Interview: Exiled Russian Andreï Makine wrote his first novel sitting on park benches in Paris. He has now been translated into 30 languages and publishers are reclaiming his early work, he tells Lara Marlowe
Success holds sweet ironies for a writer who has struggled to gain recognition. When Andreï Makine arrived in Paris in 1987 from Russia, via Africa, Asia and Australia, he spent weeks sleeping rough in Père Lachaise cemetery.
Makine wrote his first novel, A Hero's Daughter, sitting on park benches. He lost track of the number of publishers who rejected it.
"Publishers can be awful people," Makine whispers, for we are sitting in his publisher's office. "They put their coffee mugs on the manuscripts while they read them, so you cannot re-use them. My tiny studio was filled with wrecked copies of A Hero's Daughter. I practically had to sleep on them!"
French publishers lost interest when Makine told them he'd written the novel in French. "They thought to themselves: 'He talks with an accent; he must write with an accent,' " he says.
So Makine pretended a French friend had translated his work from the Russian. "The critics all said: 'What an excellent translation!' " he laughs now.
It was only with his third novel, Once Upon the River Love, that Makine grew confident enough to end the charade about translations. His fourth novel, Le Testament Français, is about a boy growing up in Siberia under Stalin. The child's imagination is fed by a French grandmother's old photographs and stories. The novel made literary history by winning France's two top awards, the Prix Goncourt and the Prix Medicis.
Today, Makine has been translated into 30 languages. His ninth novel, The Woman who Waited, has remained on the French best-seller list since it was published in January. A Life's Music is being adapted for cinema in the US, and a German composer is writing an opera based on The Crime of Olga Arbyelina.
As often happens, the literary establishment is reaching back for the early gems it missed. The British publisher, Sceptre, has already printed six of Makine's novels, exquisitely translated by Geoffrey Strachan. This month, 14 years after it was first published in France, Sceptre has brought out A Hero's Daughter.
"I was planning this book during the last years of the Soviet empire, when everything toppled, when heroes became useless," Makine says. The hero of the title is Ivan Demidov, a Russian who lies about his age to join the Soviet army after the invading Germans massacre his family in 1941. For his bravery in halting a German advance near Stalingrad, Ivan wins the Gold Star of a Hero of the Soviet Union.
"There were only a few thousand given," Makine explains. "The Gold Star was the highest distinction, the summum."
Ivan marries Tanya, a nurse who saves his life in a subsequent battle. The couple endure all the hardships of the Soviet Union. They lose their first child, suffer through drought, famine and life in a crowded communal apartment. Their daughter Olya becomes an interpreter and is blackmailed by the KGB into "servicing" Western businessmen it is spying on. In a disintegrating country where heroes of the Soviet Union are no longer respected, Ivan sells his other medals, but not the Gold Star. Olya is forced to sell the precious symbol to pay for her father's burial, then determines to buy it back. Though the family have lost their illusions, the Gold Star still means something.
Makine's style has been compared to impressionist painting or cinematography. In A Hero's Daughter, for instance, he conveys the magic of falling in love in one simple sentence: "They talked and listened to one another with feelings of joy they had never experienced before." Makine's novels move so quickly that one British literary critic complained that inattentive readers would lose their way.
A Hero's Daughter is a devastating portrait of the former Soviet Union in just 163 pages.
"It's very, very condensed," Makine admits. "Someone who never went there will understand the essence of Soviet Russia. It's difficult to comprehend; Churchill was right when he called Russia 'a riddle inside a mystery inside an enigma'."
But the novel is also a moving love story.
"Life was so tragic, so hard, that the only tie that still protected people was that between a man and a woman," Makine says. "The Soviets broke down ties within countries, social classes and races. Everything became very individual in the great collectivist empire. We were promised we'd belong to a great human undertaking, but it wasn't true."
The themes of all Makine's novels are already present in A Hero's Daughter: love as a respite from the cruelty of the world; espionage and betrayal; war and waiting. Makine juxtaposes horror and beauty to haunting effect. On an evening walk in spring, Ivan tells Tanya how his baby brother was skewered by a German on his bayonet, and Tanya recounts the story of two Russian girls she found lying in a barn, still warm, after they'd been raped and shot by the Russian Polizei who collaborated with the Nazis.
After seeing his comrades' stomachs blown away and fingers lopped off in the battle that wins him his Gold Star, Ivan follows a rivulet to a spring where he drinks greedily, then sees himself in the water:
For a long time he contemplated this sombre reflection's features. Then shook himself. It seemed to him that the silence was becoming less dense. Somewhere above him a bird called.
Such moments of beauty were the only source of hope in the Soviet Union, Makine says. "Finding beauty in the midst of hell was the only thing that enabled them to survive. A lot of people who did not have the capacity to see beauty sank into alcoholism or crime or committed suicide. There were waves of suicides; people couldn't stand it."
As a child in Siberia, Makine listened to survivors of Stalin's Gulag.
"One old man told me he'd spent 25 years in the Gulag," he says. "For a 15-year-old, that seemed like an eternity. He told me how he found a bird's nest that had fallen down. All but one of the eggs were broken. He held the unbroken egg in his armpit for several days until it hatched.
"In the mud, amid such cruelty, all of a sudden a little bird popped out. He was so happy."
In A Hero's Daughter, Tanya waits for Ivan; Olya's flatmate waits for her fiancé, who is serving in Afghanistan. Makine's last novel is about Vera, a schoolteacher who has waited 30 years for a man reported missing in action.
"We lost 25 million people in the second World War," Makine explains. "That means 25 million families separated, divided, wounded, and as many people who asked themselves: 'Will he return?' The Gulag was the same thing - millions and millions of people."
Though he is warm and humorous in conversation, Makine is as circumspect as the KGB agents he writes of when asked about his own life. He resides in Montmartre, rents a cottage in Vendeé, which he cycles to from the train station, and is dismissive of the French literary set. Little else is known of his private life.
The circumstances of Makine's departure from the Soviet Union are a mystery. So is the time he spent wandering through Africa, Asia and Australia.
"I'm writing a novel about it," he says, slamming shut that avenue of inquiry. "If I talked about it, you'd hear platitudes. In a novel, you can explain, understand yourself and what you have lived through. The novel serves that purpose too."
The battle scenes in A Hero's Daughter are so graphic that I assume Makine has been in at least one war - and he has the bearing of a military officer. It is the only personal question that he answers clearly.
"Yes. It was a useful personal experience, because it is very difficult to describe a war if you haven't seen one," he says. "People don't understand that you go deaf as soon as the shelling starts, the noise is so loud. You often read about 'the smell of blood' on battlefields. It smells like excrement, not blood, because people's guts are blown apart."
Judging from his age - 46 - I surmise that Makine served in Afghanistan. But instead of providing a straight answer, he refers again to his work: "I talked about Afghanistan in my second novel."
Nor will Makine say whether he had a grandmother like Charlotte Lemonnier, the old woman who introduces the Siberian boy to French culture in Le Testament Français.
"The important thing is that the character comes to life," he says. "There was an old woman who taught me French. That is an autobiographical fact."
To say whether she was a blood relative would, he claims, betray his oeuvre. "It's as if I said 'the heart is mine but the leg is not'. You end up doing an autopsy. It becomes a surgical act, dissection."
When asked why he writes, Makine replies: "It's a battle against time, against being forgotten, against death. It's a way of refusing to reduce man to his political and social being, to his mortal skeleton. I want to show the divine spark within us; show that in a few, exceptional moments, man can reach God."
• A Hero's Daughter is published by Sceptre; price £15.99