num_pages: 244
description: Dreams of My Russian Summers, tells the poignant story of a boy growing up amid the harsh realities of Soviet life in the 1960s and '70s, and of his extraordinary love for an elegant Frenchwoman, Charlotte Lemonnier, who is his grandmother. Every summer he visits his grandmother in a dusty village overlooking the vast steppes. Here, during the warm evenings, they sit on Charlotte's narrow, flower-covered bacony and listen to tales from another time, another place: Paris at the turn of the century. She who used to see Proust playing tennis in Neuilly captivates the children with stories of Tsar Nicholas's visit to Paris in 1896, of the great Paris flood of 1910, of the death of French president Felix Faure in the arms of his mistress. But from Charlotte the boy also learns of a Russia he has never known, of famine and misery, of brutal injustice, of the hopeless chaos of war. He follows her as she travels by foot from Moscow half the way to Siberia; suffers with her as she tells of her husband - his grandfather - a victim of Stalin's purges; shudders as she describes her own capture by bandits, who brutalize her and left her for dead. Could all this pain and suffering really have happened to his gentle, beloved Charlotte? Mesmerized, the boy weaves Charlotte's stories into his own secret universe of memory and dream. Yet, despite all the deprivations and injustices of the Soviet world, he like many Russians still feels a strong affinity with and "an indestructible love" for his homeland.
language: English
title: Dreams Of My Russian Summers
titlecomplete: Dreams Of My Russian Summers
genres: France, Historical, Russia, Novels, Russian Literature, Historical Fiction, Literature, French Literature, Fiction, Literary Fiction
ratings_count: 3724
places: France, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Paris, Russia, Moscow, Siberia
series: Dreams of My Russian Summers
awards: awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Prix Goncourt, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Prix Médicis, awardedAt: 788947200000
name: Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, awardedAt: 852105600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Fiction, awardedAt: 883641600000
name: Scott Moncrieff Prize
category: Geoffrey Strachan
publisher: Touchstone