Kolkhoze
Emmanuel Carrère is master of a literary genre that blends history, autobiography, and reportage in a style by turns brilliantly humane and creepily exhibitionist. (His ex had to take out a legal injunction to stop him writing about their private life.) Kolkhoze (P.O.L., 2025) — his new best-seller and a finalist for the Prix Goncourt — is the third in what might be seen as Carrère’s Russia trilogy. In Un roman russe (2007), he revealed that his maternal grandfather, a Georgian émigré to France, was actually a Collaborator who was killed in a settling of scores after Liberation. (His mother, the celebrated French historian of Russia, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, supposedly didn’t speak to her son for two years after his book was published. As usual with family secrets, the crime was not what had been concealed, but the telling of it.) Limonov (2011) was his eponymous portrait of a Soviet
underworld poet who became first a butler on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and then an extreme-right militia-leader in the Yugoslav wars and later Central Asia. With Kolkhoze, Carrère returns to his own family’s love-affair with Russia: while his authoritarian mother continued to support Putin until her death in 2023, the author travelled to war torn Ukraine and Georgia to try to reevaluate his beloved ancestral land from the viewpoint of the peoples it colonizes.
Can you detach Dostoevsky’s novels from the fanatical bigotry they sometimes express? Mother-love and mother-country are similarly entwined in Kolkhoze: this book is above all a wry tribute to a woman whom her son once described as incapable of telling you what time it was without lying. With Carrère, too, you never feel he knows what’s the truth, but his stories are irresistible.