The Woman Who Waited

TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

ANDREÏ MAKINE WAS BORN AND BROUGHT UP in Russia, but The Woman Who Waited, like his other novels, was written in French. 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 nyet (no), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), dacha (a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or holiday home), and sarafan (a traditional sleeveless tunic dress).

There are also a number of references to well-known Russian place names, including the Nevsky Prospekt, the street in St. Petersburg (Leningrad under the Soviet Union), and to institutions from the Communist era in Russia. A kolkhoz was a collective farm, a kolkhoznik a member of the farm collective. An apparatchik was a member of the party administration, or apparat. References from French cultural life include those to Jean-Luc Godard, the influential NewWave film director of the 1960s, the events of May 1968, when student protests in France led to a crisis that shook the government, and Colonel Chabert, the eponymous hero of Balzac’s 1834 novel, who returns from the war in which he was reported killed to find his wife has remarried and refuses to recognize him.

G.S.