Requiem For A Lost Empire - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Andrei Makine (ч. 2)

"Wicked men have no songs. How come the Russians have songs?"

Friedrich Nietzsche, TheTwilight of the Idols

"There are only two peoples now. Russia is still barbarous, but it is great… The other young nation is America… The future of the world is there between these two great worlds. Some day they will collide and then we shall see struggles of which the past can give no idea."

– Sainte-Beuve, Cahiers 1847

"The other day I turned up the pages of an address book from before the war. I had to mark crosses and grim notes on every page: 'Exiled… Disappeared… Dead… Killed in battle… Shot by the enemy… Shot by his own side…' "

– Alfred Fabre-Luce, Journal d'Europe 1946-1947

Translator's Note

Andrei' Makine was born and brought up in Russia but Requiem for a Lost Empire, like his other novels, was written in French. Part of the book is set in Russia and the author uses some Russian words in the French text, which I have kept in this English translation: these include agitprop (political propaganda, especially in art or literature); gulag (the system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union in the period 1930-55); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); kolkhoz (a collective farm); kolkhoznik (a member of the kolkhoz collective); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); muzhik (the somewhat contemptuous historic word for a peasant); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with ear flaps); soviet (an elected local or national council in the former U.S.S.R). The nickname "Shakhmatov" ("the Chess player") derives from the Russian word for chess, shakhmaty.