Requiem for a Lost Empire: A Novel

In this remarkable novel, which spans eighty years of the twentieth century, Andreï Makine describes, beautifully but unsparingly, the almost uninterrupted succession of violence, misery, and horror that has been visited on the Russian people since the October Revolution of 1917. For those quick to forget, or too young to remember, he paints a graphic portrait of those years in a three-generational novel that is as moving as it is revealing.

A young Russian army doctor is sent to distant sho...