An Evening with Claire

The lyrical first novel of youth and love by acclaimed modernist master Gaito Gazdanov, author of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf 'The Gazdanov revival... is nothing short of a literary event' TLS Two old friends meet nightly in Paris, after a separation of ten years. Trading conversational barbs and manoeuvring around submerged feelings, Claire and Koyla resume what fate interrupted. When their long-imagined romance at last becomes reality, Kolya is engulfed by memories of Russia, from a tragic and solitary childhood to the disorienting ordeal of civil war. As his haunting recollection takes shape, so too does a portrait of lost youth set against the trauma of a vanished homeland. Written when Gazdanov was just twenty-six, An Evening with Claire is the celebrated Russian master's debut novel, and appears here in an elegant new translation by Bryan Karetnyk. Melancholic and lyrical, it is a powerful distillation of the quintessential émigré experience: caught between two worlds, belonging to neither.

Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) joined the White Army aged just sixteen and fought in the Russian Civil War. Exiled in Paris from the 1920s onwards, he eventually became a nocturnal taxi-driver and gained prominence on the literary scene as a novelist, essayist, critic and short-story writer. The Spectre of Alexander Wolf, The Beggar and Other Stories, The Buddha's Return and The Flight are also published by Pushkin Press.