Evening at Claire's

Author's name: Gaito Gazdanov

Nikolai was sixteen years old when he joined the White Army in the Russian Civil War, and was later forced to flee his country when the Whites were defeated. After a period of wandering, Nikolai arrived in Paris, where he met the beautiful Frenchwoman Claire, with whom he had fallen in love ten years earlier in pre-revolutionary Petersburg.
Nikolai visits Claire every evening, hoping she will reciprocate his feelings. Every conversation between them reminds him of his childhood, his parents, his friends, and the civil war, filling him with a longing for the innocence lost forever in a country that no longer exists.

An Evening at Claire's is the first novel published by Gaito Gazdanov, and it has rightfully become a masterpiece of Russian émigré literature and the reason for Gazdanov's fame as one of the most important writers, with critics comparing him to Proust, Kafka, and Dostoevsky.