Requiem For A Lost Empire

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Andrei' Makine was born and brought up in Russia but Requiem for a Lost Empire, like his other novels, was written in French. Part of 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 agitprop (political propaganda, especially in art or literature); gulag (the system of forced-labor camps in the Soviet Union in the period 1930-55); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); kolkhoz (a collective farm); kolkhoznik (a member of the kolkhoz collective); kulak (a peasant farmer, working for his own profit); muzhik (the somewhat contemptuous historic word for a peasant); shapka (a fur hat or cap, often with ear flaps); soviet (an elected local or national council in the former U.S.S.R). The nickname "Shakhmatov" ("the Chess player") derives from the Russian word for chess, shakhmaty.

G.S.

It has always been my conviction that the house that sheltered their love, and later my own birth, was much closer to the night and its constellations than to the life of that vast country they had managed to escape without leaving its territory. The country surrounded them, encircled them, but they were elsewhere. And if, in the end, it discovered them, hidden deep in the woods in the Caucasus, this was the chance outcome of a game of symbols.

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