The End of the Affair

The Russian novelist Andre Makine, who writes in French, finds that the joys and deceits of language and the temptation of silence, dwell at the heart of Russia’s extreme 20th century history. History and language seem to be Makine’s themes. In his earlier novel, “Dreams of My Russian Summers,” a Russian boy learned from his French grandmother her lovely musical language and found that escaping to a place where he could live with beauty became the point of his life.

“Requiem for a Lost Empire” attributes a similar history to Makine’s nameless narrator. When, late in Stalin’s era, the secret police came for his parents, this boy was snatched to safety by Sasha, a French woman long settled in Russia and an old friend of the family. He was saved. But there his fascination and his suffering also began: over what person to be, which language to speak and which history to make his own. The Soviet Russian past and present were full of disappearances, evasions and hidden dangers. His first impulse as he grew older was to beware a world “booby-trapped by words.” His second, much later, was to bear witness to the history of his country.

This nameless man is the son of Pavel, who liberated a concentration camp during World War II and married a Caucasian woman he saved from rape, and the grandson of Nikolai, who saw the Revolution betrayed and married an educated woman left for dead by partisans who cut her tongue out. He becomes an army doctor and finds himself, circa 1990, caring for casualties in a proxy war between the old Soviet and United States superpowers. He goes into intelligence work to try to uncover the covert arms dealing that is bringing desperately destructive alien conflicts to Africa and the Middle East, and he pursues this goal as the empire that employs him breaks up and the loyalties of his co-workers shift uneasily. What happens in Yemen to the narrator and his intelligence partner, who is also the woman he loves, frames a dazzling historical narrative concerning the lives of Nikolai and Pavel.

In its early stages, the richly atmospheric framework story recalls Michael Ondaatje’s “The English Patient,” another tale of wartime duplicity and concealed identity. Later, as the narrative moves west through Parisian intellectual circles to the world of Russian expatriates in Florida, Makine explores “that mixture of fascination and disgust that the West had always aroused in the East.” Possibly here is the only time when the novel falters, because the door is opened to caricatures: the highly polished, beautifully dressed, gushing intellectual women, utterly incapable of seriousness or naturalness; the GI so over-equipped for combat, and so protected against it, that he seems like a giant doll; and the highly paid, arrogant French maker of a film documentary about Russia, whose cliched work makes people forget rather than remember.

And yet, what is portrayed here as the smiling banality of the present is surely true, and anyone who knew the old Soviet world and Russian history firsthand must despair, as Makine’s narrator does, that it will never properly be understood again for the complexity of good and evil that it was. And so Makine’s narrator has another reason for telling his life story, not only trying to undo the knot of time for Russians but also trying to lift the veil of ignorance that goes undetected in a West that thinks it has all the information and therefore knows everything.

“Requiem for a Lost Empire” is a novel, as Makine must hope, that crosses borders. For those who recognize it, it is full of Soviet iconography, like the inordinately heavy children’s spinning tops that armament factories used “to turn out as a palliative sideline, and which children genuinely loved.” But it also takes “Soviet” characters and makes them real people who can make sense of and feel the allure of “bourgeois happiness” without hiding behind ideology. They know full well that the West is not just a matter of dull material contentment. A world in which human beings enjoy being civil to one another and living in peace is a kind of miracle.

But can a writer, should a writer, begin from civility and peace? Makine and the Russian generations for whom he speaks have not had the choice. “Pavel suddenly understood that there was nothing else: darkness, a man, a voice. Everything else was a peacetime invention. Man was simply this naked voice beneath the sky.” “Requiem for a Lost Empire” is about both war and peace, and there is something admirably Tolstoy-esque about its sweep.

And yet it is not an epic, not about an objective world out there, but a meditation about what is of value to one man as told to the woman he loves. Makine’s work is smaller and less certain of universal values than Tolstoy’s. How could it not be in the year 2001? But it is deeply modern in the way it detects that authenticity lies uniquely with what an “I” can tell a “you” whom he trusts. Our modern world, when it is not cynical, seems to set up this Manichaean division between politics and love and powerfully affects the shape of novels like this one.