A novel of love and growing up by Andreï Makine, whose bestselling Dreams of My Russian Summerswas hailed by the Los Angeles Timesas one of the "best autobiographical books of the century." In the immense virgin pine forests of Siberia, where the snows of winter are vast and endless, sits the little village of Svetlaya. In the early years of the century the village had been larger, more prosperous, but time and the pendulum of history had reduced it by the 1970s to no more than a cluster of izbas. As wars and revolution had succeeded one another, the men had gone away, never to return, the women reduced to dressing in black. But for three young men-the handsome young Alyosha, the crippled Utkin, and the older, dashing Samurai-little is needed to construct their own special universe. Despite the harshness of the environment and their meager resources, the three adolescents form a tight band of friendship and dream of another life, a world of passion and love. The warm lights of the Transsiberian train passing through give them fleeting glimpses of that other world. And when they learn one day that a Western film is being shown at the Red October Theatre in the closest real city, Nerlug, twenty miles away on the mighty Amur River, they trek for hours on snowshoes to see it. Through that film, starring the French actor Jean-Paul Belmondo and replete with gorgeous women whom he succeeds in seducing one after the other with consummate ease, the boys' lives are changed forever. Over the next several months they travel seventeen times to see their hero. And when that film is replaced by another that is equally daring and seductive, their obsession only grows. Written from the perspective of twenty years after these youthful events, Once Upon the River Lovefollows the destinies of these three young idealists up to the present day, to the boardwalks of Brighton Beach and the jungles of Central America. With the same mastery of plot and prose that marked the author's Dreams of My Russian Summers,this novel demonstrates Andreï Makine's remarkable ability to recreate the past with such precision and beauty that the present becomes all the more poignant and moving. Once Upon the River Loveoffers further proof that Andreï Makine is one of the major literary talents of our time.

A superb new novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summersand Requiem for a Lost Empire,set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II. “Makine is without doubt one of the greatest living writers. Music of a Life proves it.” -Le Figaro( France) A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summersand Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Lifeis set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II. Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he espies his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator. Music of a Lifehas been Andreï Makine’s biggest bestselling novel internationally since Dreams of My Russian Summers.It is, in the words of France’s most distinguished daily newspaper Le Monde,“extremely powerful… a gem.”

The fascinating story of a young Russian filmmaker's attempts to portray Catherine the Great, before and after the collapse of the Soviet UnionCatherine the Great's life seems to have been made for the cinema—her rise to power; her reportedly countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades; the episodes of betrayal, revenge, and even murder—there's no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray Catherine's essential, emotional truth, her real life beyond the rumors and façade. His first screenplay just barely makes it past the Soviet film board and is assigned to a talented director, but the resulting film fails to avoid the usual clichés. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as he struggles to find a place for himself in the new order, Oleg agrees to work with an old friend on a television series that becomes a quick success—as well as increasingly lurid, a far cry...

Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber enlisted in the French army at the outset of World War II and quickly rose to the rank of lieutenant. Despite his patriotism and courage in defending his country, in which he narrowly escaped death several times, he suffered the bigotry of his fellow soldiers until he was expelled from the army for being Jewish. He sought exile in Spain and was deported and interned in a concentration camp before he managed to join the Allied army in North Africa. He eventually participated in the triumphant liberation of his homeland.His story, almost forgotten, would have remained unknown if not for the efforts of the award-winning and internationally bestselling author Andrei Makine, Retelling Servan-Schreiber's dramatic life with a novelist's skill, he reveals a man who embraced experience in all its joys and sorrows, who knew the pleasures of love amid the savagery of war, and who could forgive the hatred he was subjected to but never forget it. In...

In this remarkable new novel, which spans eighty years of the twentieth century, Andre Makine describes, beautifully but unsparingly, the almost uninterrupted succession of violence, misery, and horror that has been visited on the Russian people since the October Revolution of 1917. For those quick to forget, or too young to remember, he paints a graphic portrait of those years in a three-generational novel that is as moving as it is revealing.Moving back and forth in time--from the battlefields of the 1920s to the harsh African heat and dust of the desert in the 1980s, from the orphanage where the narrator spent his youth to the art galleries and chic salons of the glittering West--Requiem for a Lost Empire has all the sweep and depth, all the beauty and insight of the great Russian novels. It is, as the eminent French critic Charles Edmond-Roux noted, ""an astonishing novel, one that will surely stand the test of time.""

A deeply moving meditation on memory, history, love, and art by the author of *Dreams of My Russian SummersIn The Life of an Unknown Man*, Andreï Makine explores what truly matters in life through the prism of Russia's past and present.Shutov, a disenchanted writer, revisits St. Petersburg after twenty years of exile in Paris, hoping to recapture his youth. Instead, he meets Volsky, an old man who tells him his extraordinary story: of surviving the siege of Leningrad, the march on Berlin, and Stalin's purges, and of a transcendent love affair. Volsky's life is an inspiration to Shutov -- because for all that he suffered, he knew great happiness. This depth of feeling stands in sharp contrast to the empty lives Shutov encounters in the new Russia, and to his own life, that of just another unknown man . . .

The summer of '47. In the sleepy town of Villiers-la-Foret, roughly an hour from Paris, the peaceful radiance of the day is interrupted by the discovery that, along a nearby riverbank, the body of a man has washed up, a gaping wound in his skull. Beside him rests a beautiful, nearly bare-breasted woman, her dress soaked and in tatters. An accident or foul play? A crime of passion? Soon there are almost as many speculations and theories as there are townspeople. The woman, it turns out, is a Russian princess, Olga Arbyelina, a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution who in the 1930s had settled in town along with many of her compatriots. Rumor was that Olga's husband, a dashing prince given to gambling and revels, had deserted her some years after the couple's arrival in France, leaving her alone to care for their young son. About the victim, also a Russian refugee, little is known: many years Olga's elder, he was a taciturn, rather coarse, slightly ridiculous man name Sergei...

A beautifully observed and moving account of love and the human spirit in the Soviet eraIn Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him-a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover. As the dreary Brezhnev era gives way to perestroika and the fall of Communism, the orphan uncovers the truth behind the life of Dmitri Ress, whose tragic fate embodies the unbreakable bond between love and freedom."Makine has been compared to Stendhal, Tolstoy and Proust; our best historians of the Soviet era queue up to pronounce him one of the finest living writers on...

A novel showing the lasting and devastating effects of Stalin's brutal reign of terror.

"A symphony, a historical epic rich in romance and tragic irony...An object of wonder." —Boston GlobeWith this novel, Andreï Makine, whose work has been compared to that of Balzac, Chekhov, Pasternak, and Proust, brings to a stunning conclusion his epic trilogy that began with Dreams of My Russian Summers and continued with Requiem for a Lost Empire.The novel opens in 1942, in a burning, gutted Stalingrad, where the German and Russian armies are locked in a struggle to the death. Amid these ruins, a French pilot and a nurse, also French, are engaged in a passionate affair that each knows will be hopelessly brief. The pilot, Jacques Dorme, was shot down two years earlier. Imprisoned and sent east to a German POW camp, Dorme made a daring escape and crossed Germany stealthily by night until he arrived in an already devastated Russia, where, having proved his mettle as a pilot, he joined a Russian squadron stationed near Stalingrad. But during the brief time they...

They are virtual brothers, Arkady and Alyosha, young pioneers in Stalin's postwar world, marching to the clarion call of socialism, to the stirring beat of the drums. The future, they are assured, is bright and beautiful. But what, then, are those endless miles of barbed wire they encounter everywhere along their route?This is the moving, two-generational tale of two families, those of Yakov Zinger and Pyotr Yevdokimov, fathers of the two young pioneers. Inseparable, the two men have been through the grueling war against the Germans, with all its horror and senseless carnage. Yakov—or Yasha, as he was known—emerged physically intact but scarred forever "from the moment he had been lifted out of a mountain of frozen bodies at a camp in liberated Poland." Pyotr, a skilled sniper who operated behind the German lines, lost both his legs, not at the hands of the Germans, but as a result of an artillery "mistake" by his own forces. Together, in these postwar, Cold War...

A moving, utterly captivating love story: Romeo and Juliet as if told by Chekhov or Dostoevsky. In a remote Russian village a woman waits, as she has waited for almost three decades, for the man she loves to return. Near the end of World War II, nineteen-year-old Boris Koptek left the village to join the Russian army, swearing to the sixteen-year-old love of his life, Vera, that as soon as he returned they would marry. Young Boris, who with his engineering battalion fought his way almost to Berlin, was reported killed in action crossing the Spree River. But Vera refuses to believe he is dead, and each day, all these years later, faithfully awaits his return. Then one day the narrator arrives in the village, a twenty-six-year-old native of Leningrad, who is fascinated both by the still-beautiful woman and her exemplary story, and little by little he falls madly in love with her. But how can he compete with a ghost that will not die? Beautifully, delicately, but always powerfully, Andreï Makine delineates in masterly prose the movements and madness that constitute the dance of pure love.From Publishers WeeklyA sensuously styled, elegiac tale set in the mid-1970s, Makine's latest opens a window onto a generation of post-WWII Russian widows through one mysterious woman's vigil. In the village of Mirnoe on the northern White Sea coast, a young male journalist researching local customs meets an intriguing woman who has waited 30 years for her fiancé, reported killed, to return from the war. Just 16 when her lover was conscripted, Vera devotes herself selflessly to the care of the town's many war widows: she rows out to tend to the widows' graves on a nearby island and lives alone, ever watchful. The narrator, writing in retrospect but 26 at the time of the story, was educated in St. Petersburg; ironic and arrogant, he believes he has Vera's selflessness figured out as a prosaic, idealized vision of womanhood. And yet, he learns, Vera has studied advanced linguistics in St. Petersburg, and returned to Mirnoe by choice. The closer he gets to her, the more he is shamed in the face of her towering presence. Makine, now almost 50 and the author of eight other novels (including Dreams of My Russian Summers), lives in Paris; he transforms a very simple premise into a richly textured story of love and loss. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From BooklistThis wonderful novel is set in what is known as the Soviet period of stagnation--the 1970s, or late Brezhnev era. The university-educated narrator wistfully looks back on a few months in mid-decade when he left his cynical and jaded friends in Leningrad to travel to a small provincial town near the White Sea. Ostensibly writing about provincial folk customs, but also hoping to gather material for an anti-Soviet satire, he instead meets Vera, a woman much older than he who has waited 30 years for her lover to return from World War II. Makine, whose previous novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers (1997), presents an elegantly enigmatic tale that explores a number of themes that may seem a little outdated to some readers but which meld seamlessly with the novel's mise-en-scene, including devotion, duty, and the contradiction between perception and truth. The latter is driven home by the complicated relationship between the narrator and Vera, and the brief moment when he all but morphs into her long-lost lover. Frank CasoCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summers and Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Life is set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II.Alexeï Berg's father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin's reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler's war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941. Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he sees his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again...

Again available from Arcade, Andreï Makine's luminous and haunting novel of a young boy's sentimental journey into manhood. Every summer young Andreï visits his grandmother, Charlotte Lemmonier, whom he loves dearly. In a dusty village overlooking the vast Russian steppes, she captivates her grandson and the other children of the village with wondrous tales—watching Proust play tennis in Neuilly, Tsar Nicholas II's visit to Paris, French president Felix Faure dying in the arms of his mistress. But from his mysterious grandmother Andreï also learns of a Russia he has never known: a country of famine and misery, brutal injustice, and the hopeless chaos of war. Enthralled, he weaves her stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. A poignant story of a Soviet boy's ascent into adulthood in the 1960s and '70s, Dreams of My Russian Summers is an epic tale full of passion and tenderness, pain and heartbreak, mesmerizing in every way.