Dreams of My Russian Summers [Paperback]

Andrei Makine (Author), Geoffrey Strachan (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 1997

Andrei, a 1960s Soviet schoolboy, recalls his summer visits with his grandmother, Charlotte, in a remote Siberian village, her magical tales of another time and world, and his difficulty reconciling the two contradictory and incompatible worlds that Charlotte's life has spanned."

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.

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 241 pages
• Publisher: Arcade Publishing (August 22, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1559703830
• ISBN-13: 978-1559703833
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,988,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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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
(REAL NAME)   

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.

21 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars hit 'n miss, September 26, 2002

By 

Jay Stevens (Missoula, MT) - See all my reviews

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

Erk! What a difficult review to write! So uneven, so blurry and ephemeral in plot and character, but containing a scene or two of exquisite beauty and skilled craftsmanship... What do you say?

"This book was a work of genius." The early scenes of Paris as imagined by a boy listening to stories his grandmother weaves - think of the depth and complexity of creating point of view, setting, and character that this scene entails. And Makine pulls it off. Paris feels...unreal, like a child's fantasy. Makine plunges into this fantastic Paris as if it is the story. As a result the reader's images, too, become tangled and unsure, and the reader, too, becomes entranced by Parisian fairy tales.

"...overwritten, vague, and pretentious." Yup. The book features your typical first-year college writing class protagonist. You know the type. Emotionally blocked. Self-obsessed. Absolutely passive. Self-pitying. A bookish nerd, dissed by the cool kids in school because he's too sensitive. The kind of character that should be drop-kicked.

"...an homage to Russian and France..." Y-e-e-s. And no. Anything to do with the grandmother is gold. Her descriptions of France as imagined through her grandson, the story of her travel through Russian during the Civil War, seeing her walk along the train tracks by her house on the Russian steppe. Yes. Otherwise...no. We learn nothing new about Russia here, most of the platitudes written by our simpering protagonist are romanticized, overblown, and images of the country. And those of us who have been to Paris cannot fully succumb to the images of France, especially with the image of a lonely artist clicking away on his typewriter, wearing winter coat in his unheated Paris apartment. It's like your typical year-abroad story at this point.

Perhaps what ruined the book the most for me was the expectation placed upon it by word of mouth and critical acclaim. It isn't what it was said to be. (Lots of passive and contractions, there.) Lower your expectations.