Dreams Of My Russian Summers: A Novel

An incredibly beautiful book of personal history juxtaposed with world history set against the tumultuous backdrops of twentieth century France and Russia. The novel has a very distinct Proustian flavour in that:
- it explores memory through adolescent eyes,
- the protagonist has a close relationship with his grandmother,
- the book is originally in French,
- every line is so damn thoughtful that I've to read it twice.

It's about memory, the importance of storytelling (in particular the stuff that family lores are made of), and my personal favourite - the power of languages especially the dual (or more) personas that come from bilingualism (or multilingualism). And all this is reminisced in the author's hypnotic prose through the eyes of an show more adolescent beginning to grasp the nuances of / find his identity in his family and the world. An impossibly excellent gem of a book. show less

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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. show less

Le Testament Français was published in the US as Dreams of My Russian Summers, but UK publishers retained its French title even in translated editions. It was the first book ever to win both the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis, and it became a bestseller in France and elsewhere. I picked it up from Brotherhood Books in 2014 because in my 2011-2012 Year of Russian Reading I'd read Makine's The Life of an Unknown Man (La vie d'un homme inconnu). And so I knew Le Testament Français would be a fine book, and it is. As the blurb on the back of this edition says:

Once in a while, there comes a book that captivates critics and public alike. Andreï Makine's autobiographical novel is such a book... Its subtle blend of memory and imagination

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is reminiscent of Proust... But in its broad sweep and mystical vision, Le Testament Français belongs to the tradition of the 19th century Russian novelists. (Independent on Sunday, date & reviewer's name not provided).

Famously, Makine was born in Russia in 1957, fled the Soviet Union for France in 1987, where he slept rough for a while and struggled to have his writing accepted as authentic because publishers thought a Russian couldn't possibly write so well in French. Since they didn't think it was his own work, he pretended to have translated it, and that's how this beautiful novel eventually came to be published.

It's a coming-of-age novel, one in which the conflicted soul of a young Muscovite eventually reconciles his love of all things French with a love of his homeland, Russia. As a boy he inhabits two parallel universes: the Soviet Union under Stalin, and a dream-world, an Atlantis derived from the stories of his French grandmother who lives in Saranza in Siberia, where he goes for the school holidays.

Charlotte had fled there in the exodus from Moscow in WW2, and never left it. She was notified twice of her husband Fyodor's death during the war, and was finally reunited with him long afterwards but he died within a year. Under Stalin they had been persecuted as foreigners and even after many years in Saranza she is still regarded as an outsider, and only the woman who delivers the milk feels at ease with her.

But this information about Charlotte's life comes only in fragments. The boy learns some of it from Charlotte's stories and some of it from the 'Siberian suitcase', a suitcase of newspaper clippings and photos that Charlotte, in her haste to escape the bombing, grabbed by mistake instead of the case of clothes and food for the journey to the east. But the stories that entrance the boy are stories of Tsar Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, of their glamourous presence at the Paris Opera, of magnificent ten-course meals with exotic ingredients like bartavels and ortolans garnished with truffles, and of seeing Proust in the park at Neuilly. The boy and his sister live in this alternate world, speaking French fluently in the holidays and Russian during their more prosaic days at school in Moscow, among classmates who mock him for his dreamy, bookish ways.

The power of this wondrous world wanes as he get older.

To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/10/22/le-testament-francais-by-andrei-makine-trans... show less

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 show more 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, [b:Le Grand Meaulnes|794779|Le Grand Meaulnes|Alain-Fournier|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1178422620s/794779.jpg|51583] 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.


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It has been translated into English (truly)as [b:Dreams of My Russian Summers|135158|Dreams of My Russian Summers|Andreï Makine|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347769108s/135158.jpg|130243]. 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 translatio has captured the original lyrical tone. show less

This book won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. (1995, 1997). This is the fictional story of a young Russian boy and his sister, who visit their grandmother every summer. Grandmother Charlotte lives on the edge of the Siberian steppe. Charlotte reads to her grandchildren, anything she can get her hands on: old newspaper articles, magazines, etc. She also goes through family pictures by the hours. Her goal is to overwhelm them with a love for French culture. It was unclear to me, how the family ended up in Russia. With the death of the grandmother also comes the death of what the young man considers "civilized and graceful" France. The young boy is the narrator of the story and remains nameless, except for show more two episodes in the story; once when his school friends call him "Frantsuz", the Russian word for Frenchman and once his grandmother utters the name "Alyosha."

A second story line revolves around the harshness of the Stalinist regime and how often brutal choices had to be made to stay alive.

I'm not ready to say if the book is pretentious or more Proust-like. Time and perhaps a re-reading will answer that question. I understand this is book one in a series, but I've been unable to substantiate that.

It's interesting to note that the author was a Russian school teacher who participated in a teacher exchange program and was sent to France, where he defected. 256 pages show less

Charlotte Lemmonier, the book's main character, is an exquisitely special and complex person, and to know her would have been a highlight in anyone's life. So it was a treat for me to read this apparently semi-autobiographical book about her, and the author's relationship to her as a beloved grandson and the ways in which she affected his life.

The book sketched a set of dreamlike images of a time and place that I knew nothing about. In particular, for example, I was blown away by the author's vivid account of the proud, honor-bound urban street battle of the "samovars" of post-WWI and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of these supposed heroes. How logical that such events would have happened, even if I never could have imagined show more them in a thousand years on my own; and (fortunately) how completely alien they are to the contemporary zeitgeist.

However incompletely I comprehended it, I appreciated the author's lucid glimpse into the not-so-long-ago (and, possibly, still extant?) culture of the Russians and his depiction of its many (but by no means all) differences with the westernized First World. show less