At twenty-six, when the memories of the harsh years of the Civil War were still vivid in his mind, and the life of an émigré in France was unsettled, Gaito Gazdanov wrote the novel Evening at Claire's, bringing back to life the vanished world of his youth. Nikolai was sixteen when he sided with the Whites in the Civil War and was ultimately forced to flee the country. After wandering, he ends up in Paris, where he meets the charming Frenchwoman Claire, whom he fell in love with back in 1917 in pre-revolutionary Saint Petersburg. Every evening, Kolya visits Claire, hoping for reciprocated feelings, and each conversation becomes an occasion for memories of childhood, father and mother, friends, lost homeland, and the Civil War. Night Roads, like Evening at Claire's, is a largely autobiographical novel. A Russian émigré, working nights as a taxi driver, travels through the night boulevards and the most remote streets of Paris in the 1930s, where centuries-old, hopeless poverty prevails. Simultaneously a witness, participant, and narrator, he paints a complex and contradictory image of the city's underbelly, populated by fallen nobility, alcoholic philosophers, madmen, and courtesans.
