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Requiem for a Lost Empire

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With Requiem Andreï Makine has created a panoramic novel of eight decades of Soviet/Russian history starting in 1917. It is a story of extraordinary emotional intensity. For anybody like me with interest in the Russian "condition humaine", this is a must read. While written as fiction, it depicts realities and truths of lives lived during Soviet times and since. Makine, born and brought up in Russia, emigrated to France in 1987 and writes his novels in French. He has found an excellent translator in Geoffrey Strachan.

Requiem is anchored in the narrator, the last of three generations of one family. Makine weaves the description of the father's and grandfather's lives into the son's narrative. It is a story within and told as conveyed to him by a third party. This technique establishes a lens singling out or highlighting specific details and events. At the same time the method creates a certain emotional distance for both the protagonist and the reader from the vicious excesses of the Soviet regime and the horrors of war. In stark contrast to the depiction of devastation, scorched earth and expanding killing fields, is the description of nature and landscapes in all their beauty and harmony. There is something nostalgic and even surreal in the soothing power that the land and rural life has over the father and grandfather. It is a refuge sought from the fighting that restores and gives life. It is the dream that sustains the soldier and keeps him alive against all odds. Happiness and love, even if short-lived are possible and experienced here.

The unnamed narrator was severed from this nourishing power, his sense of identity lost since early childhood, his "own memories falsified from birth". Rescued by an enigmatic family friend just prior to the killing of his parents, he grows up as an orphan. The sense of being an outsider never leaves him. Working as a medical doctor in African countries he moves from crisis to crisis. An offer to join the KGB comes almost as relief; changing identities as required for his life as a spy is the easiest part. He is thrown back into the African quagmire, caught between the Cold War's competing fronts. With a few brush strokes, Makine captures the essence of the increasingly perilous political games being played out in developing countries. The "game of espionage" brings the agent and his female partner closer together. While his feelings for her grow deeper, his outlook on life is put to the test: "To be able to tell the truth one day." This is her wish to which he responds by telling her his family's story as conveyed to him by the old friend years ago.

The story of Nikolai, the grandfather, and his son Pavel portrays two generations of soldiers caught up in the brutalities of the two major wars and the rise of Stalin. The growing violence of the Soviet regime is illustrated through specific episodes and incidents. Nikolai, fighting with the Red Army, rides off one day from the combat not too far from his home, yearning for peace on his land. Pavel joined the Soviet army to battle the Germans in World War II. He ends up in a penal company - canon fodder at the frontlines. The narrative of the fighting, the loss of comrades and Pavel's endurance is harrowing in its vivid detail. Most haunting is the image of an attempt to free a concentration camp with German snipers still hiding between the barracks. Pavel survives the war only to find "home" destroyed. Completely rudderless and troubled by the nightmares of his experiences, he drifts, runs, and hides from the deeply disquieting postwar Soviet reality in a remote area in the Caucasus.

Makine has an extraordinary talent to create a dramatic framework for his story while directing the reader toward concrete specific events. Nikolai, after deserting from the Red Army, has to confront the local Soviet officials who have been forcing individual farmers to accept the collectivization of their farms. Having observed what happened to his neighbours, Nikolai turns the rationale upside down. His farm tools and his old horse are in such poor condition, he argues, that handing them over to the kolkhoz would be equal to sabotage. For Pavel the chances of survival were counted in days, maximum months: the "distance that lay between him and death could be measured in the numbers killed". There was no point in sharing one's name as the probability of staying alive to the next day was almost nil.

The continuation of Pavel's story is the narrator's own story of survival, physically and emotionally. The end of the Cold War and the subsequent "disappearance of the Empire" leave him confused and challenge him to establish a new life. He feels the need for an ongoing inner dialogue with his former partner: she becomes the focus of his search for the truth. Finding her comes close to an obsession. The Parisian society crowd that he joins in his quest, speaks mockingly of the Soviet army and of his country, calling it a "phantom country". He should react, explain, or contradict the views presented. Yet, he feels unable to intervene, an outside observer, not able to fit in whether it is Moscow or Paris. Ultimately, his search for answers, his truth and for his peace of mind ends unexpectedly.

Makine has created a powerful and profoundly moving portrait of one Russian family set against the dramatic backdrop of the complex realities of the Soviet era and its collapse. His characters embody real people, individuals with deep emotions showing vigour and endurance in adverse circumstances and surviving on the strength of their roots and connection to their land. The stories of their lives will linger in the reader's mind for a long time. [Friederike Knabe]

It is always difficult to say what Andrei Makine's books are about. One could describe the plot or the story-line and feel that one hasn't said anything at all. Makine's novels are like all great works of art. They set up a resonance inside us that is intensely pleasureable and also painful. In Requiem, as in his other novels, Makine's prose is poetic and technically flawless, the historical content is fascinating and his irony and humor elicit a warm rush of recognition and laughter. Like all great art, it also makes us painfully aware of what is unexpressed in us.

If one can say that Dreams of My Russian Summers is "about" the birth of a writer, then Requiem for a Lost Empire is about the struggle to tell or speak the truth. There is a silence that bounds this struggle. The three generations of men in this novel live with the women they love largely in silence. One of the women even has her tongue cut out. Yet somehow, this silence is a state of grace. Most of the time we live in the contiuum between, caught between our superstitious fear of naming things and our compulsion to do so. Makine's efforts to tell the truth, whatever level of truth one wishes to draw from his writing, have produced an exquisitely beautiful and haunting novel.

Unfortunately, I cannot report that Andrei Makine's "Requiem for a Lost Empire" is anything close to as good as his "Dreams of My Russian Summers". Read the book summary for the overall plot, but, basically the novel portrays the lives of three generations of the same family, as each generation literally has to escape for their lives--during the Russian Revolution, during World War II, and during the Cold War. The chases during the first two generations were gripping, but the narrative in second half of the novel just seemed to lose focus. I had a hard time putting the book together at the end.

Even more of a let down, and it is hard to put this in words, was that this novel did not contain the unbelievably beautiful writing found throughout "Dreams of My Russian Summers". The book wasn't lengthy, though I wouldn't have reread it knowing what I do now.

The opening sentence, which you can see via Amazon's search, reminded me of the beginning of Garcia Marquez' "One Hundred Years of Solitude." In fact, after reading the whole novel by Makine, "Requiem" reminds me of the lyrical, melancholic, and subdued side of epic realism mixed with a dreamier, French-influenced, narrative rooted in reverie and memory closer to much in Russian fiction. It takes its time to tell, in only 250 pp., a story spanning about eight decades and three generations. The Gallic quality of Makine's prose permeates Geoffrey Strachan's smooth translation into English. I imagine Makine's French sounds much like we read him in English--without as much violence done in translating as often occurs!

While reviews have summarized the plot, the prose style, for me, stands out most. Among dozens of possible examples, here's my favorite: "The winter night was warm, the rain at the window split up the city's glow into an infinity of twinkling lights. Myriads of luminous dots spread out before me, a crude symbol of human dispersal: to discover a lost person all you would have to do would be to visit each of these sources of light, one after another, over the whole planet. Often in my despair this infinite sifting of the lights seemed to be achievable." (178) This shows Makine's sensitivity, his concern for crafting evocative images, and his skill at arranging his words.

The novel, also, has relevance for the early 21st c. The protagonist speculates about "the wars started in order to test new weapons, those ended in order to lower the price of a barrel of crude oil. " (224-5) The breakup of the Soviet empire brings this book, in its latest of the three generations of stories, into a realm where both the US and the USSR fight a Cold War by proxy. The shrewd cynicism of media, political, and personal manipulation energizes this novel with a more serious current that much of popular espionage or historical fiction.

I sense that Makine is rising from being a skilled tale-teller into one who may reach the higher ranks of the literati among European novelists; given this ambitious yet admirably compact novel, he is destined for success. He cuts his scenes down, despite their often delicate prose, into vignettes and ruminations that convey the spirit of the times more than the immediate action alone, and this added texture deepens the action with contemplation. This is a thoughtful meditation on Russia, for wherever the plot carries the characters, that wonderfully rooted opening sentence from some redoubt in the Caucasus brings that family back to its heartland, in spirit if not always assuredly in fact.

Andrei Makine adds another laurel to his impressive writing career with the release of Requiem for a Lost Empire. In this short book (250 pages) Makine surveys the past century of change in Russia from the fall of the Czars and the rise of the people, through Stalin and World War II, through the Cold War with its ominous KGB into today with the undercover lives of common men striving to retain the promises of Communism. Makine does this seemingly incredible feat through the eyes of one family - sons and fathers who lived through the various phases of critical change that Russia (empire, USSR, etc) has undergone. In nonlinear fashion he draws multifacted, complex characters with flashbacks and flashforwards in a way that makes this less a history book (though it is valuably one) than the novel it is. And as if that weren't enough, Makine writes with a grace and poetry that suffuse his tale with lasting visuals and ominous grit. That the author left Russia to live in France and has written all his books to date in Frence means that we are also experiencing the work of a master translator. This little book is a gripping masterwork - highly recommended reading.