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Overview
The fascinating story of a young Russian filmmaker's attempts to portray Catherine the Great, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union
Catherine the Great's life seems to have been made for the cinema—her rise to power; her reportedly countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades; the episodes of betrayal, revenge, and even murder—there's no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray Catherine's essential, emotional truth, her real life beyond the rumors and façade. His first screenplay just barely makes it past the Soviet film board and is assigned to a talented director, but the resulting film fails to avoid the usual clichés. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as he struggles to find a place for himself in the new order, Oleg agrees to work with an old friend on a television series that becomes a quick success—as well as increasingly lurid, a far cry from his original vision. He continues to seek the real Catherine elsewhere.
With A Woman Loved, Andreï Makine delivers a sweeping novel about the uses of art, the absurdity of history, and the overriding power of human love, if only it can be uncovered and allowed to flourish.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555973421 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 08/04/2015 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Andreï Makine was born in 1957 in Siberia and has lived in France for more than twenty years. His previous novels include Dreams of My Russian Summers and The Life of an Unknown Man.
Geoffrey Strachan is an award-winning translator.
Read an Excerpt
A Woman Loved
A Novel
By Andrei Makine, Geoffrey Strachan
Graywolf Press
Copyright © 2013 Editions de SeuilAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-55597-342-1
CHAPTER 1
I
The great mirror falls like a sash window. The woman who has just pressed the lever smiles: always a tense moment. What if the frame hit the floor with a crash and the glass shattered? But there is padding at the point of contact, and now the world is cut in two. On this side a white-and-gold salon. On the other, hidden by the mirror, a vaulted recess, a candle, a naked man breathing heavily ...
A chamberlain sidles into the salon. "Majesty, the chancellor is here." The woman is already seated at a desk, pen in hand. Beneath her long dress, her body is sated with love. "Ask him to come in!"
She gets up to greet an elderly man with watery eyes, whose frame is too massive for those slender calves in their white stockings.
"Prince, I hope you've come to report that order has been restored in the governance of Kazan ..."
The audience ended she rushes over to the lever. The mirror rises to reveal the alcove ... The man whose embrace she had interrupted had a powerful, scarred body. The new secret guest is svelte; his mouth forms a sweetly petulant line ... He is uttering a cry of pleasure at the moment when the chamberlain coughs outside the door before announcing another visitor. The woman breaks free, adjusts her dress, arranges her hair. The mirror falls, hiding the curve of the recess ...
"His Excellency, the English ambassador, Sir Robert Gunning."
She crosses to an armchair where a cat lies sleeping, drives it away with a swift caress.
"Come and sit by the fire, Your Excellency. You will not be used to our Russian hoarfrosts ..."
The Englishman leaves. The mirror rises again. The lover now has tight curls, blond like an albino, with thick lips. At the court he is known as "the White Negro." The woman gives herself to him with expert deftness ... The man is on the brink of orgasm when there is a discreet cough in the antechamber.
"Majesty, Field Marshal Suvorov."
"Dear Alexander Vassilievich! They tell me the sultan is in retreat from our victorious armies. So, when shall we lay siege to Constantinople?"
The alcove opens up. An almost timid lover. It feels to the woman as if she were possessing him, and at the same time teaching him how to possess her ...
"His Excellency, the French ambassador, Monsieur de Breteuil!"
She remains seated with an indifferent air and, as she allows the man to approach her, fiddles with a pinch of snuff.
"So, Monsieur le Baron, it seems your court persists in thinking my hatred does you more honor than my friendship?"
The mirror rises: a very young lover weeps, stammering out grievances, then calms down, like a comforted child.
"Majesty, His Majesty, the King of Sweden!"
As she talks with the king the salt from her lover's tears is still on the woman's lips ...
"Majesty, Monsieur Diderot!"
"Dear friend! You philosophers merely work on paper, which is long-suffering. While I, poor empress, work on human skin, which is a good deal more irritable and ticklish ..."
Diderot gets carried away, gesticulates, makes prophetic pronouncements, departs.
The woman makes the mirror rise once more. Her lover is laughing. "Did he beat you black and blue again, that lout of a Frenchman?" She presses against him, smothers his laughter with a kiss. "No. I take refuge behind a little table now ..."
"The Right Honorable, the Count of Cagliostro!"
"Great Tsarina! I have had this alloy smelted deep within the fire-vomiting bowels of Vesuvius. It possesses rejuvenating virtues ..."
The mirror rises, descends, rises again ... The president of the Academy, Princess Dashkova. Lever pressed. Giacomo Casanova, agent of the Inquisition. Lever pressed. Prince Paul, her unloved son. Lever pressed. Count Bobrinsky, her illegitimate son. Lever pressed. The marquis d'Ormesson. Lever pressed. The comte de Saint-Germain. Lever pressed.
Oleg Erdmann turns a pocket mirror over and over in his hand. The back is made of black leather: the dark alcove. The glass: the salon where the empress receives visitors.
The reflection cuts into segments the cramped room where he lives: a sofa, an old wardrobe, shelves groaning under the weight of books. On the worktable a typewriter's metallic grin. Three leaves of paper, with sheets of carbon paper between them — the text of his ...
"Of my utter madness," he says to himself, anticipating the judgments that will be passed on his screenplay. The worst would be simple contempt. "So, young man, you've been browsing through a few pamplets about the life of Catherine the Second, have you?"
"Well, more than any of you ever have!" Oleg whispers defiantly, challenging the scorn of an imaginary jury. He has read and made notes on everything. He knows the empress's life better than ... better than he knows his own! The notion astounds him. But it's true, he no longer knows what he was doing on, say, March 22, 1980. Nor on the day before, nor the day after. These dates, still so recent, have been completely erased. It's easier to reconstruct the empress's life at two centuries' distance.
So, what is she doing, already in the early scenes? Well, of course! Taking snuff. With her left hand, the other is reserved for people to kiss ... And then there's that occasional table she puts between herself and Diderot. When he gets excited the philosopher starts thumping her on the knees. "I'm covered in bruises," she complains with a laugh ... Breteuil? Catherine has little time for him, as for most of the French diplomats. In 1762 she asks him to finance the coup d'état that is being prepared. Versailles refuses. London foots the bill. Result: a quarrel with France, juicy contracts for England ... One of the visitors to the alcove is "Scarface" — Aleksey Orlov, as reckless as his brother, Grigory, the current lover. One night, taking advantage of his resemblance to Grigory, Aleksey manages to slip into the young tsarina's bed. The darkness facilitates the fraud. At the height of their transports, Catherine comes across the scars on the man's face ... And Cagliostro? He dupes the simple souls of St. Petersburg, converses with spirits, offers elixirs of youth ... Catherine banishes him, she has no love of charlatans or Freemasons. Or maybe she is jealous of his wife, the ravishing Seraphina? The Italian departs in the style of a true magician: at midnight twelve carriages ride out through each of the city's twelve gates. Each of them contains one Cagliostro and one Seraphina. And in the travelers' register, at every one of the barriers, the sorcerer's signature ... Who else? Count Bobrinsky, the son of Catherine and Grigory Orlov. The child is born just before the coup d'état. He must be hidden from the tsar. Wrapped in a beaver fur (bobr is the Russian for "beaver"), he is spirited away to safety ... The comte de SaintGermain, the adventurer, arrives in Russia in the spring of 1762. To take part in the plot? The marquis d'Ormesson is one of the rare Frenchmen to find favor in the empress's eyes, is he not the cousin of Louis-François d'Ormesson, who opposed the opening of the Estates General in France in 1789, predicting catastrophe? When Giacomo Casanova comes to Russia he buys himself a female serf, nicknames her "Zaire," and, wonder of wonders! he falls for her. While at the same time cheating on her with a handsome army officer, Lunin, much to Catherine's amusement. She prefers Giacomo's brother, Francesco, the painter whose brush immortalizes Potemkin's victories ... And then there is her unloved son, Paul! A sickly child who changes the cards on the place mats before dinner so he can be seated next to his mother ... A mother who signs peace treaties, receives Diderot, corresponds with Voltaire, defeats the Turks (which delights the author of Candide). And who, at intervals, walks over to the great mirror and presses a lever ...
"That's going to make it like a Brazilian soap opera," one of his fellow students teased him one day. "A TV series in three hundred and a half episodes." Confused, Oleg faltered: "Why 'and a half'?" The other burst out laughing. "Well, you'll need half an hour at least just to list all of Katie's lovers!"
Mockery did nothing to alter his resolve. Oleg wanted to know everything about Catherine: how she spent her time (she worked fifteen hours a day), how she dressed — very simply — her restrained tastes in food, her fads (the snuff she took, her intensely strong coffee). He knew her political views, what she read, the personalities of the people she corresponded with, her carnal cravings (the "uterine rage" derided by so many biographers), her custom of rubbing her face with ice every morning, her passion for the theater, her preference for riding astride a horse rather than sidesaddle ...
Yes, everything about Catherine. Except that often this "everything" seemed strangely incomplete.
Perhaps the key to the enigma could be found in the naive observation that this ultracerebral woman from time to time let slip: "The real problem in my life is that my heart cannot survive for a single moment without love ..."
"Were you asleep or what? I rang ten times! It was your boozy neighbor who let me in ... Aha, I see our scriptwriter's been writing about his flighty Katie. May I read your masterpiece? Come on, wake up, Erdmann! Give me a kiss! Make me a coffee, you mummified zombie ...!"
Oleg smiles through a fog of images: a white-and-gold salon, a mirror going up, a vaulted alcove ... Lessya's lips are freezing cold. He comes back to the present: a bedroom in a communal apartment, fifteen occupants housed in seven rooms, a shared kitchen, a single bathroom. A daily hell, yet one where you can be happy (in his parents' time they used to say: "If you're in hell, enjoy the fire ..."). He's happy to feel the snow on his girlfriend's coat as she hands it to him, the warmth of the body that briefly squeezes against him. Happy to see Lessya settling down amid the disorder and, by her presence, creating harmony within it. Happy to make his way along the endless corridor where the exhalations of lives crammed together hang in the air, and to find himself in the kitchen — bliss, he is alone! And to slide his coffeepot onto the stove that is laden with heavy saucepans full of family soups. A transom is open — the chill air sharpens the scent of roasted beans. He's giddy with happiness: waiting for him at the other end of the communal labyrinth is a woman he loves ...
Still in the corridor he peers into his room: Lessya is reading, stretched out on the sofa. With a girlish pout she puffs away a lock of hair tickling her cheek ... He has recently taken to noticing details he would never have remarked on but for his obsessive scrutiny of Catherine the Great's life. The woman historians call "the Russian Messalina" but who, for Oleg, is gradually turning back into a child of long ago — a little German princess watching the snow as it falls on the Baltic ...
He longs to tell Lessya how picturing that forgotten child makes it possible to imagine another way of living. And loving ...
"Erdmann, undo your bootlaces. You're going to need a rope!"
Lessya is being melodramatic: this comes with the territory in their world of young filmmakers. But he gasps as if he had been hit in the solar plexus.
"No, it's the truth. You'd better go hang yourself! Your screenplay's clinically insane. And it's not even funny! Look at me: am I laughing? No. I'm frankly confused. This mirror, this alcove, what's all that about? Can you picture the audience's faces? They're not going to be laughing either ..."
Oleg hands Lessya a cup and tries to remain calm.
"Look, it's not a script that's meant to be played for laughs ..."
"Excuse me? You're not going to tell me this grotesque vaudeville is meant to be taken seriously?"
"Yes, I am. This is just the way I see history ..." Still clowning, Lessya chokes on her coffee. Oleg feels too weak to fight back ...
"How many pages have you read, Lessya? Eleven? You'll see. Later on, it all falls into place. Chronologically, biographically ... Catherine's childhood in Germany, her arrival in Russia, where she's going to marry the future Peter the Third. She'll take lovers and when her husband comes to the throne, her lovers'll kill him. Then she'll reign, introduce reforms, defeat the sultan, seduce French philosophers ... Don't worry. All the historical details will be accurate, down to the width of the crinolines ... Now, wait a minute. You're not going, are you?"
His voice lurches into a plea and he realizes that to hold on to Lessya he would even be prepared to write a platitudinous biopic: childhood, youth, illustrious reign ...
"Yes, I am. There's going to be a party at Zyamtsev's. He's just been given the green light to make his film. And as he's not your best buddy ... Besides, you've got work to do. You've got a good story line! First of all young Catherine in her dreary little principality back in smalltime Germany and then, hey!, we see her at the head of an empire! It'll be a great rags-to-riches movie. But there's just one thing. Promise me you'll scrap the first eleven pages ..."
Lessya grabs the little pocket mirror lying beside the typewriter, and starts putting on lipstick.
He goes with her to the entrance hall. In the kitchen a woman is sitting on a stool, her gaze lost amid the swirl of snowflakes outside the dark window. "The boozer," whispers Lessya, with a wink at Oleg.
The door bangs shut, he goes back past the kitchen, greets the woman: "Hi there, Zoya. Thank you for opening the door to my friend just now ..." The woman nods, lost in a dream. She has a fine face, aged by weariness and, doubtless, by drink ... He has never seen anyone come to call on her. From time to time Zoya's ancient kettle appears on the stove, a utensil probably dating back to the time of the Second World War.
Once more in his room Oleg gathers up the scattered sheets, the pages Lessya advises him to scrap: the mirror going up, the alcove revealed, the mirror coming down ... The shadowy figures come and go, every one of them, for Catherine, epitomizing the impossibility of being loved.
That night insomnia pays him a visit, a familiar caller. Lessya had referred to his screenplay as "a grotesque vaudeville." But is life truly anything else?
A year before he had submitted the idea for this film to his teacher — his master — Lev Bassov. The old man listened to him with a sympathetic expression, then began addressing him like a convalescent who needs gentle handling. "Look, it's a tough subject ... For a lot of reasons: both practical, because it would cost a fortune (costumes, battle scenes ...) and political, well, I don't need to spell those out. What's more, there's enough material here for several full-length films. There's the coup d'état in 1762, Catherine's untimely pregnancy, the murder of the tsar. And what about Potemkin? A character like that's going to act everyone else off the screen. And Pugachev and the peasant uprising? It's true Pushkin wrote a pretty brief short story about it, well a narrative writer can just say — 'Pugachev ordered the attack and the city fell.' But you try filming it with four hundred extras! And the trickiest thing, by the way, is not the need to compress time. No, it's the human mystery. Her son Paul: who is he really? An idiot who loves all things German and whom his mother detests? Or a tragic individual destroyed by this hatred? No, if you do a complete A to Z of Catherine you'll get just another costume picture. Or maybe a cartoon film. You're not thinking of going into animation, are you?"
The idea had made them both laugh and Oleg promised not to follow in Disney's footsteps. He began reading, piling up the mountains of books that were taking over his living space. Catherine insinuated herself into every corner of his thoughts and, at night, into his dreams. The air was impregnated with the aroma of "the Catherine century," as the Russians call it, the fragrant and bitter scent of old leather bindings ... His research became painful to him, his most private moments were invaded by hundreds of historical figures, tormented, extreme beings, characters with larger-than-life destinies. And all these had to be moved deftly from one scene to the next, in a film of an hour and forty minutes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Woman Loved by Andrei Makine, Geoffrey Strachan. Copyright © 2013 Editions de Seuil. Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
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