Dreams Of My Russian Summers

Andrei Makine Dreams Of My Russian Summers

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY Geoffrey Strachan

For Marianne Veron and Herbert Lottman

For Laura and Thierry de Montalembert

For Jean- Christophe

… it was with a childish pleasure and a profound emotion that, being unable to mention the names of so many others who must have acted similarly and thanks to whom France has survived, I gave the real names here…

– Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouve

Does the Siberian ask heaven for olive trees, or the Provencal for cranberries?

– Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirees de St. Petersbourg

I questioned the Russian about his method of work and was astonished that he did not make his translations himself, for he spoke a very pure French, with just a hint of hesitation, on account of the subtlety of his thought.

He confessed to me that the Academie and its dictionary froze him.

– Alphonse Daudet, Trente ans de Paris

Translator's Note

Andrei' Makine was born and brought up in Russia but wrote Dreams of My Russian Summers in French, living in France. In this novel the lives of the characters move back and forth between two countries and two languages. Makine uses a number of Russian words that evoke features of Russian life, and I have generally left these as English transliterations of Russian, for example: izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with ear-flaps); babushka (a grandmother); taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia, south of the tundra); kasha (the staple dish of cooked grain or groats); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); kolkhoznik (a member of a collective farm).

But I have also left in French a few phrases where the foreign or evocative sound for Russian ears seems to me as important as the meaning, for example: 'petite pomme' ('little apple'); Belle Epoque (the era in France before the First World War); 'cher confrere' ('dear colleague'); an echo of Flaubert's remark, 'Madame Bovary c'est moi' ('Madame Bovary is me'); the opening couplet from La Fontaines fable of the wolf and the lamb, 'La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure /Nous Vallons montrer tout a l'heure …' ('The strongest always stand to win/The argument, as shown herein…'), which features in an elocution lesson; and the elusive French 'je ne sais quoi' (an indefinable something).

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While still a child, I guessed that this very singular smile represented a strange little victory for each of the women: yes, a fleeting revenge for disappointed hopes, for the coarseness of men, for the rareness of beautiful and true things in this world. Had I known how to say it at the time I would have called this way of smiling 'femininity.'… But my language was too concrete in those days. I contented myself with studying the women's faces in our photograph albums and identifying this glow of beauty in some of them.

For these women knew that in order to be beautiful, what they must do several seconds before the flash blinded them was to articulate the following mysterious syllables in French, of which few understood the meaning: 'pe-tite-pomme. '… As if by magic, the mouth, instead of being extended in counterfeit bliss, or contracting into an anxious grin, would form a gracious round. The whole face was thus transfigured. The eyebrows arched slightly, the oval of the cheeks was elongated. You said 'petite pomme,' and the shadow of a distant and dreamy sweetness veiled your gaze, refined your features, and caused the soft light of bygone days to hover over the snapshot.

This photographic spell had won the confidence of the most diverse women: for example, a relative from Moscow in the only color photo in our albums. Married to a diplomat, she spoke through clenched teeth and sighed with boredom before even hearing you out. But in the photo I could immediately identify the 'petite pomme' effect.

I observed its aura on the face of a dull provincial woman, some anonymous aunt, whose name only came up when the conversation turned to the women left without husbands after the male slaughter of the last war. Even Glasha, the peasant of the family, in the rare photos that we still possessed of her, displayed the miraculous smile. Finally there was a whole swarm of young girl cousins, puffing out their lips while trying to hold on to this elusive French magic during several interminable seconds of posing. As they murmured their 'petite pomme,' they still believed that the life that lay ahead would be woven uniquely from such moments of grace…

Throughout this parade of expressions and faces there recurred here and there that of a woman with fine, regular features and large gray eyes. Young at first, in the earliest of the albums, her smile was suffused with the secret charm of the 'petite pomme. ' Then, with age, in the more recent albums, closer to our time, this expression became muted and overlaid with a veil of melancholy and