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Andrei Makine
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A Hero's Daughter Kindle Edition

by Andreï Makine (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 7 ratings
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Set in the Soviet Union from World War II until the early 1990s, A Hero's Daughter portrays the rise and decline of the Soviet Union through the story of Ivan Dimitrovich Davidov and his family. For his extraordinary bravery and courage beyond the call of duty at the Battle of Stalingrad, Ivan is awarded his country's highest military honor: Hero of the Soviet Union. Married after the war to Tatyana, the medical orderly who found him barely breathing amid a pile of corpses after another apocalyptic battle late in the war, they have a daughter, Olya, who grows up in the glow of her father's reputation.

In 1980, the beautiful Olya, now seventeen, assigned as an interpreter during the 1980 Moscow Olympic Games, commits and indiscretion with a French athlete, and throws her straight into the waiting arms of the KGB. As the years roll by, Olya, more and more deeply implicated in espionage, despairs at her fates as a "political prostitute," while her father, equally used by the State, becomes increasingly disillusioned and unruly, until he is arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. Finally the lives of father and daughter intersect in an utterly moving and heartrending conclusion.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
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  1. Print length
    217 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Sticky notes
    On Kindle Scribe
  4. Publisher
    Arcade
  5. Publication date
    August 29, 2003
  6. File size
    469 KB
  7. Page Flip
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  8. Word Wise
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Russian-born, Paris-based Makine vaulted into prominence with his fourth novel, Dreams of My Russian Summers, which won France's two most prestigious literary prizes. Since then, along with newer novels (most recently Music of a Life), a steady stream of his earlier work has appeared in English. Here, in his first published book, he provides an early glimpse at one of his recurring themes: the way the Soviet system prostituted-literally, in some cases-its most promising citizens. Ivan Demidov is an official Hero of the Soviet Union, a distinction he earned in the bloody defense of Moscow during WWII. Since then, he has worn the Hero's Gold Star, which earns him the respect of other citizens and the very practical right to extra rations at understocked grocery stores. For a while, he is celebrated in propagandistic television programs and asked to make patriotic speeches at elementary schools, until newer Heroes-from the fighting in Afghanistan-take his place. His talented daughter, Olya, is trained as an interpreter but sent to work at the governmental International Trade Center, where educated, attractive Russians "entertain" foreigners on whom the KGB wishes to spy. There are signs of inexperience here: Ivan and Olya are less fully realized characters than walking metaphors for Soviet exploitation. But present in this ably translated work are the seeds of the powerful social criticism that flowers in Makine's more mature novels.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Makine won wide critical acclaim for Dreams of My Russian Summer (1997). A Hero's Daughter is his first novel and, like his other books, shows the lasting and devastating effects of Stalin's brutal reign of terror. Ivan Davidov is a World War II hero who was awarded one of Russia's highest medals. Throughout his adult life, through marriage (to his wartime nurse) and fatherhood, he is accorded some special treatment as he and his fellow countrymen eke out an existence, but he eventually discovers that his medal and special treatment enslave him to the government system. During the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, his daughter, Olya, works as an interpreter and has a dalliance with a foreign athlete. The discovery of this causes her to be equally enslaved to the government, more specifically to the KGB, where she becomes entrenched in a life of espionage and political prostitution. Eventually, Gorbachev takes power in Russia, brings glasnost and perestroika, and both father and daughter confront each other, as well as their own despair, during a moving conclusion. Michael Spinella
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00CLBUDZS
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Arcade; Reprint edition (August 29, 2003)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 29, 2003
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 469 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 217 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 7 ratings

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Andrei Makine

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Customer reviews

4.6 out of 5 stars
4.6 out of 5
7 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Alfred J. Kwak
4.0 out of 5 stars Dream debut
Reviewed in the United States on November 22, 2012
Promising 1990 debut novel by Andreï Makine(AM), translated and published in English only in 2004. He grew up in the former Soviet Union (SU) with a French grandmother and became bi-lingual. He sought political asylum in France in 1987. Since 1990, he has written a series of highly-acclaimed novels about the (post-)communist SU.
AM is a born storyteller in this and later books, covering many violent and deceitful personal dramas in the history of his birth land. The SU prevailed against the German invasion of 1941 despite great losses: a huge, multiethnic nation, enthralled by and living in fear of leader Stalin and his security organs, suffered 20m war dead and millions of widowed, orphaned, disabled and traumatized survivors.
The novel's hero is much-decorated Corporal Ivan, who enlisted in 1941, lying about his age (17). AM describes his near death and rescue by his future wife. The homecoming of returning soldiers is a recurring theme in AM's future novels. The great drought of 1946 is evoked, when no relief was sent to stricken regions. Ivan's baby son dies. The distraught parents move to Borissov, a small town 100 km from Moscow, where Ivan becomes a driver, his handicapped savior/wife (three fingers missing, a piece of shrapnel constantly threatening her heart) a worker in a furniture factory. They have a daughter, Olya.
Ivan's wife's sudden death during a scuffle of pushy shoppers is a turning point in his life, or the straw that broke the camel's back: he starts to drink heavily and to dissemble, come apart. More so after he finds out what his beloved Olya does for a living... AM's exposure of the dreams of communism as cruel lies in this highly-recommended debut is a prelude to other, even more powerful and much better plotted tales. Highly recommended as an introduction to a great living writer.
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keetmom
4.0 out of 5 stars Broken lives
Reviewed in the United States on July 20, 2014
Andrei Makine has a deceptively powerful way of writing in which he uses the lives of simple folk to capture the tragic reality of life in Soviet Russia. In this slim novella the loves, disappointments and suffering of a few individuals stand for the experience of millions. "A Hero's Daughter" was Makine's first book and it provides the basic model he has adapted in subsequent works, always managing to retain respect for his characters as people despite the harrowing experiences he presents. Life always has value for Makine, even for most damaged and distressed souls he writes about.
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Top reviews from other countries

A. Murray
5.0 out of 5 stars A harsh and compelling story
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 5, 2010
Verified Purchase
I have now read most of Andre Makine's work translated into English and have come rather late to this, his first published novel. A Hero's Daughter is essentially a family story, telling us as much about Olya's parents Ivan and Tatyana as about her own life. Ivan, having fought at Stalingrad, has been made a Hero of the Soviet Union, a huge honour which still gains him a certain kind of respect even in his life of grief and poverty decades later. Tatyana, a nurse, was wounded during the war and carries the scars and consequences of this to her health for the rest of her life. Their late born daughter Olya, reaching womanhood in the years of perestroika in the '80s, makes her living in a pitiless society where her 'good' job offers a salary at the expense of anything real or sincerely human. Ostensibly as a translator to European visitors, she is also required to satisfy their sexual demands while spying on them. Accidental pregnancies are to be casually aborted. The KGB, as Olya observes, can do anything.

Like all Makine's novels, it is a slim work, an epic captured in poetic, resonant snapshots. It is written with tenderness and a controlled irony. Like all his work, it is excellent.
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Barton Keyes
4.0 out of 5 stars Another raw scar in the Russian psyche
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 6, 2004
Verified Purchase
Makine draws much of his material from picking at the scars of recent Soviet history to show how "ordinary" people were affected by the pressures and injustices of Communism as practised by the Soviets. This book follows the same path showing how one woman's talents were prostituted in the service of the State. The writing is as lyrical and perceptive as ever; the story as cold and shocking and the consequences as harsh. An excellent but disturbing read -- don't expect to come away feeling happy.
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