“Jodi Daynard’s translation of the tender, nostalgic, yet unsentimental prose seems flawless.”— The New York Times
An Evening With Claire was a best-selling novel when it first was published, in Russian, in 1930. This is its first English translation, about which Publishers Weekly has written, “The story reveals the horrors of wartime, as well as of the grotesque nature of humanity that emerges in life-and-death situations, in sensitive yet simple prose that displays a rare elegance.”
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.”
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