The lyrical first novel of youth and love by acclaimed modernist master Gaito Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf 'The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event' TLS Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Koyla resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes shape, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland. Written when Gazdanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master's debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.
GAITO GAZDANOV (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Beggar and Other Stories, The Buddha's Return and The Flight are also published by Pushkin Press. |
