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Erzsébet Harmath
In his autobiographical novel "Le testament français" (Dreams of My Russian Summers), Andrei Makine creates a personal universe for himself: a sort of space in which poetic imagination and reality meet and merge. Thus the work of the French writer, who emigrated from Russia to France in the late 80s, could be considered as a meeting point of two different cultures, namely Russian and French. Being the member of these two cultures, the hero-narrator ends up living in a multidimensional world at the meeting point of heterogeneous spaces. What creates this world of fiction, which is at least twice compound, is the cultural memory, a concept that I take in its Jan Assmanien sense. In my article I intend to explore how this multiple space, which is built up under the influence of cultural memory, function as a par excellence space and time of fiction. Makine is one of the writers who came from somewhere else (ailleurs), yet this somewhere else is no longer a foreign universe. On the contrary, it refers to a virtual world which we can unfold like a map.
This other world is not a merely imagined world, this is not a childish fantasy, but a world recreated through narratives told by Charlotte about the France of the Belle Epoque at the beginning of the century. This way, an entire universe, like a reconstituted Atlantis, is gradually taking shape as an image. This France-Atlantis is renewed every summer. It is not a simple story, but a fairy tale which can always be told, corrected and innovated. The narrator of the Dreams of My Russian Summers can duplicate his monotonous Russian universe due to cultural memory. He manages to do so with the help of rite and feast which reorganize his vacation days into ordinary days and holidays, as well as with the help of the small family community and the repeating return of the narratives and literary readings which render the imaginary spatial journey between France and Russia possible.
The fictitious journey becomes a reality a few years later, when the child grows adolescent and decides to emigrate to the country of his dreams. This very journey will cause the narrator´s disappointment.
The movement is not only a sign of the actually accomplished trip leading from Saranza to Paris, but an essential characteristic of a fictitious journey by Aiôn in this imaginary world with the hero-narrator Aliocha at the center. This imaginary world reveals to be the par excellence place of a transmutation enabling the temporal and geographical distance between Russia and France to sublimate.
