On Gaito Gazdanov’s “An Evening with Claire”

ALONG THE STORIED HALLS of Russian literature, the decision of the identify Gaito Gazdanov had, for a lot of many years, elicited little greater than a faintly alliterated echo. With the publication of Gazdanov’s 1930 debut novel, An Night with Claire, Pushkin Press and translator Bryan Karetnyk beckon us nearer to that resonant echo, the voice of a haunting and haunted writer usually in comparison with Nabokov and Proust however actually dwelling in a room totally his personal. Who is that this Gazdanov?

He solutions in spades: bargeman, White Military soldier, Sorbonne scholar, taxi driver (by evening), author (in any respect hours). Born in St. Petersburg in 1903 to an upper-middle-class household of Ossetian origin, by 16 Gazdanov had suffered the lack of his father and two sisters. That’s, maybe not coincidentally, the identical age at which he enlisted within the White Military — his first of many colourful jobs. He fought within the Russian Civil Struggle, serving on the platform of a machine-gun provider, earlier than being pushed out of his homeland without end by Bolshevik forces. He went to Turkey, then Bulgaria (the place he resumed his schooling), and, lastly, to the nice Russian metropolis of Paris, the place at 20 he discovered himself alone, an émigré in a sea of émigrés.

One can think about how this basis of loss may induce a fixation on the theme of detachment, and it’s certainly a way of irrevocable and whole separation from the exterior world that makes Gazdanov’s even most lyrically stunning prose painful to bear. Detachment is the religious crux on the coronary heart of An Night with Claire. The novel, drawing closely on the writer’s personal life, is informed from the angle of Kolya, who — like Gazdanov on the time of writing — is a younger Russian émigré dwelling in Paris. We enter upon Kolya and the titular Claire, with whom he has reunited after a interval of 10 years. How they discovered one another once more is irrelevant; solely “the pale-blue clouds of her room, which till this night I’d have deemed unattainable, imaginary,” matter, the exact same clouds that “surrounded Claire’s alabaster physique, lined because it was in three locations with such shameful and agonizingly alluring hair.” So opens An Night with Claire, which actually stretches to embody years and years of Kolya’s evenings: he begins to recount, from the perch of his pale blue cloud, the occasions which result in this very second.

He takes us by cheery scenes of childhood (“I had no associates. […] [F]riendship — it implies that we’re nonetheless alive whereas others have died”), to first assembly Claire as a young person, glimpsing her within the stands of the “Eagle” gymnastics membership taking part in subject. He beneficial properties and loses her companionship, and spends the intervening years combating Bolsheviks, narrowly avoiding demise, and being haunted by Claire’s identify, Claire’s face, and even Claire’s calves, which float about in his visions remoted and ghostly, just like the little toes that obsess Alexander Pushkin’s narrator in Eugene Onegin.

Thus it’s the dream of Claire that goes bounding backward by the textual content. It’s no coincidence that the primary and final phrases of the novel are themselves “Claire”: she travels in each instructions from the purpose of their assembly as adolescents, spilling out into the previous and way forward for Kolya’s thoughts and of the reader’s personal. Isn’t that how reminiscence all the time performs us? Gazdanov understands the ability of the dream — or slightly, the dreamer — to solidify an in any other case fragmentary existence with a singular imaginative and prescient, a singular want. And so Claire, forming a whole and spherical O, turns nonetheless on its unhappy axis.

It was successful: by the top of 1930 the novel was checked out 14 occasions in three months from the Turgenev Russian library in Paris, and Gazdanov was hailed, together with Nabokov, as the best new expertise to emerge within the emigration. Reviewers instantly famous his indebtedness to Proust, an writer he later admitted to not but having learn. There are certainly sure overlaps — Gazdanov recounts, within the chapters specializing in Kolya’s childhood in pre-revolutionary Petersburg, studying the identical e book that Nabokov does in Communicate, Reminiscence (Les Malheurs de Sophie a couple of pauvre French lady who, greater than a century on, simply can’t catch a break). Plus, Proustians in every single place will delight within the mere size of Gazdanov’s sentences, his love of music, and the spell of “Mom’s frigid magic.” However the youthful Russian isn’t any flamboyant knight: count on no passages musing on his personal genius or grandiose makes an attempt to resurrect the previous. As an alternative he invitations us, by the use of easy gestures, to enter what Kolya designates “the awful landscapes of my fantasy.”

From childhood, Kolya suffers a definite break up between his interior and outer existence. This illness, skilled by many, is taken to extremes in our protagonist. What begins merely as an indifference to exterior occasions grows to resemble a deafening melancholy: “Typically I dreamt that I used to be useless, that I used to be dying, that I used to be about to die; I couldn’t cry out, and a well-known silence, which I had recognized so lengthy, descended round me; it could abruptly develop and alter, taking over a brand new, hitherto unknown that means: it was a warning to me.” The power of this warning sends younger Kolya additional into himself, in addition to into the corporate of assorted “doubtful characters.” At solely 13 and a half, he begins to frequent playing halls, and the best of all absurdist points of interest, the circus.

Nowhere is Kolya’s sense of separation so evident as in what is perhaps assumed the climax of the novel. Arriving at nearly precisely the midway level, the scene happens after a break in Kolya and Claire’s friendship. He has not glimpsed her in 4 months when one night, very late, he’s out strolling (returning house from the circus, after all):

I had, furthermore, the sudden feeling that one thing was about to occur — after which, fascinated with it, I noticed that I had lengthy since been conscious of footsteps following me. I rotated. Enswathed within the fox collar of her fur coat, as if in a cloud of gold, her eyes open broad and gazing at me by the slowly falling snow, Claire was strolling behind me.

Claire jovially declares that she is married and not a virgin; Kolya can neither converse nor comprehend the that means of her phrases. Once more, it’s the “acquainted silence” that descends and envelops the area between him and the current, between him and Claire. When she invitations him upstairs to her empty condo, he stays rooted to the spot, near-mute. Claire goes up with out saying goodbye, leaving Kolya to pay attention because the door closes: “Snow was nonetheless falling and disappearing into skinny air, and the whole lot that I had recognized and liked till then eddied and vanished with it.”

It’s such a quietly harrowing scene that one can nearly hear the footsteps, the door slam shut, and the hysteria of years which can be to move between their two factors of encounter. Claire shouldn’t be glimpsed within the flesh once more, solely in visions and within the distant future from which we have now already departed.

But Claire shouldn’t be all the time the only real focus of our consideration; actually, she stays absent for many of the narrative. An extended gallery of characters and faces rise in Kolya’s thoughts, instead of the one he desperately aches to see. There isn’t any rhapsodizing on her departure, no Claire disparue, solely the chilly wideness of a life abruptly emptied of its that means. Kolya continues to watch, sullenly, distantly, precisely: amid the violence of struggle, a fellow soldier is described as “a lonely animal whose presence is tolerated, disagreeable although it might be,” and an overheard dialog is in comparison with the bubbles that type on the floor of water when an individual is drowning.

Gazdanov — like his protagonist, like his snow — stays cool. As Kolya describes the void of his fantasies, studying Claire begins to really feel like inhabiting “some huge glass constructing wherein [one] had by no means lived” — it’s a lonely place. However the void is house to the irresistible picture of Claire and to these sentences, delicately recreated by Karetnyk, which wind round us with their lyricism and evocations of profound loss. Glass buildings and bubbles and snow and pale blue clouds: all of them linger as fragments of a dream sharp upon awakening.

The mysterious Gazdanov — that echo down the corridor — confronts us with the burden of reminiscence. An Night with Claire is a masterfully crafted e book that not solely deserves however calls for renewed consideration. As Kolya may attest, it’s unattainable merely to overlook it.

¤

Phoebe Roberts is originally from New York and graduated from Saint Ann’s School. She is currently in her final year of Russian studies at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.