Gaito Gazdanov: An Evening with Claire

An Evening with Claire

by Gaito Gazdanov

translated by Bryan Karetnyk

“But Claire is French,” I suddenly recalled, “and if this is so, then what was all that constant, intense sorrow about snow and green plains for, all that sorrow for those many lives I had lived in a country now hidden from me behind a fiery curtain?” I began to dream of meeting Claire in Paris, where she had been born, and where she would undoubtedly return.  Before my eyes I saw France, Claire’s native land, and Paris, and the place de la Concorde; and the square seemed different to me than the one I had seen depicted on postcards. 

___________________________________________________________________

Born in Saint Petersburg, Gaito Gazdanov (1903 - 1971) left Russia for Paris in 1920, where he started working for Renault. At the time he also wrote short stories about the immigrant experience. This first phase of his authorial career culminated in his first novel or, rather, novella, An Evening with Claire, a work from 1929 which is still considered one of the classics of Russian emigré literature.

It feels natural to consider this an autobiographical work. Its narrator, Kolya, a Russian based in Paris, spends his evenings with Claire, an old flame with whom he was besotted as a young man ten years before.  His meetings with Claire, who is now married, set off a train of memories of his childhood and youth, of his family, friends and schoolmates. 

Kolya’s (and Gazdanov’s) sense of displacement as an immigrant is mirrored in the style of writing which seems to hover on the cusp of modernism, unsure whether to abandon itself to the lush Romanticism of a past age, or to embrace a more contemporary stream-of-consciousness approach.  Kolya’s lyrical voice is well captured in the translation prepared by the indefatigable Bryan Karetnyk, who is doing so much to bring lesser-known classics of Russian literature to the English-speaking public.

Gazdanov looking very dapper...

If I am disappointed with the novel it is only because it was not the love story which I was expecting after reading the blurbs (and which I was in the mood for).  The eponymous Claire is, ultimately, not a character we ever come to know intimately.  She remains primarily, if not exclusively, a symbol of the emigré experience, her unattainability seemingly inseparable from her Frenchness:

I could distinguish between simple unknowns and strangers par excellence, a type that existed in my imagination like that of a foreigner - which is to say, a person not only of different nationality, but who belonged to a different world, one that was inaccessible to me. Perhaps my feelings were in part because she was French and a foreigner.  Although she spoke Russian with perfect fluency and accuracy and understood everything down to the meaning of folk sayings, there remained in her a certain charm that a Russian girl would never have had...

Like the music of Stravinsky’s French years, or the 1920s Parisian streetscapes of Konstantin Korovin,  Gazdanov’s An Evening with Claire is not only a fine work in its own right, but is also an important expression of a particular community at an important juncture in 20^th Century history.

Kindle Edition, Pushkin Press

Expected publication: October 19th 2021 (first published 1930)

Konstantin Korovin: "Moonlit Night: Paris" (1929)