Andrei Makine was born and brought up in Russia but wrote Once Upon the River Love in French, while living in France. Much of the novel is set in eastern Siberia, close to the mighty river Amur – the frontier between Siberia and Manchuria. But Amur is also one of the Russian names for Cupid, the god of love, and in French the name of the river is spelled Amour, the French for "love." The French title of Makine's novel, Au Temps du Fleuve Amour, thus contains a play on words in French and Russian that cannot be captured precisely in English, hence the tide that has been given to this translation.
In his French text, Makine uses a number of Russian words for basic features of Siberian and Soviet life. I have generally left these as English transliterations of Russian. These include: izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps); taiga (the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia south of the tundra); kolkhoz (a collective farm); kolkhoznik (a worker on such a farm); muzhik (the somewhat contemptuous historic word for a peasant); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); apparatchik (a member of the Communist Party or government apparatus).