The Death of Emmanuel Carrère's Russian Mother

The death of the mother of French writer Emmanuel Carrère It had to culminate in a book. The inevitable recollection of the past that accompanies the death of a parent was the lever that propelled him, once he had digested the highly sensitive material, to write the mixture of chronicle and family autobiography that is KolkhozA book full of surprising relatives – Carrère has a cousin who is the president of Georgia! – and he is himself a first cousin ofA Russian novel and of Limonov, two of the peaks of Carrère's work. With a translation by Ferran Ràfols Gesa that sounds wonderful, Kolkhoz It revisits Russian themes and even brings back some of the characters from those books, but it plays on different ground, that of family history linked to the history of the 20th century: can the description of a private room tell of a historical shift? In the land of Georges Duby, the answer is "of course," and Carrère proves it beyond a doubt.

Starting with a close-up of Emmanuel Macron doing the laudatio at the state burial of mother Carrère, the storytelling machine that is his pen, takes us back to the beginning of the 20th century in distant Georgia in the Caucasus and begins to weave a tapestry: elderly Georgian exiles fleeing with a single suitcase, branches of the family arriving from pre-Soviet Russia, unforgettable summers. All of this leads to the appearance of a small but determined woman, Hélène Carrère de Encausse, originally named Hélène Zourabichvili, Georgian by birth but Russian at heart and French intellect, who would eventually become the permanent secretary of the French Academy and hold numerous other honorary positions. The intense relationship between her and her eldest son is the driving force of the book: "the mother's dazzling optimism, her boundless bad faith, and her unyielding resilience" are the three elements that nourish the young Carrère. The required readings of Dostoevsky at age eight mingle with sweeter memories, such as the one that gives the book its title and the Soviet Union's agricultural cooperatives based on collective ownership of the goods produced. "Come, children, let's make a Kolkhoz!" their mother would say to Emmanuel and his two sisters, gathering them around their beds first thing in the morning. Having a nearly Soviet mother was surely synonymous with a strict upbringing, but if it also resulted in such a vibrant scene as this, it was worth it.

Despise Dostoevsky, admire Tolstoy

The book doesn't simply recount the stories of the Carrère de Encausse family, a family brimming with memorable, complex, and contradictory characters: what a character the father is, a poor insurance salesman who, more than living a life, experiences a disappearance; what another, Uncle Nicolas, detested by the mother, to whom Emmanuel decides to become an accomplice and literary disciple; and what a remarkable character the cousin is who ends up as president of Georgia. It also functions as a reflection on the transition to adulthood that comes with rejecting one's literary education: the contempt for Dostoevsky replaced by admiration for Tolstoy is one of the book's great moments. It also serves Carrère as a vehicle to ask himself what it means to write a biography and to answer that question with the example before our eyes. There is a chronological order (thankfully!), but there are no long chapters with pompous titles: all are very brief, full of small subdivisions, to represent the avalanche of memories that washes over us when we look back.

It touches on even deeper questions: what it means to disagree with your mother, politically and personally, to disobey her and hurt her by writing what she forbade, what it means when a war breaks out—the one in Ukraine—that challenges all family beliefs. And what it means to go and write whatever comes to mind: in this, Carrère acts like an American writer. The difference is that he has to come to terms with the collapse of the house of cards that was the great Russia his mother had idolized, transformed, by a dictatorial and criminal Putin, into the country to flee and the enemy to be defeated: this grief is masterfully interwoven with the grief for his mother's death in the pages—the pages of those of us who have read Emmanuel Carrère, more than those of mothers. The reward for reaching the very end of the book is one that fills your heart for days.