What is the setting of Dreams of My Russian Summers by Andrei Makine?

This novel is split between two settings: France and Russia. For the first half of the novel, the young narrator, growing up in communist Russia during the 1960's and 1970's spends his summers visiting his grandmother in the Russian village of Saranza, where she lives in an old izba, or Russian village, near the Steppe. At Charlotte's izba, there are a collection of small, dark apartments surrounding a courtyard where the babushkas sit gossiping on park benches during the day.