The best book by an author I like is usually the latest one, the one I’ve just read. Kolkhoze (Éditions POL, 2025), Emmanuel Carrère’s recent book, is no exception to this rule.
Throughout his work, and especially since The Adversary, Carrère has perfected his way of recounting his immediate reality by interweaving it with the reality shared with the reader, the small story with the big one, to use the cliché. This time, in Kolkhoze, the subject matter is particularly sensitive, as he recounts the death of his parents, both in their nineties, during the Chinese pandemic and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine.
Carrère’s account of his parents’ last days is very moving. He recounts that when he was a child and his father was away for work, his mother allowed him and his sisters to sleep next to her bed, a ritual they called doing kolkhoz. On the night of his death, in August 2023, the siblings did kolkhoz for the last time. Their father was not there either, because the couple lived together but were separated, an apparent contradiction in terms that is relatively common in reality.
Why air these personal matters in a book? Convinced that we are approaching an unprecedented historical catastrophe—the collapse of civilization, if not the extinction of the species—what is the point of writing about anything else, the author asks. All in all, he concludes, recounting life remains the task of a writer. If my parents are now dead and I am alive, I tell the story.
As is well known, Carrère is the son of a French father and a Georgian-German-Russian mother, born stateless in Paris in 1929 under the name Hélène Zourabichvili. The daughter of a Georgian father and a German-Russian mother, both refugees after the Bolshevik Revolution and the subsequent Soviet invasion of Georgia, the future Hélène Carrère d’Encausse obtained French nationality at the age of 21 and was known throughout a long life of academic success as an expert on the Soviet Union, a Member of the European Parliament, and a permanent secretary of the Académie Française. Despite some tug-of-war between mother and son, the latest over their respective positions on Putin and Ukraine, Carrère confesses at the end of Kolkhoze that her mother was the most important person in her life. “I am my mother’s face receding irretrievably, I am my father’s bottomless sadness,” she writes.
On the war, “Pushkin is not Putin” is the formula that distinguishes between the Russian people and their rulers. For years, Carrère remained faithful to it, but since the invasion of Ukraine and after his latest stays on Russian soil, he has changed his mind: “We were deceiving ourselves in believing that Putinism was simply a mafia regime, driven by that well-known springboard that is greed. Because it is something else, he writes. It is about creating and exposing to the eyes of the world (…) resentment, violence, crass ignorance, and the stale pride of having understood that life is a war of all against all.” To the extent that the Russian people do not seem to oppose this grotesque move, they must be considered complicit.
If they let him hijack Ukraine, Putin’s next step will be to finish Russifying Georgia, turning it into a Belarus with a better climate. Carrère, whose maternal grandfather was Georgian, recounts in Kolkhoze that until recently he had never visited this Caucasian country, where his cousin Salomé Zourabichvili was the first female president (strictly speaking, she is not his cousin but his second aunt, but their similar ages and their use of French mean that he calls her his cousin). His description of Georgia is also highly colorful. Despite having been historically mistreated by Russians and Turks, Georgians have no inferiority complex, quite the contrary. This is how they tell the story that at the beginning of the world, God wanted to give each people a piece of land, but at the time of the distribution, the Georgians were, as always, celebrating, did not hear the call, and were left without land. Finally, God, who has a soft spot for them, gave them a piece of land for their personal use, hidden behind mountains, surrounded by snow-capped peaks glistening in the sun and covered with fertile valleys planted with vineyards. “I’ll leave it to you,” God said to the Georgians. “And I’ll go there on vacation.”
As you can see, nothing in the 550 pages of this book is wasted. And it is already a candidate for the Goncourt, which must be the only prize Carrère has not won in his career. Incidentally, the Frenchman was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize and, for once, he won the award before his mother.
If I could, I would reread A Russian Novel (2007), which is closely associated with this Kolkhoze because it tells the sad story of the philosopher Georges Zourabichvili, his grandfather. For doing so, his mother stopped speaking to him for a couple of years. A Russian Novel, which claims to be a novel but is not, was the first book by Carrère that I read. I was amused by the character, at once cautious and eloquent, when I saw him at the Brussels Book Fair. The reality he describes in it, that of a remote village in the depths of Russia, something that was then, and still is, completely unknown to me, captivated me immediately, not least because that description goes hand in hand with fluid, top-quality writing.
