French novel by Andrei Makine
Dreams of My Russian Summers (French: "Le Testament français") is a French novel by Andrei Makine, originally published in 1995. It won two top French awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Médicis. The novel is told from the first-person perspective and tells the fictional story of a boy's memories and experiences with his French grandmother in the Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s.
Characters.
Charlotte Lemonnier, also known in Russian as Sharlota Norbertovna, is the heroine of the story, born in France in the early 1900s in the village of Neuilly-sur-Seine. She is a calm and dreamy Frenchwoman living in the town of Saranza by the Russian steppe, who teaches her grandchildren, a young boy and girl, of her French and Russian life through memories and newspaper clippings.
The Narrator is the young boy of the story who grows up in the 1960s and '70s. He remains nameless except in the very end of the book. (He is only called Alyosha once by his grandmother.) His nickname by his Russian classmates is "Frantsuz" - the Russian word for Frenchman. He admires his grandmother more than anyone and is confused by his conflicting French and Russian heritages. This conflict is the main theme of the novel.
The Narrator's Sister is another nameless character, like her brother. She is also Charlotte's granddaughter. Although she is present in the beginning of the novel accompanying her brother in their visits to Charlotte, she later goes to study in Moscow and is no longer mentioned.
Pashka is a peer of the narrator who is also a loner. He is rejected by his classmates and wants nothing to do with them. He avoids society and conformity because he is more interested in nature and the outside world. Although he and the narrator never officially become "friends," their mutual solitude brings them closer together.
Norbert is Charlotte's father. Little is known of him other than he was a doctor who died at age 48, leaving Charlotte and her mother without much money.
Albertine is Charlotte's mother and Norbert's wife, 26 years his junior. After Norbert's death she traveled several times between Siberia and France, taking Charlotte with her. She eventually settled in Siberia with Charlotte, battling severe depression and a morphine addiction. After returning to France one last time, she leaves Charlotte with her brother, Vincent, and leaves for Siberia, never to come back. She dies 2 years after reuniting with Charlotte, now in her 20s.
Vincent is Charlotte's uncle and a reporter for the French newspaper "Excelsior". He took photos of the flood of 1910, and ultimately inspired Charlotte to collect newspaper clippings. He dies in World War I.
Fyodor is Charlotte's Russian husband, who marries her roughly a year after Albertine's death. It is unknown how he and Charlotte met. He works as a judge. He is arrested on a New Year's Eve in the beginning of World War II. He is later sent to fight in the war and is reported dead twice, yet he returns to Charlotte after the war, only to die less than a year later of his wounds.
Sergei is Charlotte's son, the product of her rape by an unknown Uzbek man. Even though he is not Fyodor's true son, he is accepted and loved by him and Charlotte.
Mother is the nameless mother of the narrator and Charlotte's daughter. When her son is 14 or 15, she dies suddenly of an illness that she kept secret from her family.
Nikolai is the narrator's father and the nameless mother's husband. Little is said of him except that he dies of a heart attack only months after his wife's death.
Aunt is the nameless aunt of the narrator who moves in to care for him and his sister after their parents' death. She is strong, resourceful, and instrumental in showing the young boy the "true" Russia - bitter, violent, and proud.
Alex Bond is a Russian businessman employed by the narrator (now in his thirties) to see if Charlotte is still alive.
Plot.
The book opens with the narrator leafing through photographs of old relatives in his grandmother's house in Saranza, a fictional Russian town on the border of the steppe. His grandmother, Charlotte Lemonnier, comes in and starts talking about the photographs and her memories to the boy and his sister. The novel is characterized by stories like this: a collection of Charlotte's memories and the narrator's memories, intertwining so that the text moves seamlessly through their lives in a dreamlike fashion. The movement between Charlotte's French past and the Soviet present causes conflict in the boy's identity as the novel explores both sides of his heritage.
Charlotte begins the novel by transporting her grandchildren to the French 'Atlantis' during the flooding of Paris in 1910. So begins the narrator's desire to learn all about this mysterious French past. He describes the town of Saranza in-between these stories. It is a quiet town bordering the Russian steppe that is lined with old "izbas", traditional Russian houses made of logs. The town is a strange mixture of these old relics and the new regime's style that discards any excess or superfluous design, showcasing the theme of the clash between past and present.
At the return of autumn, the boy narrator and his sister return to their hometown, an unnamed industrial, Stalinist-style city on the banks of the Volga. He quickly falls back into the pace of Russian life with its schooling and paramilitary exercises. He becomes confused by the conflicting images with which he has been presented: his grandmother's romanticized French image of Tsar Nicholas II versus "Nicholas the Bloody" as taught at his Soviet school.
The narration reveals more of Charlotte's early life. After the death of her father Norbert, her widowed mother Albertine becomes unstable, making visits to Paris only to insist on returning to Russia. It is the grave of her husband that keeps bringing her back to the Siberian town of Boyarsk. Young Charlotte, roughly age nine, begins to give French lessons to the Governor of Boyarsk's daughter. She becomes caretaker to her mother, who is revealed as a morphine addict. After several relapses, Albertine takes Charlotte with her back to France. But in July 1914, when Charlotte is eleven, Albertine temporarily goes back to Siberia, to put an end to her Siberian life. She never returns to France. Then war breaks out and Charlotte's only caretaker, her uncle Vincent, is killed in battle.
Time jumps ahead to 1921, when Charlotte, now a young woman, is chosen to go to Russia as a Red Cross nurse, because she can speak both French and Russian. Years pass with only the description of wartime hardship and the images of the countless mutilated soldiers that fall under Charlotte's care. Charlotte decides to return to the town of her childhood, Boyarsk, to see the fate of the izba where she and her mother once lived. She comes across an old grizzled woman living there only to find that it is her mother. When Charlotte tries to take her and leave Russia, the authorities of Boyarsk seize her papers and refuse to return them. Mother and daughter barely survive the winter. In May, fearing starvation, Albertine and Charlotte flee the town and begin working on a Siberian farm. Albertine dies two years later. Soon after that, Charlotte marries a Russian man named Fyodor and they settle in the Uzbek town of Bukhara.
Coming back to the present, the children listen to more of Charlotte's dreamy stories of France through her "Siberian suitcase" filled with newspaper clippings. She talks of royalty, of President Félix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress, of restaurants, revolutions, etc. Back in his house, the narrator overhears his parents and other relatives talking of Charlotte. Because he is fourteen years old now, they tolerate his presence as they plunge into the details of Fyodor's arrest.
Fyodor was dressed in the red outfit of Father Christmas to entertain his children on New Year's Eve when he was arrested. Although the reason is fuzzy, it is implied that it was partially because of Charlotte's "crime" of being French. Thus, Fyodor was suspected of spying for the French. He is eventually released and forced to move across the country, in a small city in the annexed Poland. One week later, he goes to Moscow supposedly temporarily, in order to be reinstated into the Party, however Charlotte never sees him again until four years later, after the war.
A short time after Fyodor's disappearance, Germans bomb the city where Charlotte and her children are staying. As they manage to flee on the last train out of the city, Charlotte realizes that she brought with her the "Siberian suitcase" rather than the suitcase of warm clothes and food she had packed that morning. By chance, this suitcase becomes the last physical link between Charlotte and her life in France.
She and the children settle in a town 100 km away from the front line. She works again as a nurse, caring for the wounded soldiers fourteen hours a day. In the midst of this constant presence of dying soldiers, Charlotte receives a letter informing her of Fyodor's death on the front. Soon after, she receives a second note of death, which ironically gives her hope that her husband is actually alive. Fyodor indeed returns to her after Japan's defeat in September 1945. Less than a year later, he dies of his wounds.
Back to the present, the young narrator searches hungrily for all the information in his city about France. His obsession with France and the past alienates him from his classmates, making him a loner. Taunted and teased by his peers, he bonds with another loner nicknamed Pashka.
The next summer, the narrator returns alone to Saranza, because his sister is now studying in Moscow. His fifteenth year marks the deterioration of his relationship with Charlotte. He is no longer that innocent little boy who felt the "magic" of Charlotte's stories. He becomes angry at Charlotte's retelling of the past, confused between this past and the harsh Russia he lives in. At the very end of August, only a few days before his departure from Saranza, he mends his bond with Charlotte. All of a sudden he realizes the beauty of this French past, and he and Charlotte understand each other again.
Back in his hometown, the narrator's mother goes to the hospital for some tests. The teenage boy is reveling in the freedom of his mother's absence, only to be struck by her sudden death. In February, only a few months later, his father Nikolai dies too, of a heart attack. It is not his parents' deaths, but his aunt's arrival that changes his outlook on life. His aunt is a tough, no-nonsense, resourceful woman who teaches him to love Russia. Through her, he sees the harshness, the violence, and the darkness of Russia, yet he loves it still. As he says on page 144, "The blacker the Russia I was discovering turned out to be, the more violent my attachment became." As he moves closer to his Russian heritage, he pushes away the French.
As soon as he embraces his Russian identity, he becomes accepted by the peers that once scorned him. His "Frenchness" now turns into a gift, as he entertains his classmates with anecdotes about France. However, this alienates him from Pashka. In the cruel world of teenagers, he now openly scorns Pashka to gain the others' acceptance.
It is on the Mountain of Joy, the mountain hideaway where all the teenagers go to dance and flirt, that the narrator has his first experience of "physical love." It is a very awkward encounter, and he is further humiliated when his classmates make fun of him for not knowing "how to make love". It seems to the narrator that his "French implant" has made him an outcast, even among women. Without warning he takes a train to Saranza to put an end to this French nuisance.
Despite the boy's anger, when he abruptly arrives at Saranza, Charlotte is calm and undisturbed. She starts talking about the things she saw during the war. On a walk outside the town, she addresses the narrator as "Alyosha" and tells him that even after all of her years in Russia, she still can't seem to understand her adopted country; its harshness still seems foreign. Yet