What I liked and didn't like about Makine's A Woman Loved

At the end, Andrei Makine's A Woman Loved is a daring novel that manages to give us an entire arc of Russian/Saviet history - from the 18th-centiury reign of Catherine the Great, to the Russian disaster of World War I, the Stalin era (in which Russians of German descent were exiled to Siberia), the Brezhnev era of state oppression, and finally the collapse of the USSR and the wealth of the oligarchs and the headiness of artistic freedom - and does this all in a compressed narrative focused on young man writing a screenplay about Catherine, and as we follow his life over about 20 years, as his life in a sense follows the course of his screenplay - which goes through several iterations before its final incarnation as a soft-porn soap opera about Catherine's sexual conquests and appetites. Makine - Russian born and living in France (and writing in French) - captures some scenes beautifully and does a great job tracking the professional ups and downs of the life of the screenwriter, Oleg - which is a stand-in for many writers in the Soviet and post-Soviet era, the need to compromise or be sneaky to get material past the censors; then, later, the need to just be crass and exploitative, producing trash to make tons of money and the heady early days of Russian "freedom" and corruption. I wish, however, that Makine gave more depth to Oleg's character -- we follow him over several decades and in some beautiful passages we get his back story but we never get his "front" story; we see the women his lives w/ at various periods of his life, but these relations never seem significant and his personality is opaque. I wish Makine had more carefully developed Oleg's character and spent less time on this many accounts of the filming of various scenes in the life of Catherine - these sections seemed repetitious and, though salacious, they were pretty dull and insignificant - maybe they mean more to Russian readers, but for men a brief account of the filming and more info on the main character and his thinking and yearnings would have strengthened this novel.