Less well known today is another wonderful Paris Russian writer, Gaito Gazdanov. It’s his work that has really shaped how I see the White Russians of Paris – especially his novel Night Roads, which gives an autobiographical account of what it was to be an angry young man from the Russian diaspora driving a taxi by night and struggling to become a writer. That was my starting point for imagining my male lead, Jean.
My interest isn’t only from books. My first Russian teacher, Nina Wilsdon, née Brodyanskaya (another name that crops up in this story), was from one of these Paris émigré families. And, while learning Russian at university, I had a taste of the life myself when I spent five months in a White Russian school-turned-monastery-turned-language centre at Meudon, just outside Paris.
So perhaps my fascination grew out of the stories I heard in all these classrooms, too.
At any rate, I still can’t think of anything braver than the sheer cussedness of those early twentieth-century exiles, people so brutally expelled from their past and so incredibly down on their luck, who just wouldn’t give up trying to find a future.
Credits
Cover design by Lisa Bettencourt
Cover photograph: Nina Masic / Trevillion Images
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The White Russian
Copyright © 2014 by Vanorissima.
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EPUB Edition November 2014 ISBN 9781443438681
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