Beginning Andreï Makine’s novel A Woman Loved, we might briefly imagine that we have been plunged into the midst of a racy historical drama, a bodice ripper about the Empress Catherine of Russia, and her many lovers. A mirror keeps rising and lowering to show us her boudoir: a theatrical device, we may think, until we realize that it actually is a theatrical device.
The amours of the Russian empress are not only a matter of history but also the stuff of fantasy, specifically a fantasy that a screenwriter named Oleg Erdmann is trying to turn into a script for a film that is worth filming and that can be filmed—given the cultural climate in which he lives. This is the pre-glasnost Soviet Union, where the censors decide about art, and where the artists who run afoul of them can be in serious danger.
As Oleg wrestles with the complexities of the empress’s long and, as they say, colorful career, he also tries to figure out what sort of person she was and how to structure what he wants to say—and what can be said, on film. Meanwhile the world around him could hardly be less like the world he is describing, unless we include the often nonsensical and capricious dictates of government, of political and personal power, the inequities and abuses that persist from era to era. The empress lived in lavish style, while Oleg is sharing a Leningrad communal apartment with an increasingly disaffected girlfriend and several other unfortunate citizens. To pay the rent for this paradise he has a job moving carcasses of meat in a slaughterhouse.
Andreï Makine was born and raised in Russia, but lives in France and writes in French. So it could be said that he brings a Franco-Russian perspective to a universal subject: a soul in torment. Predictably, nothing goes quite right for Oleg as he attempts to bring his vision to the screen. Less predictably, the society in which he lives changes dramatically, and things began to go very right—or are they merely going wrong in a different direction?
Deftly translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan, Makine’s novel moves so rapidly, and so amusingly, that only gradually do we realize how many complex and weighty themes Makine has chosen to address. Among the most interesting of these is the question of why artists are attracted to the subjects that engage them, why a writer (a screenwriter, in this case) is drawn to a particular character and that character’s life—out of the endless number of subjects and lives that could have been chosen. As the novel progresses, we come to understand that Oleg’s interest in the Empress Catherine goes deeper and is more complicated than we—and even he—have realized: that his fascination with the Russian ruler reflects his own most profound feelings about his origins, his heritage, his childhood.
Makine is also very good on the ways in which life informs art, and vice versa; how the victories and failures of Oleg’s professional and romantic career change his views on the empress’s reign and her love affairs. “Once more he is struck to notice how easily life and performance blend into one another, creating an intermediary world in which everyone is acting out the role of themselves, while at the same time cribbing from his fellow human beings.”
In the latter sections of the novel, Communism has fallen; the dictator and the Politburo have been replaced by the oligarch and the gangster. “Political parties proliferated, the economy was privatized, frontiers were opened.” Figures from Oleg’s former existence reappear with new jobs and in new guises. Once more Oleg is given a chance to bring Catherine’s life to the screen—this time to the small screen, in the form of a sensational and exploitative television series—and the new set of difficulties and challenges he faces mirror the problems besetting the larger society. The dilemmas that Oleg has been confronting all along, among them the question of what constitutes historical truth, take on a wholly new and unexpected dimension. And his new understanding of the nature of love answers at least some of the mysteries that have confounded him all along.
What’s remarkable is how much depth, how much complication—and how much history—Makine has packed into a novel about a man who wants only to make a film about a famous and notorious woman who claimed for herself the freedoms that so puzzle, intrigue—and elude—her smart, sympathetic, beleaguered cinematic biographer. And what stays with us is the intelligence and the depth of feeling with which Makine has portrayed the victories and compromises that sustain the unlikely and inspiring union of art, life, and love.
Francine Prose