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Every summer, young Andrei 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, Andrei 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. She creates for him a vivid portrait of the France of her childhood, a distant Atlantis far more elegant, carefree, and stimulating than Russia in the 1970s and '80s. Her warm, artful memories of her homeland and of books captivate Andrei. Absorbed in this vision, he becomes an outsider in his own country, and eventually a restless traveler around Europe. Dreams of My Russian Summers is an epic full of passion and tenderness, pain and heartbreak, mesmerizing in every way.… (more)
User reviews
The principal characters, the boy and the grandmother, are well drawn and Charlotte epitomizes those who have such depths of character that they survive incredible hardships and cruelty, to find a balance and perspective on life. In Charlotte's case, aided by a deep love for her Russian husband, his compassion and faithfulness, and what becomes her love for Russia and its people despite the stupidities and cruelties and inanities of the government. The story captures the picture of a people burdened with a harsh geography, history, and climate, overtaken by a brutal political system that did nothing to foster tolerance and understanding on either a group or individual basis. But underneath that banal and cruel system, pulsed a society of people driven by what drives all people: births, deaths, loves, sex, jealousies, revenge, envy, etc etc. The system can try to impose a certain conformity and rigidness on society, and can succeed in a formal way, but no system can ever harness the wealth and unpredictable nature of human emotions and relations.
As a child, the protagonist spent his summer holidays in the steppes with his French grandmother, Charlotte, who regaled him with stories that held him spellbound during the long Siberian nights on the
When Charlotte left France as a young woman decades before, the only thing she had with her was a suitcase filled with old photographs and newspaper clippings. These, along with her almost tangible memories, form the keystone of her endless stories and anecdotes. He becomes completely enthralled with Parisian life – at the expense of real life. He was, “imprisoned in the fantasy of the past, from whence (he) cast absent-minded glances at real life.”
This book, while celebrating his grandmother and the depth and wonder she brought to his life, also brought to light the struggle he experienced in finding and coming to terms with real life as opposed to the wonderful dreams and anecdotes that were so much a part of his daily existence.
This book made me want to reminisce about the good old days with my grandmother. I wanted to go and dig out old photographs of yesteryear, of my grandparents in another era, posing in studios in elegant attire for a deft photographer stooped over a tripod under a black cloth :)
The book sketched a set of dreamlike images of a time and place that I knew nothing about. In particular, for example, I was blown away by the author's vivid account of the proud, honor-bound urban street battle of the "samovars" of post-WWI and the subsequent mysterious disappearance of these supposed heroes. How logical that such events would have happened, even if I never could have imagined them in a thousand years on my own; and (fortunately) how completely alien they are to the contemporary zeitgeist.
However incompletely I comprehended it, I appreciated the author's lucid glimpse into the not-so-long-ago (and, possibly, still extant?) culture of the Russians and his depiction of its many (but by no means all) differences with the westernized First World.
The boy is divided as he grows up between his love of his grandma and the lovely world she conjures and his urge as a young child to fit in and embrace his Russian heritage. In his perspective, the French aspect of his character reflects a gauzy humanism and a love of beauty, while the Russian aspect of his character comes to represent a type of barbarism and a potential for violence. His perception, however it may be flawed, convinces him that the Soviets have good reason to be afraid of their Frenchness.
"I became aware of a disconcerting truth: to harbor this distant past within oneself, to let one's soul live in this legendary Atlantis, was not guiltless. No, it was well and truly a challenge, a provocation in the eyes of those who lived in the present."
Living in the West, it is casually assumed that progressives are often the only ones whose souls contain humanism and the good. For Makine and his narrator, the exact reverse is true; at that time, it was necessary to look to the East to find ideals and a culture that exalted human beings, whereas the Soviet Union's progressives did everything in their might to put them out of existence.
It is not surprising that Makine's story occasionally comes out as being somewhat vague and opaque given how deeply personal memory is. He sometimes leans a little too heavily on Proustian and Nabokov connections; a few fewer references to cork-lined chambers and moths wouldn't hurt; we get the point. Furthermore, I'm not enough of a Francophile to find it funny rather than emotional when someone speaks fondly of France. However, I would recommend the book due to the beauty of the writing, a few striking pictures, and the way the plot alludes to the tragedy of 20th-century Russia.