ABOUT
THE BOOK

The summer of ’47. In the sleepy town of Villiers-la-Foret, roughly an hour from Paris, the peaceful radiance of the day is interrupted by the discovery that, along a nearby riverbank, the body of a man has washed up, a gaping wound in his skull. Beside him rests a beautiful, nearly bare-breasted woman, her dress soaked and in tatters. An accident or foul play? A crime of passion? Soon there are almost as many speculations and theories as there are townspeople. The woman, it turns out, is a Russian princess, Olga Arbyelina, a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution who in the 1930s had settled in town along with many of her compatriots.

Rumor was that Olga’s husband, a dashing prince given to gambling and revels, had deserted her some years after the couple’s arrival in France, leaving her alone to care for their young son. About the victim, also a Russian refugee, little is known: many years Olga’s elder, he was a taciturn, rather coarse, slightly ridiculous man named Sergei Golets, thought dismissively to be a former horse butcher. What on earth could have brought these two unlikely souls together?

Moving back to early in the century, the author meticulously recreates Olga’s past – her enchanted childhood; her pampered youth and fevered, transitory embrace of the revolution; her arduous flight towards freedom; her encounter with the dashing White Army officer who saved her life; her marriage and arrival in France; the birth of her adored son. Olga and her son spent the long years of World War II in Villiers-la-Foret, suffering the deprivations of that time but somehow surviving.
She also faced a special problem: her son was afflicted with hemophilia (from which the townspeople who knew concluded that she must be related to the czar). Medicines and medical care were of little help. Yet if love could prevail, she would make him survive. Love has its limits, its limitations and boundaries. But in a woman of great passion, what do such limits mean when you know that each day may be the last for your beloved son? With ‘The Crime of Olga Arbyelina’, Andrei Makine proves once again that he belongs at the forefront of contemporary literature as a novelist of power, subtlety, and brilliant complexity.