Like Irene Nemirovsky before him, Andrei Makine is a talented, prolific, and Russian-raised French author. Unlike Nemirovsky, Makine's novels almost always deal very directly with Russia or Russian nostalgia. Makine's The Life of an Unknown Soldier tells the story of a a minor expat Russian writer who gets dumped by a younger lover and makes the desperate decision to journey back to St. Petersburg in search of an old love. The protagonist returns to St. Petersburg in the middle of its 300th anniversary. The writer is of course immediately confronted by the fact that the city has changed just as irrevocably as his former lover, who welcomes him, but seems little-inclined to think about the past. This first part of the novel feels someone less interesting than Makine's other novels, including his prize-winning My Russian Summers. While well-written, it lacks both the beauty and subtlety of Makine's best work. It also feels somewhat cliche to see a returning exile to feel estranged in his home town. Certainly George Orwell's Coming Up for Air does this brand of nostalgia much better.
However, Makine being Makine, the novel becomes much more powerful after the protagonist begins to listen to the life story of an old man who is about to be evicted from his real estate agent and host's rapidly expanding millionaire's pad. For the old man's biography includes much of Russia's twentieth century history. As it turns out, the old man survived the siege of Leningrad, the battles of Stalingrad and Kurst, the Gulag, Purges, and everyday communism. After completing the second half of The Life of an Unknown Soldier, one is tempted to credit Makine for making the first half of the novel banal on purpose. Perhaps the contrast is meant to demonstrate the extent to which the power of nostalgia and the excitement of history overwhelm the reality of our present lives. In any event, Makine is a writer's writer, and exhibits an ability to describe hunger, war, and fear with incredible precision. And so the book, as a whole, represents another of Makine's sophisticated tours of the space between Russia's past and present.
Below are a few quotes from the book:
"An exile's only country is his country's literature." Who said that?
He would also quote Chekhov: "In a short story cut the beginning and the end. That's where most of the lies are told."
"Playboys take women out for drives in convertibles," Shutov thought with a smile. "Destitute writers treat them to the Russian classics."
On a boat just about to leave a Crimea put to the torch by the Revolution, the young Nabokov was playing chess.
The aesthete, Nabokov, care more about an elegant metaphor than the land of his fathers.
"I'm not Russian, Lea. I'm Soviet. So you see I'm filthy, stupid, and vicious. Very different from all those Michel Strogoffs and Prince Myshkins the French are crazy about."
"Listen, Shutov, I know she went back to Leningrad, well, Saint Petersburg. She'd married a fellow who was in oil. Yes, you get the picture. And it didn't work out...No, not the oil. The marriage."
"We've reached the stage of irony." At first Russia copied these Western fashions, now they delight in pastiching them."
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