A Woman Loved

Makine (Dreams of My Russian Summers) captivates in this tale of a Russian screenwriter’s dogged pursuit to capture the essence of an outsized empress, Catherine the Great. The novel opens in 1980 when, in between shifts at a slaughterhouse, Oleg Erdmann is working on a screenplay about the enlightened, insatiable despot who plotted to have her husband murdered by her lovers, annexed Crimea, corresponded with Voltaire and Diderot, and “contrived to organize her sexual life like a government department.” The young man’s artistic fascination with the empress, with whom he shares German origins, carries over into his romantic life. Once the movie starts filming, he takes up with the actress playing the young Catherine, then falls in love with the East German actress cast to play the older version. Though Erdmann acknowledges the supreme theatricality of Catherine’s reign, he also searches for, and finds, some Rosebud-like revelations to combat the caricature of her as a “nymphomaniac regicide.” At times Makine hammers home his themes a little too insistently, but the novel wonderfully captures the challenges and betrayals of biographical art as it strives to animate figures from the “grotesque vaudeville” of history. (Aug.)