The Life of an Unknown Man

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Andreï Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but The Life of an Unknown Man, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set partly in Russia, partly 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); dacha (a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or holiday home); izba (a traditional wooden house built of logs); and kolkhoznik (a worker on a collective farm).

The text contains a number of references to streets and buildings in Saint Petersburg (formerly Leningrad) on the river Neva, including the famous Nevsky Prospekt, one of the main streets of the city’s center; “Five Corners,” the intersection of five streets on Zagorodny Prospekt; and Smolny, formerly the Smolny Institute, where the Russian Revolution started and which became the headquarters of the Communist Party in Leningrad. The “Scythian gold” alluded to in the text is among the treasures in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg. A boyar (in Russian, boyarin) was a member of the aristocracy in Russia from the tenth century until the early eighteenth century, next in rank to a prince. In the performance of Rigoletto at the Leningrad Opera in 1945, referred to in the text, the central character is the king, as in Victor Hugo’s original play, upon which the opera was based, rather than the Duke of Mantua (the change required by nineteenth-century Italian stage censorship and still generally observed).

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