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Andreï Makine

Author of Le Testament Français

36+ Works 4,064 Members 119 Reviews 17 Favorited

About the Author

Andrei Makine was born in Siberia in 1957. Although raised in the Soviet Union, he learned about France and came to love that country through the stories told by his French grandmother. He now lives in Paris himself, having been granted political asylum by France in 1987, and writes in French. His show more grandmother figures prominently in the autobiographical novel, "Dreams of My Russian Summers," for which Makine received both the Goncourt Prize and the Medicis Prize, becoming the first author to simultaneously receive both of these prestigious French awards. In the U.S., the English translation of "Dreams of My Russian Summers" has also received recognition, including the Boston Book Review Fiction Prize and the Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year award. Andrei Makine is also the author of "Once Upon the River Love" and "The Crime of Olga Arbelina." (Bowker Author Biography) show less

Works by Andreï Makine

Le Testament Français (1995) 1,545 copies
A Life's Music (2001) 399 copies
Requiem for a Lost Empire (2000) 289 copies
Once Upon the River Love (1994) 288 copies
The Crime of Olga Arbyelina (1998) 256 copies
The Woman Who Waited (2004) 244 copies
The Life of an Unknown Man (2009) 169 copies
Human Love (2006) 113 copies
A Hero's Daughter (1990) 109 copies
L'Archipel d'une autre vie (2016) 62 copies
A Woman Loved (2013) 53 copies

Associated Works

How They See Us: Meditations on America (2010) — Contributor — 24 copies

Tagged

Common Knowledge

Canonical name
Makine, Andreï
Other names
Osmonde, Gabriel (pseudonym)
Birthdate
1957-09-10
Gender
male
Nationality
USSR (birth)
France
Country (for map)
France
Birthplace
Krasnoyarsk, Russia, USSR
Places of residence
Krasnoyarsk, Russia, USSR
Penza, USSR
France
Education
Université de Kalinine (Littérature française)
Université d'État de Moscou (Doctorat ∙ Littérature française)
Université de la Sorbonne, Paris (Littérature russe, 1992)
Occupations
author
Relationships
Aucouturier, Michel (Directeur de thèse)
Organizations
Université de Novgorod , Russie
Lycée Jacques-Decour, Paris, France
Science Politique,Paris, France
École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Académie française (Fauteuil N°5, 2016-03-03)
Awards and honors
Prix Prince Pierre de Monaco (2005)
Short biography
Andreï Makine est un écrivain d'origine russe et de langue française.

Dans les années 1980, il obtient un doctorat de l'Université d'État de Moscou après avoir déposé une thèse sur la littérature française contemporaine. Il collabore à la revue Littérature contemporaine à l'étranger (Cовременная художественная литература за рубежом), et enseigne la philologie à l'Université de Novgorod.

Au cours d'un voyage en France en 1987, il obtient l'asile politique, puis devient professeur de langue et de culture russes à Sciences Po et à l'École normale supérieure.

En 1990, il publie son premier roman, "La fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique". Deux ans plus tard, il dépose une thèse de doctorat à la Sorbonne consacrée à l'œuvre de l'écrivain russe Ivan Bounine (1870-1953).

Il obtient la reconnaissance du public et de la critique avec son quatrième roman, "Le testament français", paru en 1995, pour lequel on lui décerne les prix Goncourt, Médicis et Goncourt des lycéens. L’obtention du Goncourt lui vaut, entre autres, d'obtenir la nationalité française en 1996, ce qui lui avait été préalablement refusé.

En 2001, il obtient le prix RTL-Lire pour "La Musique d'une vie" et, en 2005, le prix de la fondation Prince-Pierre-de-Monaco pour l'ensemble de son œuvre.

Toute l'œuvre d'Andreï Makine est écrite en français, sa langue seconde. Ses romans sont traduits dans plus d'une trentaine de langues.

En 2011, il révèle qu'il a publié des romans sous les noms de Gabriel Osmonde et Albert Lemonnier.

Le 3 mars 2016, il est élu membre de l'Académie française au premier tour, au fauteuil occupé précédemment par Assia Djebar.
Andreï Makine vit à Paris.

Members

Discussions

Andrei Makine in Fans of Russian authors (December 2011)

Reviews

I love a thin book. The small problem with this one is that I immediately began to read it again. First, to find out at what point Makine seamlessly switched from the present (on a train) to the narrative of a life.
But they had been recounted in a confusion fashion amid the sounds of a train arriving at a great, dark, frozen city. And that was doubtless how they had been lived through, in the disconcerting simplicity with whih broken lives ae lived.
Second, to savour the rich layers of a deceptively simple tale. That I had been introduced to Alexander Zinoviev was the icing on the cake.… (more)
 
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simonpockley | 12 other reviews | Feb 25, 2024 |
Exquisite writing. Limpid, crystalline…lyrical descriptions that call Proust to mind. A well-crafted story: a pianist on the eve of his début in Stalinist Russia when his parents are “exposed” and arrested. He flees Moscow for the remote countryside where he eventually assumes the identity of a dead soldier (this is World War II). Most of what follows is the story of his life under this assumed identity, focusing on broken lives, the meaning of self, and the costs of our choices. The story is compelling and all-enveloping, the prose—as I suggested—is lyrical and captivating. Makine is, undeniably, gifted as a stylist. But as beautiful as the writing is, as powerful as the story is, somehow the writing and the story combined to produce a book that is inexplicably less than the sum of its parts. I enjoyed it; I will undoubtedly read more of his work. But somehow, and I’m honestly not quite sure how to explain it, ultimately I found the book left me wanting.… (more)
 
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Gypsy_Boy | 12 other reviews | Aug 24, 2023 |
I read Makine’s Music of a Life several months ago and concluded that despite the “exquisite writing” I couldn’t help but conclude that “somehow, and I’m honestly not quite sure how to explain it, ultimately I found the book left me wanting.” It was impressive but it didn’t stay with me. So I decided perhaps I ought to read this one, his fourth, but the one that brought him to the world’s attention and won both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. The writing is, again, quite impressive (though, truth to tell, I liked it better in Music of a Life), and so is the story. But this time he’s answered my objections. This one has more weight, more gravitas. It is, on the surface, a work of memory, an adult looking back and recalling his “Russian summers.” Summers spent with his grandmother in a remote Siberian village overlooking the steppes, summers spent listening to her stories of another world: Paris at the turn of the century. Stories of Proust, of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, the great Paris flood of 1910, and of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. Her stories aren’t all good and happy and filled with nostalgia and wistfulness. She also recounts the story of her husband and his fate—a victim of Stalin’s purges. She tells of famine and of misery, of the chaos of war. As someone wrote on GoodReads, this is a search for self through someone else’s memories. The book contains much more than my short summary suggests and though it can, at times, be a bit overwrought, I ultimately found it more affecting and more powerful than I had anticipated.… (more)
½
 
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Gypsy_Boy | 33 other reviews | Aug 24, 2023 |
This is a beautifully-written novel about a young man who spends the summers in Siberia with his French grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, along with his sister. The narrative is told as a semi-autobiographical story by Andrei Makine, who fled the Soviet Union in 1987 when he was thirty years old. Charlotte, who became trapped there following the death of her Russian husband, shares a world of memories with the children, including memories of France before World War II. Charlotte's sheer Frenchness raises serious suspicions in the eyes of her neighbors and the authorities in the very paranoid realm of Soviet Communism.

The boy is divided as he grows up between his love of his grandma and the lovely world she conjures and his urge as a young child to fit in and embrace his Russian heritage. In his perspective, the French aspect of his character reflects a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty, while the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a type of barbarism and a potential for violence. His perception, however it may be flawed, convinces him that the Soviets have good reason to be afraid of their Frenchness.

"I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present."

Living in the West, it is casually assumed that progressives are often the only ones whose souls contain humanism and the good. For Makine and his narrator, the exact reverse is true; at that time, it was necessary to look to the East to find ideals and a culture that exalted human beings, whereas the Soviet Union's progressives did everything in their might to put them out of existence.

It is not surprising that Makine's story occasionally comes out as being somewhat vague and opaque given how deeply personal memory is. He sometimes leans a little too heavily on Proustian and Nabokov connections; a few fewer references to cork-lined chambers and moths wouldn't hurt; we get the point. Furthermore, I'm not enough of a Francophile to find it funny rather than emotional when someone speaks fondly of France. However, I would recommend the book due to the beauty of the writing, a few striking pictures, and the way the plot alludes to the tragedy of 20th-century Russia.
… (more)
½
 
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jwhenderson | 33 other reviews | Apr 17, 2023 |

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Associated Authors

Jan Versteeg Translator
Sabine Müller Übersetzer
Holger Fock Übersetzer
Ulla Bruncrona Translator
Françoise Bour Translator

Statistics

Works
36
Also by
1
Members
4,064
Popularity
#6,194
Rating
3.8
Reviews
119
ISBNs
336
Languages
25
Favorited
17

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