A Woman Loved
A Novel
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The fascinating story of a young Russian filmmaker's attempts to portray Catherine the Great, before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union
Catherine the Great's life seems to have been made for the cinema—her rise to power; her reportedly countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades; the episodes of betrayal, revenge, and even murder—there's no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray Catherine's essential, emotional truth, her real life beyond the rumors and façade. His first screenplay just barely makes it past the Soviet film board and is assigned to a talented director, but the resulting film fails to avoid the usual clichés. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, as he struggles to find a place for himself in the new order, Oleg agrees to work with an old friend on a television series that becomes a quick success—as well as increasingly lurid, a far cry from his original vision. He continues to seek the real Catherine elsewhere.
With A Woman Loved, Andreï Makine delivers a sweeping novel about the uses of art, the absurdity of history, and the overriding power of human love, if only it can be uncovered and allowed to flourish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) captivates in this tale of a Russian screenwriter's dogged pursuit to capture the essence of an outsized empress, Catherine the Great. The novel opens in 1980 when, in between shifts at a slaughterhouse, Oleg Erdmann is working on a screenplay about the enlightened, insatiable despot who plotted to have her husband murdered by her lovers, annexed Crimea, corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, and "contrived to organize her sexual life like a government department." The young man's artistic fascination with the empress, with whom he shares German origins, carries over into his romantic life. Once the movie starts filming, he takes up with the actress playing the young Catherine, then falls in love with the East German actress cast to play the older version. Though Erdmann acknowledges the supreme theatricality of Catherine's reign, he also searches for, and finds, some Rosebud-like revelations to combat the caricature of her as a "nymphomaniac regicide." At times Makine hammers home his themes a little too insistently, but the novel wonderfully captures the challenges and betrayals of biographical art as it strives to animate figures from the "grotesque vaudeville" of history.
