Translated from the French by Geoffrey Strachan

Andrei Makine was born and brought up in Russia, but Music of a Life, like his other novels, was written in French. The book is set in Russia, and the author uses some Russian words in the French text that I have kept in this English translation. These include shapka, afur hat or cap, often with ear flaps; dacha, a country house or cottage, typically used as a second or vacation home; izba, a traditional wooden house built of logs; and taiga, the virgin pine forest that spreads across Siberia south of the tundra.

The text contains references to several well-known Russian place names, including the Nevsky Prospekt, the street in St. Petersburg (on the river Neva); in Moscow, the Stone Bridge and Arbat, the famous street in the city center; and Graben, the street in the heart of Vienna.

G. S.

I COULD QUITE EASILY PINPOINT THE DATE of that encounter. It goes back at least a quarter of a century – more precisely, to the year when a celebrated Russian philosopher, then a political refugee in Munich, coined a phrase that quickly gained currency, an expression thinkers, politicians, and even mere mortals would go on using for a good decade or more throughout the world. The extraordinary success enjoyed by his formula stemmed from one palpable merit: in two Latin words the philosopher had succeeded in summing up the lives of the 240 million human beings who, at that time, peopled the land of my birth. Men and women, children and adults, old people and newborn babes, the living and the dead, the sick and the healthy, innocents and murderers, the learned and the ignorant, workers in the depths of coal mines, cosmonauts in their celestial orbits – these and thousands of other categories of people were all linked to a common essence by this innovative expression. They all began to exist under one generic name.