L'oeuvre d'Andreï Makine, depuis Au temps du fleuve Amour, Le Testament français et Le Crime d'Olga Arbélina jusqu'à Requiem pour l'Est, La Musique d'une vie et La Vie d'un homme inconnu, ne cesse de ...déployer une sensibilité historique et une fine connaissance des comportements humains, ceci souvent dans le contexte d'une thématique de l'exil et de la migrance. Ceci dit, et comme le démontre avec pertinence l'étude de Murielle Lucie Clément, la force de l'oeuvre réside plus fondamentalement, comme celle de tout grand écrivain, dans la souplesse de l'expression et la valeur multifonctionnelle des tactiques scripturales. Cette étude examine ainsi de façon insistante et avec pénétration un des éléments d'une telle souplesse makinienne, les ekphraseis qui exploitent les riches ressources de la photo, de la musique et du film avec leurs différentes fonctions, souvent fusionnées, où c'est tantôt la dimension psychologique, tantôt celle de l'ontologie, que régissent et complexifient les fonctionalités plus strictement rhétoriques et structurales. On lira ainsi avec profit et plaisir le texte de Murielle Lucie Clément, texte qui, pour la première fois, permet d'aller beaucoup plus loin que les plutôt ordinaires équations autobiographiques ou culturelles.
Andreï Makine – From Anonymity to Literary Fame. The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies that enabled Andreï Makine to go from being a penniless Russian immigrant living in a Parisian ...cemetery to becoming a celebrity in the French literary world. The first aspect to be considered is the use of pseudo-translation. Unlike another Russian writer in exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who always believed that his works would be read by his compatriots and have an impact on the Russian cultural space, Makine, who settled in France in 1987, decided to write in French, mainly for a French readership. However, his first two novels were rejected by the Parisian publishers who did not believe that a Russian could write so well in French, so Makine had to create fictitious translators in order to get his texts published. Another significant factor is the way in which he exploited his biographical aspects to create a personal mythology. The third, and perhaps most important, factor that has contributed to Makine’s consecration in the French cultural space is the way he describes his country of origin (he has been accused of creating an image of Russia that would be pleasing to Western eyes) and his host country, praising both the French language and, as the title of one of his books puts it, “this France that we forget to love". Keywords: pseudo-translation, hybrid identity, personal mythology, slavophilia, francité
This paper focuses on the image and the role of the chronotope of Soviet Siberia in three of Makine's novels: Le testament français, Au temps du fleuve Amour and L'amour humain. It argues that while ...the endless landscapes, harsh winters and political prisons which marked Siberia are indeed depicted in these texts, other - and more significant - dimensions are added to it, such as its representation as a land of individual freedom and - thanks to the discovery of French movies and literature on its territory - of intellectual growth. Thus, this paper proposes a complex and non-Manichaean reading of Makine's Siberia, hypothesising that this immense territory ultimately functions as a hypertrophied uterus which symbolically gave birth not only to the writer, but also to the integrality of his literary output.
This article explores the use of the guidebook as a narrative form in the work of a number of "displaced" Russian authors (Joseph Brodsky, Andreï Makine, Michail Šiškin). In literary fiction, the ...guidebook is a documentary-literary hybrid inscribed into the wider frame of postmodernism. It is a fusion of a document with its informative function, autobiography and historiosophic essay. Literary works written in this form share some features: they all display a shift in focus from space to time, putting strong emphasis on history and presenting a "panoramic" or "mosaic" picture of it. This panoramic view increases the distance to the spatial environments seen from afar and - as in Brodsky's case - undermines the very spatial reality. The paper argues that the use of the guidebook as a narrative form by transcultural authors makes transcultural writing itself a fusion of the pragmatic and the aesthetic, and that its specificity lies exactly in this blend.
This paper focuses on the autobiographical narratives of three translingual writers, Nabokov, Brodsky and Makine. Their narratives are analyzed by taking into account Vygotsky’s ideas on the ...relationship between language and thought (1987), Bruner’s ideas on storytelling (1986, 2002) and Swain’s concept of languaging as a meaning-making process through language (Swain, 2006). The paper investigates the question of the role of language in making sense of writers’ lives as displaced people. In order to answer this question, we analyzed the autobiographical narratives for languaging episodes that are defined as autobiographical excerpts where the writers attempt to make sense of their lives as displaced people. The following major themes have been identified as the result of the analysis: construction of the lost world out of new experiences, discovery of the meaning of existence, reconciliation through cultural and linguistic hybridity. We believe that the implication of the study is that it can resonate with the lives of other displaced people at the time of cultural and linguistic superdiversity.
This article examines representations of war remembrance in the francophone Russian writer Andreï Makine's novel La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme The Earth and Sky of Jacques Dorme, 2003. The ...novel portrays events and experiences of World War II from three temporal perspectives: that of the eponymous French pilot, who flies transports for the Soviets in the Alaska-Siberia air bridge during the war; that of the narrator as a child, who witnesses the construction of Stalingrad monuments and the emergence of the Soviet war cult in the mid-1960s; and that of the adult narrator, who searches for Dorme's remains in post-Soviet Russia and seeks to commemorate the nowforgotten pilot by writing about his life. Makine portrays official monuments and commemoration of the Battle of Stalingrad as attempts on the part of the Soviet state to manipulate the collective memory. By contrast, he depicts individual remembrance as a more authentic alternative to collective commemorative practices. This article interprets Makine's depiction of war remembrance against the background of the Soviet war cult, showing how the novel privileges individual over collective memory. It argues that Makine represents individual oral and written narratives in particular as an alternative to official histories and public commemoration.
Authors writing in a language other than their native tongue have become a common phenomenon in an era of increased international mobility. This article is devoted to three Russian-born émigré ...writers—Andreï Makine (b. 1957), Wladimir Kaminer (b. 1967), and Gary Shteyngart (b. 1972)—all of whom have achieved literary stardom with books written in French, German, and English, respectively. Although each of the three authors has a distinctive style and ideological position, in his own way each projects a “Russian” persona to the western public. Using the notion of cultural hybridity, Adrian Wanner explores the various strategies these authors have adopted in fashioning an identity for themselves that is tailored to meet the demands of the reading public in their respective host nations while exploiting the cachet of the Russian “brand name” in today's global literary economy.
After the release of his third novel "Le Testament francais," Alfred Makine, a Russian exile who was turned down by all editors, has become a public figure by winning a trio of literary awards. ...Safran examines the reviews of the novel in French, American, and Russian publications in an attempt to understand how the critics categorize the art and the identity of the bilingual writer; focuses on Makine's contributions to literary bilingualism, which thematizes the psychology and the history of the bilingual artist; and analyzes some of the novel's many references to French poetry in relation to Makine's insistence on the artistic function of bilinguality and biculturality.
Andrei Makine was born in Siberia but went to Paris as a translator at age 30, obtained asylum, and has lived in France since. When struggling to establish his literary career, Makine quickly learned ...the advantage of marketing himself as a Russian writer. Taras proposes that Makine can be understood as the foremost Russian-born literary representative of the politics of transnationality and creator of the border text.
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