A Woman Loved
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- £2.99
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
Catherine the Great's life seems to have been made for the cinema. Countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades, betrayal, revenge, murder - there is no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray the real Catherine, her essential, emotional truth.
When he is dropped from the film he initially scripted - his name summarily excised from the credits - Erdmann is cast adrift in a changing world. A second chance beckons when an old friend enriched by the capitalist new dawn invites him to refashion his opus for a television serial. But Erdmann is made acutely aware that the market exerts its own forms of censorship.
While he comes to accept that each age must cast Catherine in its own image, one question continues to nag at him. Was the empress, whose sexual appetites were sated with favours bought with titles and coin, ever truly loved? In his search for an answer, Erdmann will find a love of his own that brings the fulfilment that filmmaking once promised him.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
