The Crime of Olga Arbyelina Andrei Makine Paperback $13.00 Read more...

INTRODUCTION

Set in the small French town of Villiers-la-Foret in 1947, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina appears at first to be a murder mystery. After the eerie, Poe-like prologue, the novel begins with the discovery of a dead body stretched out beside the apparent murderer on the bank of a river. The inhabitants of Villiers-la-Foret immediately begin to shape a story around the scene:

"Fascinated, abnormally perceptive, the townspeople held forth about the crime, invented new theories about it, and were critical of the inquiry that was making no headway." (p. 14)

The man with his head bashed in and the woman with disheveled hair and bare breasts suggest to them a love affair gone bad, however improbable such a relationship might seem between a beautiful princess and a former horse-butcher.

We expect the rest of the novel to unravel this shocking and incongruous scene, as in a conventional murder mystery. For, like the townspeople, we as readers have also begun to invent theories about what has happened. But there has been no murder, no love affair, no crime—in the conventional sense of the term—to solve. The dead man, Golets, hardly figures in the story until he attempts to use his knowledge of Olga's secret to seduce her. The real story of The Crime of Olga Arbyelina is far more complex—and far more unsettling and surprising—than the stock narratives townspeople and readers alike use to explain the predicaments of others.

In revealing how Olga ends up on that riverbank, Andrei Makine takes us inside the mind of his heroine and explores, with startling and vivid precision, her long, strange descent into madness. And it is this exploration that makes the novel a triumph. Like Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich, which describes the process of dying so convincingly one wonders how Tolstoy could have done it without having died himself, The Crime of Olga Arbyelina is a tour de force of imaginative empathy, showing us with harrowing exactitude what the world looks and feels like to a woman who is losing her mind. By telling the story from Olga's point of view, Makine is able to recreate the claustrophobic, disoriented, shimmering intensity of insanity:

"Tilting her head back, she plunged in among the stars for a long time. A silent, unflagging wind descended from these nocturnal depths. She staggered, suddenly exalted, her eyes looked around for support. The shadow of the wood, the dark reflection of the water, the dim fields on the opposite bank. The sky from which spilled the powerful and constant wind. All this lived, breathed, and seemed to see her, to be focusing some kind of infinite gaze upon her. A gaze that understood everything but did not judge."(p. 195)

As Olga loses contact with ordinary consciousness and the boundaries of the self dissolve, she experiences moments of transcendent rapture with nature. But she also experiences delusions, piercingly vivid sensations, painful memories. And in her unstable mental state, she allows herself to be drugged and sexually violated by her hemophiliac son. These scenes would be shocking in any narrative mode, but their unsettling force is heightened by seeing them only through Olga's eyes—the opening door, the overcoat, the faint white nakedness of her son's body, the uncertainty of what is happening, and then the terrifying moment when the word forces itself upon her: "incest." We never learn what the son is thinking or what has driven him to such a violation. That Olga acquiesces and continues to feel a protective tenderness for him, even after she is fully aware of their incestuous relationship, not only subverts our expectations but adds a disturbing complexity to the emotional texture of the novel.

Certainly no one standing on the riverbank when Olga and Golets are found would have guessed at the nature of her relationship with her son. Nor would any reader have surmised it. And that is the true mystery that Makine uncovers: the secret life no one sees, the disintegrating mind slowly detaching itself from the real world, all the hidden forces that can make a life come unhinged. At the end of the novel, Makine places us back at the beginning. But unlike the townspeople staring at the couple they imagine to have been lovers, we are now better equipped to interpret what has happened and, perhaps, to offer a gaze that "understands but does not judge."

ABOUT ANDREI MAKINE

Andrei Makine was born in 1958 in the Soviet Union. He emigrated to France ten years ago. His novels include Confessions of a Fallen Standard-Bearer, Once Upon the River Love, The Crime of Olga Aryelina and Dreams of My Russian Summers, which won both the Goncourt and Medicis prizes, France's two top literary awards, and was a finalist for the 1997 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREI MAKINE

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina is preceded by epigraphs from Dostoyevsky and Proust, and in terms of dark subject matter and impressionistic style they would seem to be major influences on your work. Is this true? What other writers have been especially important to you?

I have always been impressed by the dialectic of crime versus innocence in Dostoyevsky's work. Olga's life can be perceived as an ecstatic transcendence of that duality. Raskolnikoff, though a criminal, does not escape any of the bonds society imposes on us: a faithful friend, a family full of generosity, a well-meaning and intelligent judge...Olga remains in total solitude and can hold out no hope of being pardoned for her crime. There is no one to reach out and help her. For me, discovering Proust has to do above all with the discovery of his poetic vision of time. Regarding time, he seems to me as close to the great Russian poet and novelist, Ivan Bunin, who is unfortunately too little known in the West.

Few writers—one thinks of Conrad and Nabokov—have written successfully in a language other than their mother tongue. Why have you chosen to write in French rather than in Russian? How has this choice changed your writing? Do you feel any special affinity with Nabokov?

I live and publish in France: the choice of writing in French is therefore quite logical. This said, the real language of literary creation for me is poetic language, one that can modulate itself into any national dialect, whether it be French, Russian, English, or Chinese. It is not so much the aesthete or the stylist that I admire in Nabokov; rather it is his innate sense of style.

The Crime of Olga Arbyelina is filled with descriptions of nature—of landscape, sky, weather—that are both precise and artfully evocative, particularly in the many winter scenes. Did living in Siberia give you a heightened sensitivity to the elements? In what other ways has it affected your writing?

In this novel, one might well speak of real "poetics of snow." And in that, my Russian experience has been enormously valuable.

Your novel has been called "as chilling and finely charted a descent into madness as has ever been imagined." What compelled you to create the character of Olga? How were you able to present her mental and emotional disintegration so convincingly?

I can say without exaggeration that in creating Olga's madness, I came within a hair of real alienation, linked to profound pain. Holderlin describes wonderfully well this conscious and creative "game" with insanity: a carefully controlled slipping to the edge of the abyss. More than in any of my other novels, I felt myself turning into this woman and living her life. I gave her mine in return. Ultimately, Olga's life became much more real and intense for me than that of most women I have known and loved.

Why did you choose to tell this story strictly from Olga's point of view?

Olga, whose name I slightly modified here, really did exist. When they confided in me, those who had actually known her had a great deal of trouble recreating the profound mystery of her story. They all seemed overwhelmed not only by the taboo of incest, the secret of her solitude, but also by the extreme complexity of this woman's psychological trajectory. To them, her story was unspeakable, unapproachable, and could only be the stuff of literary fiction.

Like Olga, you emigrated from Russia to France, with obviously more successful results. Has it been an easy transition? Are there ways in which the novel expresses a personal sense of displacement?

"Leaving is a little like dying," say the French. That applies even more to my own journey, for the country I left behind no longer exists. The one I live in—France—corresponds only modestly to the subjective and bookish image I had of it as I was growing up.

Many readers would expect to be wholly repulsed by the incest scenes in the novel. While they are deeply disturbing, they are also touched with a poignancy and surprising tenderness. Why did you decide to develop the mother/son relationship in this way?

I believe that literature has an obligation to address themes other disciplines shy away from, or cannot deal with. Very often, writers develop political, historical, moral, ideological theses that perhaps should have been left to specialists to address in their various disciplines, be it politics, history, philosophy, or what have you. But Olga's life and that of her son are inaccessible to the disciplines mentioned above. A psychologist could obviously interpret this "psychological case." A historian could no doubt evoke a historical framework in which it is set. But it is only through poetic creation that one can ultimately seize and understand the lives of those two (mother and son) in their integral whole, one related to cosmic forces, to the moment, to death, to God. And to the imperceptible vibration of a branch covered with frost.

Do you have any special writing routines or rituals? How much do you revise? How long did you work on The Crime of Olga Arbyelina

"The new is the old sufficiently forgotten." And I am in constant admiration of Musset's ever so modern The Confession of a Child of the Century, which is as fresh and new as the day it was written. That novel, aside from a sprinkling of historical references, remains both classic and modern, and could just as well have appeared in 1920, or 1930, or even in 1950. Japanese poetry of the Middle Period hasn't aged a bit. And Lawrence Stern has contributed more to modernizing narrative games than all the Robbe-Grillets of this world. The major questions of man are timeless: the present and eternity, war and peace, to be or not to be, crime and punishment, the old man and the sea, remembrances of things past, and time recovered. Everything else, no matter what verbal acrobatics revolutionary writers come up with, is simply showing off.

Much recent American fiction is characterized by minimalism and a kind of post-modern ironic self-consciousness. Your prose is lush and lyrical and expansive by comparison, and seems closer to the high modernist strategies of Marcel Proust and Virginia Woolf . Have you deliberately set yourself against current trends in fiction? Are there any contemporary American writers you especially admire?

Among the contemporary writers I most enjoy are the Frenchmen Le Clezio and the later works of Francois Nourissier. Also, I was much taken in—and thrown by—Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole and Bert Meyers's poetry, especially the wonderful four lines that go:

And my obsession's
A line I can't revise
To be a gardener
In paradise.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. The Crime of Olga Arbyelina begins and ends with the framing device of a storyteller within the novel, the gatekeeper of a cemetery who tells Olga's story to a silent auditor. His voice is "calm and detached" and seeks "neither to persuade or to prove." Why do you think Makine has chosen to structure his novel in this way? Why this particular narrator?
    
2. How would you explain Olga's mental and emotional unraveling? What are the pivotal experiences leading up to her breakdown? To what extent is her incestuous relationship with her son a cause or a result of her madness?
    
3. What does the "crime" in the novel's title refer to? Has Olga committed a crime? Why does she confess to the murder of Golets even though she is innocent? In what sense have crimes been committed against her?
    
4. The relationship between Olga and her son is profoundly unsettling, and yet Olga herself thinks: "If what they were living through could be called love, then it was an absolute love, for it was fashioned from a prohibition inviolable yet violated, a love visible only in the sight of God, because monstrously inconceivable to mankind ..." (p. 198). How do you regard this relationship and Olga's understanding of it? Why do you think Olga acquiesces to her son's nightly visits?
    
5. Olga has been driven from her homeland by the Bolsheviks, raped by a soldier, abandoned by her husband, treated with indifference by her lover, drugged, sexually violated, and impregnated by her son. Does the novel lay the blame for Olga's fate on the shoulders of the men in her world? Would you?
    
6. After Olga realizes that she is mad, she has a vision of "the whole earth, the globe, the world peopled by men. Yes, all those men talking, smiling, weeping, embracing one another, praying to their gods, killing millions of their fellows, and, just as if nothing had happened, continuing to love one another, pray, and hope before crossing through the fine layer of earth that separated all that ferment from the immobility of the dead" (p. 174). She concludes that "they are the ones living in compete madness." Is she right? What experiences, historical and personal, would lead her to such a view?
    
7. When Olga arrives in the town Villiers-la-Foret, the other Russian émigrés expect to play a part in the melodrama of the Exiled Princess; and when they find her in tatters on the riverbank next to the dead Golets, they immediately imagine a love affair and a murder. In what ways does the novel warn against such misreadings? In what ways does it show us the far more complex reality that lies underneath the stories we try to fit other people into?
    
8. Olga hopes that one day that all she has lived through can be admitted, that she will find someone who will understand and not judge her. Is the novel asking you, as a reader, to fill that role? Does the book succeed in eliciting compassion rather than judgment? Can you infer what the narrator's or the author's view might be?