Evening with Claire

Gaito Gazdanov (1903–1971) is one of the greatest writers of the Russian diaspora. After the revolution, at the age of not quite sixteen, Gazdanov joined the White movement and served as a private soldier on an armored train, and then was forced to leave Russia forever, sharing the fate of many Russian emigrants. He spent most of his life in Paris and worked as a night taxi driver for many years; from 1953, he was a correspondent and later an editor at «Radio Liberty».
«Evening with Claire» (1929), Gazdanov's first novel, brought the young author fame, opening doors to leading literary magazines. His contemporaries placed Gazdanov in the same rank as Vladimir Nabokov, and among his «predecessors» they mentioned Marcel Proust and Ivan Bunin, admiring the delicate poetic nature and musicality of his prose, as well as the freshness and strength of his language. However, in the writer's homeland, the novel was published only after the author's death, in 1990. In addition to the novel «Evening with Claire», this edition includes stories by Gaito Gazdanov written in the 1930s, as well as the novel «The Ghost of Alexander Wolf» (1947).