Dreams Of My Russian Summers

Translator's Note

Andrei' Makine was born and brought up in Russia but wrote Dreams of My Russian Summers in French, living in France. In this novel the lives of the characters move back and forth between two countries and two languages. Makine uses a number of Russian words that evoke features of Russian life, and I have generally left these as English transliterations of Russian, for example: izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with ear-flaps); babushka (a grandmother); taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia, south of the tundra); kasha (the staple dish of cooked grain or groats); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); kolkhoznik (a member of a collective farm).

But I have also left in French a few phrases where the foreign or evocative sound for Russian ears seems to me as important as the meaning, for example: "petite pomme" ("little apple"); Belle Epoque (the era in France before the First World War); "cher confrère" ("dear colleague"); an echo of Flaubert's remark, "Madame Bovary c'est moi" ("Madame Bovary is me"); the opening couplet from La Fontaines fable of the wolf and the lamb, "La raison du plus fort est toujours la meilleure /Nous Vallons montrer tout à l'heure …" ("The strongest always stand to win/The argument, as shown herein…"), which features in an elocution lesson; and the elusive French "je ne sais quoi" (an indefinable something).