 at the outbreak of the revolution. She has lived an outwardly harrowing life, surviving famine, civil war, a rape by a band of thieves in the desert as well as the seemingly endless cold and snows of the Siberian winter.

When she finally marries a Russian soldier, he is twice reported dead at the Front and Charlotte escapes the German air raid with her two children, working as a nurse in army field hospitals. She is a woman who embraces the vastness of Russia, yet manages to keep her Frenchness alive.

And it is this Frenchness, this essence of all things French, that she wishes to pass on to her grandchildren. Apparently she succeeds. Standing on Grandmother Charlotte's balcony, young Makine looks out over the steppes as he comes to believe that he has found the secret of "being French." He says, "The countless facets of this elusive identity had formed themselves into a living whole." He finds this elusive identity of the living whole in stark contrast to his native Russia and longs for France and its "well ordered mode of existence."

Grandmother Charlotte's tales of her years in France are triggered by a suitcase full of crumbling family photos and yellowed newspaper clippings. Miraculously, this suitcase has survived the Russian Civil War, famines and purges, Stalin's prison camps and Hitler's invasion.

These precious clippings and photos allow Charlotte's grandchildren to participate in the French joie de vivre and experience such things as the visit of Tsar Nicholas to France in 1896. As a child growing up under the regime of Leonid Brezhnev, Makine has trouble believing that the man described as the bloody butcher of the people actually shook hands with the President of the Republique Francais as the band played the Marseillaise. Grandmother Charlotte even remembers and can recite, the poem composed for the Tsar's visit, a poem that assured him he had earned "the love of a free people."

Even more unbelievable to young Makine is his grandmother's revelation that only a few years after the visit from Tsar Nicholas, this very same President of France died of a heart attack in the arms of his beautiful mistress.

His grandmother's childhood discovery of a plaque in a Paris alleyway proves to be prophetic. This plaque commemorates the spot where, in 1407, an assassin thrust his sword through the body of the Duke of Orleans after an amorous tryst with his sister-in-law, the Queen, the lovely Isabeau. Makine, himself, as an adult, will find himself, almost miraculously, in this very same alleyway.

In between his idyllic visits to Saranza and Grandmother Charlotte, Makine is growing up in grim shabbiness in his parents' home in Moscow. Large apartment blocks built in the grandiose Stalinist style stand out in stark contrast to the "mysterious French essence" of Grandmother Charlotte and her home on the steppes. Makine wants to literally absorb France's Belle Epoque, but he must contend with his socialist schoolmates instead.

Impressionable and in love with a land he can only dream about, Makine rebels against both the ordinariness of Soviet life and the grandmother he loves but fails to understand.

A true master of prose, Makine contrasts Russia and France beautifully. Several times in the novel, Russia is mentioned as breathing and alive; the world of harsh realities. France, on the other hand, is a dream world and its images are spun from the rich and elaborate Impressionistic language of fantasy.

Although Dreams of My Russian Summers was both written and translated by a man, the imagery evoked is decidedly feminine, especially that pertaining to France; the petite pomme of a smile in a photograph, the coupling hawkmoths with the death's head and the repeated image of the Verdun stone.

The entire book, however, is the story of a young boy's maturation into a sensitive and intelligent man. A man who loves the present, yet has come to revere the past. A man who is thankful for the contrast provided in his life, a contrast he calls "an optical illusion" offering the most luminous moments of his life.

Readers are offered nothing less than the beautiful fragility of a reverie, to be visited again and again.

17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A durable masterpiece, January 28, 2002

By 

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dreams of My Russian Summers (Paperback)

Time alters all things. The resultant changes can be decay, or tedium/passe, or at the opposite end of the spectrum the changes can be enhancing as a patina on fine wood. Andrei Makine's DREAMS OF MY RUSSIAN SUMMERS has happily acquired a literary patina that makes this brief but crystalline memoir of childhood even more of a joy to read after a few years on the shelf. Makine has the rare ability to weave wholly credible stories with unforgetable characters while at the same time measuring his prose like poetry. We are to suppose this is an autobiography, but it is far more than the journey of a nascent writer becoming a man. This is the essence of the Russian mind embellished by the great fortune of having early exposure to the beauty of France by means of recalling summers with Charlotte, a French born grandmother who nourishes the imagination and history of the writer to the point of delirium. All that has happened to and in Russia from the time of the Tsars to the present is presented in such a way that the grisly realities are always balanced by the homage to love of fatherland. Makine is a stunning writer and is still adding to our contemporary literature in ways that secure him a place among the geniuses of the word. Read and indulge your mind and your senses!