Maa ja taivas

The touching finale to the epic trilogy that began with Dreams of My Russian Summers, by the man whose work has been compared to that of Chekhov and Proust.

A love story. A brief encounter, set in the gutted, burning Stalingrad of May 1942. Earlier, Jacques Dorme, a French fighter pilot, had been shot down in a dogfight against the German invaders of France in June 1940. Made prisoner and sent east to a POW camp, Dorme escapes and makes his way to a devastated Russia where, ultimately, he joins a Russian squadron. At Stalingrad, Dorme meets and falls madly in love with a nurse. Amid the ruins, their love blossoms but is cut short by Dorme's sudden departure for Siberia, where he ferries American planes brought in from Alaska for the Soviet air force. Crossing the polar sky on New Year's Eve 1944, in a heroic move to save his fellow pilots, Dorme crashes into an ice-covered peak.

Decades later, the narrator, a Russian war orphan exiled in France, haunted by his harrowing childhood and obsessively searching for his roots, travels back to his native land, where he discovers his life and that of Jacques Dorme are inextricably intertwined.