An Evening with Claire: A Novel - Softcover

Gaito Gazdanov was born in St. Petersburg in 1903. He joined the White army at age sixteen and was exiled in Paris, after passing through Constantinople. Before becoming a writer acclaimed by the Russian émigré community in Paris, he worked on barges, trains, and in an automobile factory and was sometimes homeless. A member of the French Resistance during World War II, Gazdanov died in Munich in 1971.

Between the two world wars, the Russian emigre community was noted for the ferment of its literary and intellectual activity. The best-known of its members was, of course, Nabokov, but there were many other Russian emigre writers who found exile a way of evaluating, sentimentally or otherwise, the Old Russia they would never see again. Written when the author was 26, and effectively translated by Daynard, this is a thinly disguised memoir of his youth, much of which was tragic. Gazdanov's sisters died young, as did an idolized father. A stint at a strict military school and gymnasium ended when the author enlisted in the White Army, where he spent two horrifying years on a machine-gun platform of a train, traversing southern Russianan experience he recounts with a teenager's glee. This first novel provides neither social nor political analysis. In effect, it is the portrait of an intelligent, emotional boy whose hypersensitivity is masked by a veneer of cynicism and whose flair for mimicry cannot hide his innate compassion. Awkwardly framed by an introduction and coda describing a night spent in Paris with the eponymous Clairea woman he has loved obsessively for 10 yearsit is an emotional paean to childhood. There is no bitterness, just a resounding sadness, a reminder of an irrevocable past.
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