Tombstone Blues : THE CRIME OF OLGA ARBYELINA By Andrei Makine; Arcade: 256 pp., $24.95

In his widely acclaimed first novel, the autobiographical “Dreams of My Russian Summers,” Andrei Makine recollects the first thrill of literary creation. As a 14-year-old boy, ice fishing in the depths of a Russian winter with his illiterate friend Pashka, the Franco-Russian hero gives the summary of a half-remembered poem of Victor Hugo’s taught to him by his French grandmother. Even that twice-removed fragment causes such turmoil in Pashka that it drives him “naked into the snow.” And yet, the young boy wonders, it isn’t the words themselves that have this effect, but “a deep harmony within the visible world, which once revealed by the poet, became immortal. . . . Later I was to learn its name: style. And I could never accept the empty exercises of word jugglers under this name. For in my mind’s eye, I would see Pashka’s blue legs, thrust into a snowdrift on the banks of the Volga, and the reflections of the flames in his moist eyes.”

Makine’s latest novel, “The Crime of Olga Arbyelina,” opens with the figure of just such a potential stylist, the custodian of a Russian Orthodox cemetery in Paris, who entertains visitors by rubbing anecdotes from the fading letters on the gravestones. At the end of one of these daily sessions, a young Rastignac of a student (perhaps Makine himself) who has, perhaps for private reasons, been haunting the cemetery for days, shows interest in a particular tombstone. All of a sudden the man turns ancient mariner. Locking the gates, brewing a pot of tea, he grips the student by the elbow. “You’re the first person I have ever told about her!” The rime begins.

“Her” is Olga Arbyelina, who, in the summer of 1947, is found sitting half-naked and silent on the muddy banks of the river that flowed past the village of Villiers-la-Fore^t. Next to her lies the corpse of an elderly Russian man whom she has apparently killed. Yet though the village gossips are horrified by the image of a folie d’amour between this 46-year-old aristocratic beauty and this gross creature, the magistrate is bothered by something else. “This is the first time in my life,” the magistrate of Villiers-la-Fore^t says, “I have had to convince a person that they are not guilty of murder.” The Russian interpreter suggests that Olga has accused herself of one crime in order to cover up another. For a Frenchman, however, this interpretation is nonsense. “A killer breaks a shop window, admits it, goes to prison, and gets away with a murder. But you don’t accuse yourself of murder in order to cover up a broken window.” And so begins the vision of the shattered pane of Olga’s life.

A daughter of aristocracy who escaped to France from the chaos of the Russian Revolution, Olga married the dashing Prince Arbyelina, to whom she owed her deliverance. A son follows, a boy cursed with the blood of nobility passed down by his mother--the dreaded Russian hemophilia. Though the father is as concerned and loving as the mother, dressing the boy in his old military tunics and teaching him to stand guard over their Parisian apartment with a wooden rifle like a good soldier, the spectre of illness eventually drives him to take an endless business trip, leaving “that silent child on secret and desperate guard duty.”

And so, in 1939, Olga takes her 7-year-old son and moves from Paris to the town of Villiers-la-Foret. There, she finds refuge in an abandoned brewery, nicknamed the Caravanserai by the citizens on the right side of the tracks, a ghetto of Russian emigres still inhabiting “a very singular time. A time made up of their Russian past, from which they emerged sometimes, into the midst of French life, distraught, clumsy, and continuing, as soliloquies, conversations begun in their former lives. They were all stuck at the age of their last years in Russia.”

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Throughout World War II and the occupation, Olga leads a quiet life, working in the library of the Caravanserai, traveling to Paris for occasional nights of pleasure with a dashing journalist, leaving her son with an old Russian friend, the artist Li, an aristocrat turned Red soldier turned Parisian bohemian. Like her fellow compatriots, Olga lives her days in soliloquy, conversing with the specters of the past, and her nights in a dead sleep, thanks to an herbal infusion of Li’s.

One day, Olga is shaken from her reveries to discover that the war is over. It is 1946, and her fragile 7-year-old is now on the brink of manhood, tall enough to wear his father’s overcoat and perhaps even his father’s shoes. One night, Olga spots him at the kitchen stove, sprinkling a white powder into her nighttime infusion. Secretly pouring her sleeping draught down the sink, she waits up, feigning sleep, and watches the doomed boy enter her room, to explore his first and perhaps his last love. By doing nothing, Olga acquiesces and commits her crime.

In his descriptions of Olga’s affair with her son, Makine shows himself to be a stylist of obvious storytelling gifts. He is at his erotic best when he balances the raw with the cooked, poetry with anatomy. “He remained in her without moving, his breath suspended, his body weightless. A motionless flight above a sleeping lake--She could still feel the weight of him in her groin, in her belly when he was no longer there, as she slowly returned across the tides of fire and crystal and again found herself in a room surrounded by a rainy winter’s night.”

One roots for Makine, one hopes strenuously that the beautiful, mature Olga will prove not a pale Francophiliac Emma Bovary but a passionate Anna Karenina who abandons Vronsky for the love of her son. And indeed, there are wonderfully sensual, shadowy corners in Olga’s history, from her discovery of an illicit coupling as a girl of 12 through her friendship with Li and her affair with the journalist.

Except for Olga herself, however, none of the characters in this novel is molded with the attention to dimension that Makine brought to “Dreams.” Most problematically, Olga’s unnamed son remains more phantom than flesh. He lacks the solidity that might make his incestuous relationship with his mother both truly horrifying and truly understandable. Perhaps this is a compromise Makine feels he has to make. He needs the reader to sympathize with his tormented heroine, therefore he can’t afford to give too much weight and blood to her son, lest the crime become too unspeakable. There is something reminiscent of other gauzy French treatments of incest in this recipe, trying to make a “souffle au coeur” without breaking any eggs.

Yet great literature cracks the unspeakable square on its shell and makes it writable. One thinks of another Russian emigre who passed through French on his way to concocting an American masterpiece about just such a horrifying and sympathetic pedophile. As Makine continues his exercises in style, one hopes he will follow his precursor in exile into this land of danger, the true homeland of the storyteller. *