An Evening with Claire. Night Roads

The debut novel of Gaito Gazdanov, which became a real stroke of luck for a young writer! A portrait of an entire generation, conveyed through the memories of a Russian émigré about his childhood and adolescence.

At the age of twenty-six, when memories of the harsh years of the Civil War were still vivid in his mind and the life of an émigré in France was unsettled, Gaito Gazdanov wrote the novel “An Evening with Clair,” reviving the vanished world of his youth.

Nikolai was sixteen when he sided with the Whites in the Civil War and, as a result, was forced to flee the country. After wandering, he ends up in Paris, where he meets the charming Frenchwoman Claire, whom he fell in love with back in 1917 in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg. Every evening, Kolya visits Claire, hoping for feelings in return, and each conversation becomes a reason to remember childhood and his father and mother, friends, the lost homeland, and the Civil War.

“Night Roads,” like “An Evening with Clair,” is to a large extent autobiographical.

The Russian émigré, working at night driving a taxi, rides through the night boulevards and the most secluded streets of 1930s Paris, where “centuries-old, hopeless poverty spreads out.” At the same time, witness, participant, and narrator, he draws a complex and contradictory portrait of the city’s underside, inhabited by fallen nobles, drunk philosophers, the insane, and courtesans.