Moscow, Leningrad/Saint Petersburg, Paris : Andrei Makine's palimpsest-cities

The city appears as a crucial element in the French writer of Siberian origin Andrei Makine's novels. There are, in fact, three recurrent metropolises in his prose that exercise a mesmerizing attraction upon the characters. The first one is Moscow, the political centre of Soviet Russia, the second is Leningrad, the ancient Saint Petersburg, capital of the czars, and the last one is Paris, the fairy-tale symbol of romantic love and the epitome of the Occidental world the characters dream of. As a matter of fact, the city the heroes live in or long for determines their evolution and acts as a catalyst for change, adulthood and sometimes even death. The characters identity themselves with it, get trapped inside it like in a maze, see it as a synonym of their financial and emotional stability and, more often than not, get disappointed by it, as no city actually lives up to their expectations. We will thus examine in this paper the different representations of these three cities in five of Makine's novels, namely: La Fille d'un héros de l'Union soviétique (1990), Confession d'un porte-drapeau déchu (1992), Au temps du fleuve Amour (1994), Le Testament français (1995) and La Musique d'une vie (2001). We will argue that these spaces can be considered as what Olivier Mongin calls "palimpsest-cities" – that is, cities in which various layers of history and culture are juxtaposed – and we will then focus on the peculiarities of each of them, as well as their impact on the characters' lives.