An Evening with Claire • Gaito Gazdanov

Gaito Gazdanov is, in my view, a true hidden gem of an author. His novel The Phantom of Alexander Wolf is quite understandably regarded as world literature, yet his name remained unknown to me for a long time. In 1919, at the age of sixteen, Gazdanov joined the White Army as an ordinary soldier during the Russian Civil War and served aboard an armored train. Four years later, he fled to Paris, where he scraped by doing menial jobs until he managed to become a taxi driver, thus earning a modest but steady income. By the late 1920s, he began publishing short stories and novels, and with his book An Evening with Claire he achieved his breakthrough in the émigré Russian literary scene. However, his royalties were not particularly lucrative, and Gazdanov seems to have been an author burdened by the circumstances of his time — one who received attention throughout his life but never the full recognition his works truly deserved.

An Evening with Claire is distinctly autobiographical, as Rosemarie Tietze reveals in her afterword. Kolya, the protagonist of the story, spends an evening at Claire’s and sinks into memories of his childhood and youth. He experiences a fate that, in many ways, mirrors that of the author himself. The depictions of the civil war, the armored train, and the family tragedies appear to be accounts of experiences suffered by both Gazdanov and his fictional alter ego Kolya.

There is always a deep melancholy that pervades Gazdanov’s writing, and his protagonist is someone who can scarcely distinguish between his inner life and external reality. As a result, he often appears emotionless, dispassionate, brooding, and detached. He observes his surroundings and the feelings of others with an almost clinical objectivity, which repeatedly reminded me of Camus’s The Stranger. Yet through Kolya’s reflections and inner monologue, it becomes clear that his emotions are simply expressed in a different form.

And remember — the greatest happiness on earth is the thought that you’ve at least understood a little of the life around you. You won’t really understand; it will only seem as though you do. And when, some time later, you recall it, you’ll see that you didn’t understand at all. And another year or two later, you’ll realize you were mistaken a second time. And so it goes on endlessly. (p. 119)

Gazdanov’s writing is deeply marked by the war he experienced firsthand, and the struggle to process it forms a central element of his work. With unsettling directness and in intricate yet fluid prose, he depicts details, fragments, and thoughts that often flow abruptly into one another. The result is a structure that at times feels loose, almost like a stream of consciousness that wanders between different themes. His eye for detail, his attention to small things, and his seeming inability to distinguish between the important and the trivial are characteristic of this book. Yet their significance soon becomes clear: for Gazdanov, the fusion of countless sensory impressions with inner emotional life — particularly sensual love — forms a kind of life philosophy. At least, that is how it appears when reading his works, and I find this emergent worldview both imaginative and a compelling counterpoint to theism.

Another recurring motif in his writing is death. I have never encountered another author who weaves together death, war, and destruction with love and sensuality so skillfully, fusing them in a way that reveals how inseparable they truly are.

But in every love there is also sadness […]. Sadness over its fulfillment and the approaching death of love if it is happy, and sadness over its impossibility and the loss of what never belonged to us if love remains unfulfilled. (p. 18)

This book was, for me, somewhat elusive. As I read, I could feel the sentences, thoughts, and flow of consciousness slipping through my mind like sand through one’s fingers — unless one clenches the hand into a fist to hold it tight. The sentences and musings are too similar to fleeting thoughts — unstructured, ephemeral. An Evening with Claire had, for my taste, too little structure and too much war; too much melancholy, too little love; too much death, too little life. In this balance, the book stands in stark contrast to The Phantom of Alexander Wolf. Yet his descriptions of sensory impressions — whether observing a few ants or writing about the sea — are outstanding, always finding beautiful, evocative words.

Waves beat against the slabs of the quay, and as they ebbed, they revealed green stones covered with moss and seaweed; it swayed weakly in the water, its drooping strands resembling willow branches. On the roadstead stood armored cruisers, and the eternal landscape of sea, masts, and white gulls lived and stirred as everywhere there had ever been a sea, a quay, and ships — and now the stone lines of houses rose, built upon yellow sands from which the ocean had long since withdrawn. (pp. 160–161)

Conclusion: Gazdanov is a true discovery — a unique and exceptional author with a distinct style. His sentences are winding and reflective, often resembling thoughts drifting through one’s own mind, and he masterfully intertwines themes of love and sensuality with those of death and sorrow. Artful, sometimes loosely structured, yet always powerful and infused with deep melancholy — one that envelops both the protagonists and the atmosphere itself, preserving the memory of war and transmitting it to the reader. Personally, I would have preferred fewer war memories, less death and emotional despair, and more emphasis on love and sensual connection — on his bond with Claire. How powerful such balance can be, Gazdanov demonstrates brilliantly in his novel The Phantom of Alexander Wolf.

Book information: An Evening with Claire • Gaito Gazdanov • Hanser Verlag • 192 pages • ISBN 9783446244719