Andreï Makine, author of "Dreams of my Russian Summers," (entitled "Le testament français" in the original French), won the prizes in 1995 for his recollections of summers spent visiting his French grandmother in Siberia. He was dubbed the Russian Proust for the way his book blends memory and imagination.
The event, organized by Penn's French Institute for Culture and Technology and by the Alliance Française of Philadelphia, attracted a French-speaking crowd of about 100 people.
Speaking in French, the Russian-born author said he sought asylum in France a decade ago at the age of 30. Although he had read widely in French while living in Russia, in France he began a chronological review of French literature, starting with the medieval "Roman de la Rose."
Makine spoke of his struggle between two identities, which is the central theme of his autobiographical novel.
His grandmother, born at the turn of the century, moved to Russia as a child, where her father practiced medicine. She was trapped in Siberia during the chaos of the revolution in 1921.
Under her influence, Makine created an imagined France that contrasted to the realities of his Soviet life. In his book, the imagined world allows the narrator to see Russia from a French viewpoint, and alienates him from the surrounding society.
In adolescence, however, the French heritage becomes painful, conflicting with his love for "the pitiless, beautiful, absurd and unique Russia."
At the same time, the French language connects the young man, growing up in a dreary city lost in the Russian tundra, to the much larger world that was flourishing beyond the Iron Curtain.
Torn between two languages, between two cultures, he argues that his biculturalism forced him into artistic creation as "a way of reconciling the tension between the two cultures that engendered him" and gave him access to poetry, a language that goes "beyond local dialects."
He compared the two cultures - Fench and Russian - saying the French culture is much older and therefore more sophisticated. For example, the French language has a linguistic arsenal of 26 tenses whereas Russian has only three. The Russian culture has had less time to acquire "intellectual varnish," hence the sudden outbursts of raw emotions, the frequent resurgence of what he called "le barbare russe."
After Makine's talk, audience members bought books - in English and in French - from the Penn Bookstore, and waited for le barbare russe with French intellectual varnish to sign their copies.
Return to Compass Features for November 11, 1997