In “Kolkhoz,” Emmanuel Carrère Untangles His Russian Roots
In the fall of 2022, the French writer Emmanuel Carrère visited Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, for the first time. Carrère, who has been called “France’s greatest writer of nonfiction,” was sixty-four at the time; though he was of mixed Russian and Georgian descent—when he visited, his cousin Salomé Zourabichvili, was then serving her fourth year as the country’s President—he had never before set foot in his ancestral homeland.
Why did Carrère wait so long to visit? He asks himself this very question toward the end of his latest book, “Kolkhoz,” a conflicted family history that won the 2025 Prix Médicis. His mother, whose father was the son of a prominent Georgian intellectual and whose own mother was the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, never went at all—she had a fraught relationship with the success of Zourabichvili, whom she treated with “condescending affection.” One would be forgiven for assuming that, as a friend of his joked, Carrère had waited to visit the country until a member of his family was running it. But Carrère’s explanation, characteristically self-effacing, is as shamefully self-interested as it is startlingly frank. “I am my mother’s son, I felt Russian like her, not in the least Georgian,” he writes, “but it’s become so awful to be Russian today that I’m searching for other roots.”
In the course of the past decade or so, there has been a flurry of memoirs and autofictional novels by émigré writers and their descendants, grappling with the challenging inheritance of Russia’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the suffering, and the guilt. On the more poised side is Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory”; on the more beguilingly chaotic is Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country.” “Kolkhoz”—along with Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir, “This Cursed Beautiful Land,” also out this fall—is the most prominent such book to have been published since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It is also the most virtuosically, infuriatingly honest.
Carrère, who broke out with his 2000 work of literary true crime “The Adversary,” is one of the most confounding figures in French letters. Written from the surreal intersection of narcissism, self-absolution, and investigative journalism, his books purport to be “about” subjects of general interest—yoga, the iconoclastic Russian writer Eduard Limonov, a perplexing murder spree on the Swiss border—but are, without fail, about himself. More often than not, they are also about his marriages and the extramarital affairs that end them. But, somehow, Carrère never entirely alienates his readers. There’s something refreshing about his frank insistence on his shortcomings, and the way that he manages to neither glorify nor vilify them.
The shortcomings in question are notably pronounced in Carrère’s 2007 memoir, “My Life as a Russian Novel,” which investigates two mysterious disappearances: that of his Georgian maternal grandfather, who vanished after seemingly collaborating with the Nazis in Occupied France, and that of András Toma, a long-lost Hungarian prisoner of war who was discovered in a remote Russian psychiatric hospital at the turn of the millennium. It also brazenly exposes the private life of a Parisian named Sophie, the object of Carrère’s erotic obsession, whose outrage and fascination with him mirrors the reader’s. At one point in the book, Carrère has Sophie declare, “Emmanuel doesn’t vote because he’s afraid he’ll vote for the right.” (Carrère rarely discusses politics, but if he had a conservative bent it would hardly be surprising, given his vocal praise of the works of Michel Houellebecq and Louis-Ferdinand Céline, two of French literature’s biggest provocateurs.)
Carrère can be particularly inflammatory on the subject of Russia. During his research trips to the country in the late nineties and early two-thousands, he befriended, as he put it, “colourful characters who were not necessarily reputable” and devoted years to writing a biography of Limonov, a fervent Russian nationalist opposed to Ukraine’s independence. In other words, no one should look to him for an objective account of Russia’s recent history.
Crucially, an objective account isn’t what he’s produced at all. After all, this is the writer who opened “The Adversary” with the line “On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting.” In a Profile for this magazine, Ian Parker described Carrère’s books as enacting “the experience of someone being brought out of himself—diverted from disappointment or dickishness—by the unearthing of a story worth telling and by the desire to be admired for telling it.” For all Carrère’s insensitivity—at one point he refers to sanctions falling on Moscow “like the missiles on Kyiv”—the sense of urgency with which he feels he must tell his family’s story redeems him. It’s not that he thinks doing so will necessarily explain what’s happening in Russia today, or even that it will explain how he feels about the situation, but, rather, that the telling itself is enough.
The birth of “Kolkhoz” coincided with the death of Carrère’s beloved mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, and is concerned almost exclusively with her side of his family. Hélène was born into a world of Russian nobles in exile who transposed their aristocratic geography onto the suburbs of Paris (Meudon, where Hélène grew up, became Miedonsk) and whose Russophone children only began learning French at school. Her Georgian father—from whom she inherited the undeniably foreign surname Zourabichvili, a cause of merciless schoolyard teasing—eventually assimilated completely into his wife’s circle of White Russians. When Hélène married Louis Carrère d’Encausse, a French insurance man, she shed the Georgian designation altogether.
Until adulthood, the only Russia Hélène had ever known was the one these Russians had dreamed up in and around the French capital. Motivated by a desire to preserve this rarefied world, and to learn more about the country that her parents had fled, Hélène enrolled at Sciences Po and became an expert on the region. Later on, she was named the Académie Française’s “perpetual secretary.” In this capacity, she oversaw the latest edition of the French dictionary, and occupied a grand, Académie-provided apartment on the bank of the Seine. By her death at the age of ninety-four, she had become supremely, officially, French. President Emmanuel Macron spoke at her funeral.
It’s ironic that Hélène’s path into the French élite was via her parents’ homeland. Carrère deftly captures his mother’s inner conflict, flipping between contradictory descriptions of her persona: she is at once “proud of her aristocratic and cosmopolitan ancestry” and “French by choice . . . patriotic to the point of chauvinism.” She viewed the rise of Vladimir Putin as a promising development for Russia’s transition toward democracy. Her obstinate sympathy for him not only went against French public opinion; it was also a blow to her cousin Zourabichvili, whose decision to run for Georgia’s President was motivated by Russia’s illegal occupation of the country’s northern territories. The day before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Hélène argued on a TV broadcast that Putin was “a brutal but rational man who looked out for his own interests . . . Of course he would never, ever, do such a crazy thing.”
What prompted Carrère to write “Kolkhoz” was less Russia’s invasion itself than the fact that Hélène was so wrong about it. After Putin’s attack, the French media was as unrestrained in its criticism of Hélène as she had been in her permissiveness toward him. She attempted, soon afterward, to pass her error off as a form of prescience. “If I was wrong, who could have seen clearly?” Carrère relays her saying to others.
In January, 2023, she was profiled by the journalist Raphaëlle Rérolle in Le Monde. The headline read, “The Great Russia Expert ‘Shrouded in Fog.’ ” “Her love of Russia is real, deep-seated,” Carrère writes, paraphrasing the article, “but unfortunately it’s morphed into an indulgence for Putin, so that for twenty years she hasn’t stopped speaking on behalf of the Kremlin at the Élysée, repeating to Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, Macron and their successive foreign ministers that Russia is a great country which cannot be judged by our standards, and that Putin is a man of peace.” Hélène was stung by the characterization. Rérolle’s article and the media pile on that followed, Carrère writes, “affected her to such an extent that I heard her say she no longer wanted to live in a world where the supposedly honourable press had reached such depths of ignominy.” His tone crackles with frustration at his mother’s defensiveness. “I’ve reread these articles,” he writes, “they’re harsh, but you can’t really say they’re ignoble, and my mother must have been very unaccustomed to criticism to complain that she was the victim of a media lynching.”
At the time of Hélène’s death, in the summer of 2023, Carrère was grappling with the war in his own, very different way. He was at work on a book about the Black Sea port city of Kherson, and had been travelling back and forth from the front line, collecting accounts of the occupation. “Of all the historical events I’ve witnessed,” he writes, “none has riveted my attention as much as the war in Ukraine.” Around the same time, he became compelled by the fact that, as Russia’s hold on Kherson weakened, in October of 2022, they had exhumed the bones of Prince Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin—the Russian Empire’s chief colonizer of the south. The metaphor must have seemed too good to be true: Putin’s Army, despite hemorrhaging men, was preoccupied by preserving the skeleton of the Russian imperial idea. The retreating soldiers took the bones east, into occupied territory, horrified by the thought of them remaining under Ukrainian soil.
What lies beneath the Russian earth—roots, remains, ruined imperial cities—pervades “Kolkhoz,” especially in its portrait of Carrère’s mother. The first time that she visits Soviet Russia as a young woman, during a layover on the way to a research trip in Uzbekistan, Hélène spends her precious few hours riding the Moscow metro, “the deepest and most beautiful in the world, with its mosaics, frescoes, colonnades, chandeliers and mouldings.” Everything touches her: she is even “rocked” by the mundane metro announcement, “Dveri zakryvayutsya. Nie zabyvaete svoi veschi” (“The doors are closing. Do not forget your things”), simply because it is in Russian, the intimate language of her childhood, suddenly writ large. At an underground kiosk, she buys “a map and some postcards,” and naïvely tells the salesclerk behind the counter that she speaks Russian because she’s descended from exiled aristocracy. (The salesclerk, predictably, is less than impressed.)
“She prided herself on understanding the Russians,” Carrère writes, “probing their hearts and souls, vibrating in unison with them”—one imagines a young Hélène literally vibrating in unison with a million strangers in the rattling Soviet cars of the Moscow metro. Despite his pained awareness of his mother’s imperialist delusions, he finds a grain of truth in her conviction that she is in touch with the Russian spirit. If Russia has a collective unconscious, Carrère seems to suggest it might resemble his mother—a proposition in which, against his own better judgment, he clearly finds both pride and comfort.
Like the Russian state, Hélène appears to have buried many disturbing facts as deep down as possible, not least of which is her father’s alleged collaboration with the Nazi regime. It’s chilling to see Hélène’s allegiance to Russian oligarchy prefigured by her youthful affection for the right-wing figures of postwar France. Describing former Nazi collaborators’ visits to the grave of the fascist journalist Robert Brasillach, Carrère sheepishly admits that he’s “far from thrilled to say that my mother, at the age of twenty, consorted with this society of pariahs.”
What emerges from Carrère’s excavation of his mother’s past is a strikingly nuanced portrait of a brilliant, problematic scholar. Moreover, he excels in extrapolating her life onto more than a century of Russian history. In his hands, she becomes a kind of Russian Zelig—a character who appears, conveniently, at every major moment in history throughout her life. She is omnipresent in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse, staying often at the Hotel Ukraina, Moscow’s famous Stalinist skyscraper, and attending events such as “a cocktail party at the French Embassy to celebrate Franco-Soviet scientific exchanges.” Even when she herself is absent, there is always a relative at hand, as in the case of the October Revolution: a great-uncle walks from Petrograd to Finland to escape the Bolsheviks, a family friend is torn to pieces by his serfs.
These historical anecdotes have a scope that brings to mind the great Russian epics. “My Life as a Russian Novel” would have suited the book as a title had Carrère not already used it. In the nineteenth century, Russian literature was instrumental in the formation of the Russkaia dusha, or “Russian soul”—the national myth that Russians are uniquely adept at emotional intensity, spiritual awareness, and suffering. As the twentieth century dispersed Russia’s literati, some left this nostalgic concept behind, while others trailed its shadow with them into exile, burying themselves in the great Russian novels that had formed its foundation. In “Kolkhoz,” it seems to be something of a fixation for Carrère: the émigré dream that Russianness just might be able to exist as a primarily literary mode.
When it comes to this dream, Carrère is caught between competing impulses. On the one hand, Russian literature acts as a means of framing both his reporting and his personal life. On the other, he makes sure to examine it through a post-colonial lens. He and his mother, he notes, are each compelled by the work of Dostoyevsky, entranced by his descent into the darkest, most complex facets of human nature. Hélène’s devotion to the author, “the almost religious conviction that there is nothing better,” is a point of humorous preoccupation throughout “Kolkhoz.” When Carrère discovers a love of Leo Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” in adulthood, he knows his mother will not approve. A friend remarks, sarcastically, “My goodness, what a transgression!”
For Hélène, Dostoyevsky is a symbol of Russian greatness that transcends politics. But, as Carrère acknowledges, in the wake of the Ukraine invasion the author has become an embodiment of Russian nationalism. In the Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko’s commanding 2022 essay for the Times Literary Supplement, “Reading Russian Literature after the Bucha massacre,” she convincingly argues that Dostoyevsky was not only a fervent anti-Ukrainian but also a Russian nationalist who constructed an ideology that posed a dangerous question: Can any amount of violence be absolved by surrender to the Russian Orthodox Church? Yes, the ending of “Crime and Punishment” insists: even Rodion Raskolnikov, an infamous perpetrator of senseless violence, can have his Christian awakening in a penal colony in Siberia. “It barely needs pointing out,” Zabuzhko writes, “that Putin’s offensive on February 24 owed much to Dostoevskyism.”
Carrère’s strongest critique of the novelist occurs via proxy. While gathering material in southern Ukraine, Carrère travels with a group of Ukrainian soldiers, one of whom, a brooding young man named Serhiy, reminds him of a character from a Dostoyevsky novel. In an excruciating scene, Carrère, emboldened by more than a few rounds of vodka, decides to begin speaking Russian to his companions, who have made a point of speaking only Ukrainian. None of the soldiers respond, but the next day Carrère’s “Dostoyevskian” figure offers to recount, through a translator, the story of his life. It turns out that Serhiy had been taken prisoner in occupied Donetsk, and subjected to a mock execution. Once he’d finally been freed, he asked his captor why she did what she did. “Because I’m interested in knowing what a man feels when he thinks he’s going to die,” she said. Serhiy replies, without missing a beat, “Read Dostoevsky.” Serhiy, like Zabuzhko, locates his captor’s impulse to torture him in the very pages written by the Russian novelist.
Carrère notes, in passing, that his mother’s “favourite adjective” was “haunted.” “Kolkhoz” is haunted not only by the spectre of his mother but by the question of whether it’s possible to write affectionately, if critically, about Russia today—a question that is at the center of much memoiristic writing about Russia, both by the descendants of those who have left the country, such as Carrère or Evan Gershkovich, and by those who remain.
In the final analysis, perhaps Carrère’s obsession with Russia is not so far removed from his compulsion to write about himself. Writing what he knows, Carrère is consistently, paradoxically insightful on what he doesn’t know. In starting from himself—his childhood, then his mother, then her mother, and so on—he has uncovered something meaningful about the psychology of the Russian Empire that made his grandparents, and those who have followed. More than that, he has masterly evoked an empire just as powerful and just as slippery: the idea of Russia. ♦