SOURCE: Tolstaya, Tatyana. “Love Story.” New York Review of Books 44, no. 18 (20 November 1997): 4, 6.

In the following review, Tolstaya provides an analysis of Dreams of My Russian Summers and attempts to correct what she believes are mistakes made by other reviewers.

Russian literature may take pride in a strange success: Andreï Makine, a Russian of indeterminate French origin, was awarded two of the most prestigious literary prizes for a book [Dreams of My Russian Summer] written in French, in France, and about France—a book which is nonetheless quintessentially Russian. In our time, it seems, you have to be born Russian, spend thirty years of your life in Russia, a country where cruelty and reverie form a paradoxical unity (this, of course, is a cliché, but, like all clichés, it's true) in order to hallucinate with such power and passion, in order to create a fabulous country—a nonexistent...