Description

Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Kolya resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes shape, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland.

Written when Gazdanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master’s debut novel. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential emigre experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Publisher Review

- "The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event"--TLS - "Pushkin Press is to be congratulated on reviving an author who is as relevant now as ever"--Spectator - "A fascinating writer"--Irish Times - "Gazdanov's work is the perfect fusion of the Russian tradition and French innovation"--London Review of Books