Memory Speaks

Often in France, if you are a foreigner writing in French and have achieved a certain level of excellence, you become a French writer. In this century alone, Samuel Beckett, Julian Green, Nathalie Sarraute, Eugene Ionesco and E.M. Cioran, to name only a few, have become French writers even though their first language was not French. The same can be said of the Russian-born Andrei Makine, whose fourth book, “Dreams of My Russian Summers,” was written in French.

In America, only Vladimir Nabokov comes to mind as a writer who underwent a similar transformation to create a voice in another language (in this case, English). Like Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory,” Makine’s novel reminds us how, through a precise use of language, it is possible to call back the past: “We imagined a venerable old man--combining in his appearance the noble bearing of our great-grandfather Norbert and the Pharaonic solemnity of a Stalin.”

Makine was born in 1957 in Siberia and grew up in Penza on a tributary of the Volga. In 1987, he traveled to France and was granted political asylum. It is said that Makine initially had to disguise the fact that he wrote in French because at that moment in the late ‘80s, the French were perversely interested only in Russian writers.

The original French title, “Le Testament Francais,” hints at the special circumstances of its original publication in 1995. It was a hugely popular and critical success. It won two of the major French literary prizes, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis. To understand the significance of this, try to imagine it winning both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

To the French, “Dreams” is read as a hymn to the French language and how that language, and the mastery of it, connects a boy, growing up in a dreary city lost in the Russian steppes, to the much larger world beyond the high and forbidding borders of the Soviet Union. “This language that shaped men, molded objects, rippled in verse, bellowed in streets invaded by crowds, caused a young tsarina who had come from the other end of the world to smile,” Makine writes, “but above all throbbed within us, like a magical graft, implanted in our hearts, already bringing forth leaves and flowers, bearing within it the fruit of a whole civilization. Yes, this implant, the French language.”

For Americans, that dimension may be lost, but the compensations are deliciously provocative because Makine’s book transcends these circumstances and becomes classic by recording both the experience of growing up, including two startlingly brutal episodes of sexual initiation, and the process by which the main character, a Russian boy, assimilates and understands his grandmother’s life, a life spanning the vast horror of this century.

Makine’s story can be summarized rather easily: A Russian boy remembers summer holidays spent in Siberia, when he spoke French with his French grandmother and heard through the French language of a life elsewhere, of a way of life represented in certain objects and stories endlessly retold. The book avoids being a mere scrapbook because it centers upon the boy’s attempt to understand the significance of his grandmother’s stories, among which figures a handbag found long before World War I on the Pont Neuf, containing, as the boy discovers, pebbles wrapped in paper, one of which was an oddly shaped stone called the “Verdun Stone.”

Makine risks, yet trumps, the cliche of opening his book with a character going through albums of photographs. As the young boy leafs through the pages, he stops at one photograph in particular, “a young woman whose attire jarred oddly with the elegance of the people who appeared in the other photos. She was wearing a big dirty gray padded jacket and man’s shapka with earflaps pulled down. As she posed, she was clasping to her breast a baby muffled up in a wool blanket.” The boy’s studying of the image is distracted by his grandmother’s shouting, “A death’s-head! Look, a death’s-head!” The boy observes two copulating hawkmoths. Not until the end of the book will the reverberating truth of that photograph and the necessity of the distraction by the hawkmoths be revealed, a structure that encloses the book with a satisfying sense of closure.

Of course, he learns of a history that is not propagated by the Communist authorities. His grandmother “had the advantage of concentrating within her life span the crucial moments in the history of our country. She had lived under the tsar and survived Stalin’s purges; she had come through the war and witnessed the fall of so many idols.”

The grandmother also imparts to him delightful stories and customs of a vanished past. The boy learns that in order to be beautiful when posing for a photograph, one must say “petite pomme.” He also learns how to picture the Seine overflowing its banks in 1910. He studies the menu for a dinner served to Czar Nicholas II in Cherbourg before World War I but is uncertain what “roast bartavels and ortolans, garnished with truffles” are.

The greatness of “Dreams of My Russian Summers” resides in the clarity and particularity of the rendered detail, as is found in “Speak, Memory.” In Makine’s careful capturing of details, a transformation occurs by which a personal moment becomes emblematic of a whole people’s history, as when the grandmother tells of an incident she witnessed during the Russian civil war: “Angry peasants with long poles [were] pushing away a barge from which arose an unceasing lament. On board could be seen silhouettes holding out their emaciated hands toward the shore. They were victims of typhus, abandoned, who had been drifting on their floating cemetery for several days. At each attempt to go ashore the bank dwellers mobilized to prevent them from doing so. The barge continued its funerary voyage; the people were dying of hunger now as well. Soon they would no longer have the strength to attempt a landing, and the last survivors, awoken one day by the powerful and rhythmic sound of the waves would behold the indifferent horizon of the Caspian Sea.”

Praised by the French for the purity of its prose, language uncontaminated by euphemisms or jargon, the book comes to English readers in a translation that is wonderful and modestly eloquent. The story will resonate for many Americans with immigrant backgrounds who have experienced or imagined a grandmother who does not speak English and spends most of her time in the kitchen. The experience of having a sense of two loyalties and the unresolved conflict this prompts is graphically depicted when the boy, now a young man, juxtaposes his grandmother and an earlier episode of sexual initiation:

“I found in her [his grandmother] the West personified, that rational and cold West against which Russians harbor an incurable grudge. That Europe which looks down condescendingly from the stronghold of its civilization on our barbarian miseries . . . [and] the wars in which we died by the millions, the revolutions whose scenarios it wrote for us. . . . In my juvenile rebellion there was a large dose of this innate mistrust. The French implant, which I thought had atrophied, was still within me and was preventing me from seeing. It split reality in two. As it had done with the body of that woman I had spied on through two different portholes: there was one woman in a white blouse, calm and very ordinary--and the other--that immense backside, whose potent carnality rendered the rest of the body almost useless. And yet I knew that the two women were only one. Just like my shattered reality. It was my French illusion that confused my vision, like an intoxication. . . .”

By trusting in his ability to render truthfully the oddness of his story, the peculiar treasured details--ordinary pebbles individually wrapped in tissue paper--Makine allows himself and his readers to be possessed by the singular hallmark of greatness in literature (in a paraphrase of Osip Mandelstam): the desire to be astonished by his own words. “Dreams of My Russian Summers” is one of the great autobiographical books of this century.