Requiem for a Lost Empire

With Requiem Andreï Makine has created a panoramic novel of eight decades of Soviet/Russian history starting in 1917. It is a story of extraordinary emotional intensity. For anybody like me with interest in the Russian "condition humaine", this is a must read. While written as fiction, it depicts realities and truths of lives lived during Soviet times and since. Makine, born and brought up in Russia, emigrated to France in 1987 and writes his novels in French. He has found an excellent translator in Geoffrey Strachan. Requiem is anchored in the narrator, the last of three generations of one family. Makine weaves the description of the father's and grandfather's lives into the son's narrative. It is a story within and told as conveyed to him by a third party. This technique establishes a lens singling out or highlighting specific details and events. At the same time the method creates a certain emotional distance for both the protagonist and the reader from the vicious excesses of the Soviet regime and the horrors of war. In stark contrast to the depiction of devastation, scorched earth and expanding killing fields, is the description of nature and landscapes in all their beauty and harmony. There is something nostalgic and even surreal in the soothing power that the land and rural life has over the father and grandfather. It is a refuge sought from the fighting that restores and gives life. It is the dream that sustains the soldier and keeps him alive against all odds. Happiness and love, even if short-lived are possible and experienced here. The unnamed narrator was severed from this nourishing power, his sense of identity lost since early childhood, his "own memories falsified from birth". Rescued by an enigmatic family friend just prior to the killing of his parents, he grows up as an orphan. The sense of being an outsider never leaves him. Working as a medical doctor in African countries he moves from crisis to crisis. An offer to join the KGB comes almost as relief; changing identities as required for his life as a spy is the easiest part. He is thrown back into the African quagmire, caught between the Cold War's competing fronts. With a few brush strokes, Makine captures the essence of the increasingly perilous political games being played out in developing countries. The "game of espionage" brings the agent and his female partner closer together. While his feelings for her grow deeper, his outlook on life is put to the test: "To be able to tell the truth one day." This is her wish to which he responds by telling her his family's story as conveyed to him by the old friend years ago. The story of Nikolai, the grandfather, and his son Pavel portrays two generations of soldiers caught up in the brutalities of the two major wars and the rise of Stalin. The growing violence of the Soviet regime is illustrated through specific episodes and incidents. Nikolai, fighting with the Red Army, rides off one day from the combat not too

It is always difficult to say what Andrei Makine's books are about. One could describe the plot or the story-line and feel that one hasn't said anything at all. Makine's novels are like all great works of art. They set up a resonance inside us that is intensely pleasureable and also painful. In Requiem, as in his other novels, Makine's prose is poetic and technically flawless, the historical content is fascinating and his irony and humor elicit a warm rush of recognition and laughter. Like all great art, it also makes us painfully aware of what is unexpressed in us. If one can say that Dreams of My Russian Summers is "about" the birth of a writer, then Requiem for a Lost Empire is about the struggle to tell or speak the truth. There is a silence that bounds this struggle. The three generations of men in this novel live with the women they love largely in silence. One of the women even has her tongue cut out. Yet somehow, this silence is a state of grace. Most of the time we live in the contiuum between, caught between our superstitious fear of naming things and our compulsion to do so. Makine's efforts to tell the truth, whatever level of truth one wishes to draw from his writing, have produced an exquisitely beautiful and haunting novel.

Andrei Makine adds another laurel to his impressive writing career with the release of Requiem for a Lost Empire. In this short book (250 pages) Makine surveys the past century of change in Russia from the fall of the Czars and the rise of the people, through Stalin and World War II, through the Cold War with its ominous KGB into today with the undercover lives of common men striving to retain the promises of Communism. Makine does this seemingly incredible feat through the eyes of one family - sons and fathers who lived through the various phases of critical change that Russia (empire, USSR, etc) has undergone. In nonlinear fashion he draws multifacted, complex characters with flashbacks and flashforwards in a way that makes this less a history book (though it is valuably one) than the novel it is. And as if that weren't enough, Makine writes with a grace and poetry that suffuse his tale with lasting visuals and ominous grit. That the author left Russia to live in France and has written all his books to date in Frence means that we are also experiencing the work of a master translator. This little book is a gripping masterwork - highly recommended reading.