An evening with Claire

the long version

Originally published in 1930, Gaito Gazdanov’s An Evening with Claire is a masterpiece of Russian émigré literature. Written when its author was just twenty-six—with the memories of his harsh years in the Russian civil war still hauntingly vivid in his mind—An Evening with Claire is a psychological novel that is both grand and introspective. Gazdanov’s fist novel is at once an intimate and sensual account of a young man’s coming-of-age, and a tribute to the shattered dreams of the early twentieth century. As Jodi Daynard writes in her marvelously informed introduction, An Evening with Claire “presented pre-revolutionary Russia and the cataclysmic events which destroyed it in a manner both real and wistful, unregretful yet tender.”