An Evening with Claire

This work, written with the simple lyricism and psychological acuity of the early Tolstoy and Bunin struck a chord with the émigrés of the 1930s, who recognized their own feelings in those of the hero, and in a peculiar way it forms a complement to Nabokov’s early novels of longing for the Russian childhood left behind forever in a country which no longer existed.
An Evening with Claire was hailed as a major literary event in Russian émigré circles when it was first published in Paris in 1930. Its author, Gaito Gazdanov, was compared to the young Nabokov, as well as to Proust and Bunin.