“Russians are Wanderers of Our Era”: Childhood Memories of Leonid Andreev's Granddaughter

The article is a review of the childhood memories' book by Leonid Andreev's granddaughter O. Andreeva-Carlisle — the novella “An Island for Life,” first translated (by L. Shenderova-Fock) into Russian from English and French, the languages of the first publications. In the novel, the author recreates the five-year period (1939–1945) of her family's stay on the island of Oleron, occupied by the Nazis, reconstructs the “Russian world” of the diaspora, created by reading books, socializing with compatriots (G. Fedotov, M. Tsvetaeva, A. Remizov, etc.), and ardent interest in Russia. The review analyzes the genre of the book, which combines fidelity to fact with fictionalization of documentary material in the spirit of a girly story; it also reveals the “book code,” allowing the author to romanticize the narrative and present the events of the Resistance, in which the family was included, in an adventurous manner. It is demonstrated that the depicted events and the atmosphere in the village of Saint-Denis on the ocean coast are associated in the book with the artistic world of E.A. Poe, read aloud to the children by their father, Vadim, who lived as a child in Finland in a house on the Black River. The image of the author’s famous grandfather, the Russian writer Leonid Andreev, recreated from the stories, also merges with the notion of the American romantic Poe. The portrait of Leonid Andreev in the book appears mythologized, refracted by the prism of perception of his son Vadim and determined by the literary reputation of the writer himself.