Dreams of My Russian Summers
Dreams of My Russian Summers
Author: Andreï Makine
Desc: Dreams of My Russian Summers tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and '70s and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman Charlotte Lemonnier who is his grandmother. Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here during the warm evenings they sit on Charlotte's narrow flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896 of the great Paris flood of 1910 of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known of famine and misery of brutal injustice of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland.