SOURCE: Taras, Ray. “A La Recherche du Pays Perdu: Andreï Makine's Russia.” East European Quarterly 34, no. 1 (March 2000): 51-79.

In the following essay, Taras presents critical summaries of Makine's five published novels and connects the works to “the political values central to his narrative of Russia.”

Andrei Makine is “Russian, but he is not a Russian writer.” This is because “Makine the Russian wrote a novel in French since he was not up to writing it in Russian, and we Russians can only make sense of it in its translation from the French.” Yet “he does not seem a foreigner to us and, putting my hand over my heart, it is clear he isn't a Frenchman.” Who is Makine, then? Tatyana Tolstoya concludes her Russian-language review of Makine by asserting that he is “a philological half-breed, a cultural hybrid, a linguistic chimera, a literary basilisk.”¹

Makine was born in...