It has often been said that literature is the primary art form in Russia, yet writers’ envious admiration for the cinema goes back at least to the 1910s. Mandelstam, Nabokov, Mayakovsky and Joseph Brodsky are examples, while the philosophical reflections in literary scholar Lidia Ginzburg’s diary were leavened by her love of Charlie Chaplin. Now the Franco-Russian writer Andreï Makine honours this heritage with A Woman Loved, which, translated by Geoffrey Strachan, depicts the quest by fledgling director Oleg Erdmann to create a biopic about Catherine the Great (pictured) in the apparently unpromising setting of Brezhnev’s Russia.
Oleg, caught between life among drunken neighbours in his horizontal tenement and a day job in the Leningrad abattoir, is the type of melancholic fantasist in Russian literature that you’ll find as far back as Pushkin and Gogol. When his former teacher and patron, Bassov, dies, Oleg’s slender chances of getting anywhere with his movie become skeletal.
A few years later, though, the state film studios disintegrate. Fortune, in the form of the new world of TV, comes Oleg’s way. He creates another Catherine for an avid audience, while the world he has known collapses.
Makine’s premise has basis in reality. During the 1980s and 90s, tell‑all historical biopics surged to popularity. Elem Klimov’s earlier Agony (1975) sensationally evoked the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. So Oleg’s film portraying Catherine as a nymphomaniac in a powdered wig is plausible.
More problematic is the way in which the world of cinema and TV is boiled down to the cliches of endless takes and suited men in the censorship authority. Makine’s vision of film-making is limited to the idea that crews and actors drink a lot (fair enough) and are euphoric when the day’s work is at an end (“Kozin said I was brilliant!”).
The Leningrad studio, with its enormous sets and pillared halls, its intricate hierarchy of directors, editors, cameramen and technicians, becomes a nameless no-place. Equally, film language is reduced to the intercut – “Catherine gives herself to Grigory Orlov (a dull reflection in a mirror) and, reflected in another mirror, Peter III, with his throat crushed” – a technique also used to structure Makine’s novel. No doubt Makine mainly intended to evoke the truism of cinema as the quintessential art of deceit and evanescence (as in Paul Auster’s The Book of Illusions). There is otherwise no reason why Oleg should be a director, rather than, say, an aspiring writer. For her part, the empress is another of the suggestive female figures that haunt Makine’s earlier writings – The Crime of Olga Arbyelina say, or Dreams of My Russian Summer. However, a larger ambition emerges. Makine hopes his transformation of Catherine, from late Soviet-era tormented vamp to a sexual athlete in the 1990s played by a veteran porn star, will reflect the dislocations of an entire society.
There is a fine line, though, between the evocation of trash culture and the absorption of its values. With dread one learns, “There is a horse in the screenplay”. Worse, the pneumatic couplings that leave the fictional Catherine “sated with love”. Oleg’s own girlfriends, with their “girlish pouts” and “pliant” shapeliness, are descriptively underpowered.
A Woman Loved returns repeatedly to the figure of the all-powerful empress who could find sexual dalliance but not fulfilment. Oleg, too, deserts his original inspiration – “a woman walking beside tall trees, white with the first snow” – with wretched results. Makine abandons lyricism for epochal ambition, moving from personal sketches to the fate of the entire socialist bloc.
Respite from shaky antiquarianism and canned-cocktail effervescence is welcome, but rare. Oleg’s suburban childhood, in a crag-like building where his father obsessively builds a scale model of a palace, or the serenity that he finally discovers with a middle-aged actor from Berlin, lend a sense of inwardness and reflection that might have developed into a more satisfying exercise in the art of fiction.
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