Andrei Makine is a masterful prose stylist. His Dreams of my Russian Summers was notable for lovely nostalgia and its beautiful if sometimes elliptical prose. Brief Loves That Live Forever is also both concerned with nostalgia and exquisitely written. Born in Siberia, but living in France and writing in French, Makine's greatest talent seems to be his ability to write very precisely about fairly vague (if nevertheless powerful) sensations, including love, longing, loss, bi-cultural understanding, and nostalgia. But Makine is also extremely adept at combining the personal with the political. In other words, he is able to describe how our personal lives are affected by the grand architecture of world-shattering events and global processes. But he does so in a way that never crowds out the essential elements of bildungsromans. In some ways, Makine could set his stories anywhere, but the Soviet leaders' megalomania sharpens the contrast between Big History and small (or personal) history, between revolution and everyday life, between Marxist philosophy and love, between politics and psychology, between great events and epiphanies.
Makine 's Brief Loves That Live Forever is a biographical story set in the late-Soviet era of Brezhnev. Sharply divided into various vignettes, the protagonist was raised as an orphan and ended up a dissident. Orphan-hood seems to be the appropriate symbol for both late Soviet citizens, who often suffered the loss of family members to the Gulag or other totalitarian horrors, as well as post-Soviet citizens, who suffered the lost of their country, the Soviet Union, as well as an economic system, political creed, and way of life. In the protagonist's memory, the October and May Day celebrations loom large. So too do propaganda, parades, Soviet heroes, leaders' portraits, edifying stories about Lenin and Stalin, and Soviet symbols. Makine mentions concrete facets of the Soviet experience, but dwells upon a generation's general feelings of disenchantment as young people in particular begin to realize that the Soviet dream of equality and cooperation is unrealistic if not outright ridiculous. It's an award place to be in. The failed dream remains an important part of one's past. The effect must be akin to finding out that Bill Cosby is a convicted mass rapist. We are obliged to hold two different versions of the world in our hearts at the same time, both the Cosby Show's depiction of a world of racial equality, and the accusers' reality of malevolence and rape. But of course post-Soviet citizens must deal with the two all-encompassing versions of the past.
Some favorite quotes from the book:
The Party had just proclaimed that communism would arrive within the marvelously brief span of twenty years.
Official propaganda congealed these dream visions together into tangible, simplified language, common to the country's whole population.
...this dress rehearsal for the messianic society.
"Well, what can you say?..He was a submariner, her man. And if they're lost at sea they don't get a grave, or a cross..."
The other one stopped scraping, leaned on the handle of her shovel, and sighed as well: "Well, as for a cross, you know...Maybe it's better there's no grave. She'll get over it quicker..."
Everything was provided for in the ideal society: enthusiastic work by the masses, incredible advances in science and technology, the conquest of space, taking man into unknown galaxies, material abundance and rational consumption, linked to radical changes of attitude. Everything, absolutely everything! Except...
Anyway he said she wasn't patriotic, you know. He divorced her.
The fatal mistake we make is looking for a paradise that endures.
This obsession with what lasts causes us to overlook many a fleeting paradise.
We would laugh when a book on our study program struck as too stupid (one somewhat visionary author declared that the completion of a five-year plan within four years would speed up time throughout the universe.)
And while I so longed to believe in this fraternal world, I knew that when you passed through our city's suburbs at night it was better to have a switchblade in your pocket.
Totalitarianism, even in the mild form our generation knew, dreaded the spectacle of two beings embracing and escaping its control.
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