Brief Loves That Live Forever

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Andreï Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but Brief Loves That Live Forever, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set mainly in Russia, but also in France, and the author uses some Russian words in the French text that I have retained in this English translation. These include shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with earflaps), izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs), kolkhoz (a collective farm in the former Soviet Union), Komsomol (the Soviet Communist League of Youth), apparatchik (a member of the Soviet Communist Party administration, or apparat), nomenklatura (the public positions filled by Party appointees), gulag (the system of Soviet corrective labor camps), and samizdat (the clandestine publication of texts banned in the Soviet Union and also the texts themselves).

Other Russian historical references include the famous Nevsky Prospekt, one of the main streets in St. Petersburg (formerly Leningrad), and “Potemkin villages,” sham villages reputedly built for Catherine the Great’s tour of the Crimea in 1787 on the orders of her chief minister, Potemkin. The writer Varlam Shalamov was in the Kolyma gulag in the far north of the Soviet Union from 1937 to 1951. His stories of life there were published in English as Kolyma Tales. As a result of calendar changes, the date when the October Revolution was celebrated throughout the Soviet Union was November 7. “Shock workers” were members of “shock brigades,” bodies of (especially voluntary) workers who took on particularly arduous tasks.

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