Irène Némirovsky's Russian Influences: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov [1 ed.] 9783030442026, 9783030442033

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov Marta-Laura Cenedese

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Series Editors Shane Weller School of European Culture and Languages University of Kent Canterbury, UK Thomas Baldwin Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, UK Ben Hutchinson Centre for Modern European Literature University of Kent Canterbury, UK

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements of the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature book series is to create a forum for work that problematizes these borders, and that seeks to question, through comparative methodologies, the very nature of the modern, the European, and the literary. Specific areas of research that the series supports include European romanticism, realism, the avant-garde, modernism and postmodernism, literary theory, the international reception of European writers, the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, and the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, psychoanalytic, and scientific) upon that literature. In addition to studies of works written in the major modern European languages (English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish), the series also includes volumes on the literature of Central and Eastern Europe, and on the relation between European and other literatures. Editorial Board Rachel Bowlby (University College London) Karen Leeder (University of Oxford) William Marx (Collège de France) Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University) Jean-Michel Rabaté (University of Pennsylvania) Dirk Van Hulle (University of Oxford)

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14610

Marta-Laura Cenedese

Irène Némirovsky’s Russian Influences Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov

Marta-Laura Cenedese Turku Institute for Advanced Studies Turku, Finland

ISSN 2634-6478 ISSN 2634-6486 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature ISBN 978-3-030-44202-6 ISBN 978-3-030-44203-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Lebrecht Music & Arts/Alamy Stock Photo, Image ID: K0R7RM This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For my father (1947–2019)

Series Editors’ Preface

Many of the most significant European writers and literary movements in the modern period have traversed national, linguistic and disciplinary borders. The principal aim of the Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature series is to create a forum for work that takes account of these border crossings, and that engages with individual writers, genres, topoi and literary movements in a manner that does justice to their location within European artistic, political and philosophical contexts. Of course, the title of this series immediately raises a number of questions, at once historical, geo-political and literary-philosophical: What are the parameters of the modern? What is to be understood as European, both politically and culturally? And what distinguishes literature within these historical and geo-political limits from other forms of discourse? These three questions are interrelated. Not only does the very idea of the modern vary depending on the European national tradition within which its definition is attempted, but the concept of literature in the modern sense is also intimately connected to the emergence and consolidation of the European nation-states, to increasing secularization, urbanization, industrialization and bureaucratization, to the Enlightenment project and its promise of emancipation from nature through reason and science, to capitalism and imperialism, to the liberal-democratic model of government, to the separation of the private and public spheres, to the new form taken by the university, and to changing conceptions of both

vii

viii

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

space and time as a result of technological innovations in the fields of travel and communication. Taking first the question of when the modern may be said to commence within a European context, if one looks to a certain Germanic tradition shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy (1872), then it might be said to commence with the first ‘theoretical man’, namely Socrates. According to this view, the modern would include everything that comes after the pre-Socratics and the first two great Attic tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, with Euripides being the first modern writer. A rather more limited sense of the modern, also derived from the Germanic world, sees the Neuzeit as originating in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Jakob Burckhardt, Nietzsche’s colleague at the University of Basel, identified the states of Renaissance Italy as prototypes for both modern European politics and modern European cultural production. However, Italian literary modernity might also be seen as having commenced two hundred years earlier, with the programmatic adoption of the vernacular by its foremost representatives, Dante and Petrarch. In France, the modern might either be seen as beginning at the turn of the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, with the so-called ‘Querelle des anciens et des modernes’ in the 1690s, or later still, with the French Revolution of 1789, while the Romantic generation of the 1830s might equally be identified as an origin, given that Chateaubriand is often credited with having coined the term modernité, in 1833. Across the Channel, meanwhile, the origins of literary modernity might seem different again. With the Renaissance being seen as ‘Early Modern’, everything thereafter might seem to fall within the category of the modern, although in fact the term ‘modern’ within a literary context is generally reserved for the literature that comes after mid-nineteenth-century European realism. This latter sense of the modern is also present in the early work of Roland Barthes, who in Writing Degree Zero (1953) asserts that modern literature commences in the 1850s, when the literary becomes explicitly self-reflexive, not only addressing its own status as literature but also concerning itself with the nature of language and the possibilities of representation. In adopting a view of the modern as it pertains to literature that is more or less in line with Barthes’s periodization, while also acknowledging that this periodization is liable to exceptions and limitations, the present series does not wish to conflate the modern with, nor to limit it to, modernism

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

ix

and postmodernism. Rather, the aim is to encourage work that highlights differences in the conception of the modern—differences that emerge out of distinct linguistic, national and cultural spheres within Europe—and to prompt further reflection on why it should be that the very concept of the modern has become such a critical issue in ‘modern’ European culture, be it aligned with Enlightenment progress, with the critique of Enlightenment thinking, with decadence, with radical renewal, or with a sense of belatedness. Turning to the question of the European, the very idea of modern literature arises in conjunction with the establishment of the European nation-states. When European literatures are studied at university, they are generally taught within national and linguistic parameters: English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, Slavic and Eastern European, and Spanish literature. Even if such disciplinary distinctions have their pedagogical justifications, they render more difficult an appreciation of the ways in which modern European literature is shaped in no small part by intellectual and artistic traffic across national and linguistic borders: to grasp the nature of the European avant-gardes or of high modernism, for instance, one has to consider the relationship between distinct national or linguistic traditions. While not limiting itself to one methodological approach, the present series is designed precisely to encourage the study of individual writers and literary movements within their European context. Furthermore, it seeks to promote research that engages with the very definition of the European in its relation to literature, including changing conceptions of centre and periphery, of Eastern and Western Europe, and how these might bear upon questions of literary translation, dissemination and reception. As for the third key term in the series title—literature—the formation of this concept is intimately related both to the European and to the modern. While Sir Philip Sidney in the late sixteenth century, Martin Opitz in the seventeenth, and Shelley in the early nineteenth produce their apologies for, or defences of, ‘poetry’, it is within the general category of ‘literature’ that the genres of poetry, drama and prose fiction have come to be contained in the modern period. Since the Humboldtian reconfiguration of the university in the nineteenth century, the fate of literature has been closely bound up with that particular institution, as well as with emerging ideas of the canon and tradition. However one defines it, modernity has both propagated and problematized the historical legacy of the Western literary tradition. While, as Jacques Derrida argues, it may

x

SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE

be that in all European languages the history and theorization of the literary necessarily emerges out of a common Latinate legacy—the very word ‘literature’ deriving from the Latin littera (letter)—it is nonetheless the case that within a modern European context the literary has taken on an extraordinarily diverse range of forms. Traditional modes of representation have been subverted through parody and pastiche, or abandoned altogether; genres have been mixed; the limits of language have been tested; indeed, the concept of literature itself has been placed in question. With all of the above in mind, the present series wishes to promote work that engages with any aspect of modern European literature (be it a literary movement, an individual writer, a genre, a particular topos) within its European context, that addresses questions of translation, dissemination and reception (both within Europe and beyond), that considers the relations between modern European literature and the other arts, that analyses the impact of other discourses (philosophical, political, scientific) upon that literature, and, above all, that takes each of those three terms— modern, European and literature—not as givens, but as invitations, even provocations, to further reflection.

Acknowledgments

Writing this book has been a long process, one that benefited from the support of many people and institutions over the years. I wrote a first, quite different version as a doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge; those were incredibly formative years, accompanied by the emotional and intellectual ups and downs that many former and current Ph.D. candidates know well. I owe immense gratitude to my supervisor, Martin Crowley, whose intellectual rigour, dedication and empathy have been invaluable even after he was no longer my supervisor. Emma Wilson, Ian James and Alexander Etkind also provided generous advice and insights. Sadly, Angela Kershaw passed away before she could see this project completed, but it owes more than I can say to her kindness, generosity and unwavering encouragement. At Cambridge, I must thank the Cambridge European Trust, the Department of French, Girton College, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding my research. Many thanks also to Anne Cobby, Hélène, Charlotte and Mirka at the MML Library, where I spent many hours reading and writing, as well as shelving books. I would like to extend my gratitude to my students at Cambridge, at the University of Venice Ca’ Foscari and in Moscow, because their enthusiasm for the unknown and their unbridled questioning minds were a constant reminder to nurture my own curiosity and creativity.

xi

xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I spent several weeks researching Némirovsky’s archives at the Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), outside of Caen in BasseNormandie. I am grateful for the support of the administration and the patience of the staff at the Bibliothèque de recherche, which provided the most comfortable space for tireless days of work. In my experience, no other place matches the beauty, peacefulness and quiet inspiration of the Abbaye d’Ardenne, where the IMEC is located. My gratitude goes to the late Denise Epstein-Dauplé, who first gave me access to her mother’s archive; and to Nicolas Dauplé and Olivier Philipponnat, for providing me with the permission to reproduce Némirovsky’s manuscripts in this book. I finalized the manuscript at the University of Turku: a special thank you to Hanna Meretoja, who is a brilliant scholar, a great role model and the warmest of mentors. Thank you also to Hanna’s welcoming family and to Eevastiina Kinnunen, who gracefully listened to my never-ending to-do lists. The last edits were made during a research stay in Berlin. Thank you to everyone who welcomed me at the Dahlem Humanities Center (Freie Universität) and the Centre Marc Bloch (Humboldt Universität). It has been a privilege to work with my editors at Palgrave Macmillan. Thank you also to the Series Editors for their support. I also appreciate the helpful comments provided by the anonymous readers and by Martina Stemberger. Thank you to Simon Patterson for proofreading the whole manuscript. Over the years and across several countries, this book’s topic and progress were discussed with many people. I owe a special gratitude to my friends, who have helped and encouraged me in innumerable ways: Rosa Barotsi, Andrew and Nicole Bogrand, Matteo Bucci, Giovanni Ciotti, Barbara De Santi, Molly Flynn, Susanna Graham, Alex Gruzenberg, Stephan Hilpert, Philip Herter, Sergio Jarillo de la Torre, Sazana Jayadeva, Johannes Kaminski, Ali Khan Mahmudabad, Mrs Vijaya Khan, FaroqueEzra Khan, Merlin Kirikal, Domna Michailidou, Alex Moira, Giovanna Montagner, Marga Petraglia, Mara Polgovsky-Ezcurra, Liz Raddatz and Valentina Tartari. Last but not least, my deepest gratitude goes to my brother, who is the person I admire the most and have always looked up to for such acute intelligence and integrity; he is the one who has played with me and is still showing me how to fare in this world. And to my parents, without whom this work would have never been. Thank you to my mother, for her love and strength. My father will never hold this book in his hands, yet he never doubted my ability to write it. His unconditional belief in me, his

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

xiii

love and support are an incommensurable loss. This book is dedicated to him. I gratefully acknowledge the permission from publishers to draw on the following earlier publications, which appear in this book in revised form. In Chapters 2 and 4, I have integrated passages from “The Rhythm of Unity: Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace” (Comparative Literature 71:1, 2019, pp. 64–85). An earlier version of Chapter 8 was published as “A ‘Romanced Biography’: Irène Némirovsky’s La Vie de Tchekhov” (Itinéraires. Littérature, textes, cultures, no. 2017–1, 2018 [http://journals.openedition.org/itineraires/3712]). Chapter 9 was written during a research period in the project “Identity Work: Narrative Agency, Metanarrativity and Bibliotherapy” (PI Hanna Meretoja) which is part of the consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (2018– 2022), funded by the Academy of Finland (project number 314769).

Note on Translations and Citations

All writings by Irène Némirovsky, published or unpublished, have been reproduced in the original, whether in French or Russian. Translations from French texts are, wherever possible, from published sources. Unless otherwise stated, most works by Némirovsky that I reference throughout the book, as well as several archival sources, have been beautifully translated by Sandra Smith. I read all texts in the original, except for Tolstoy’s and Dostoevsky’s novels, which I read in their English translations. While ideally one always reads in the original language, the nature of my analysis was not, in my opinion, going to be hindered or its scope diminished by this choice. However, I chose to reproduce the archival material in Russian, but with present-day spelling; English translations are always provided. Whenever published translations were not available, they are my own. Titles of Némirovsky’s works are given in the original French with the first publication date, followed by English in parentheses; after the first mention, I cite titles only in French or English.

xv

Contents

1

Introduction: Creative Encounters Over Time and Space—Writers, Readers and Researchers

Part I 2

1

Tolstoy: Creative Reception

From Russia to France, Via England: Suite française, War and Peace, and E. M. Forster

29

3

Departing from Tolstoy: Polyphony and Monologism

55

4

Beyond Tolstoy: Music

77

Part II Dostoevsky: Unconscious Influence 95

5

Dreams from Underground

6

The Abject

117

7

An Anthropology of Suffering

137

xvii

xviii

CONTENTS

Part III

Chekhov: Reading in Context

8

La Vie de Tchekhov: A Romanced Biography

157

9

La Vie de Tchekhov in the Twenty-First Century

183

10

Conclusion: A Russian Suite

199

Index

205

List of Abbreviations

Abbreviations of Irène Némirovsky’s work Cl DW OCI OCII Sf SF VT

Les Chiens et les loups. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008 The Dogs and the Wolves. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto & Windus, 2009 Œuvres complètes, tome I. Introduction, présentation et annotations des textes par Olivier Philipponnat. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2011 Œuvres complètes, tome II. Introduction, présentation et annotations des textes par Olivier Philipponnat. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 2011 Suite française. Paris: Folio, 2006 Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage, 2014 La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel, 2008

Abbreviations of Leo Tolstoy’s work WP

War and Peace. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage, 2009

Abbreviations of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s work NU WN

Notes from Underground and The Double. Trans. Ronald Wilks. London: Penguin, 2009 White Nights. In A Gentle Creature and Other Stories. Trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009

xix

xx

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviations of Archival Sources IMEC

Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, Abbaye d’Ardenne, Caen ALM GRS NMR

INA

fonds Albin Michel fonds Grasset et Fasquelle fonds Irène Némirovsky

Institut national de l’Audiovisuel, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Creative Encounters Over Time and Space—Writers, Readers and Researchers

The Encounter Since the French publication of Suite française in 2004 and its translation into multiple languages, the fame and talent of Irène Némirovsky have been undisputed among readers, critics and scholars around the world. Personally, I first came across her name early on. I was living in Paris, it was 2004 and Suite française had just been published. I remember walking into bookstores to find, at the entrance, tables filled with copies of the book, her photograph on the cover and the classic red slip around the lower half, marking in big letters “Winner of the Renaudot Prize.” Despite the curiosity that all this talk about her had awoken in me, it took me a few more years to read her novels: Les Chiens et les loups (1940. The Dogs and the Wolves ) followed by Suite française were first. Némirovsky did not immediately become a favourite of mine, like others had. Still, there was something disconcerting about her oeuvre, something almost repulsive yet incredibly appealing that kept me going back to read more. After multiple readings, her style, which at first seemed too comme il faut, showed all its intricacies, and her linear plots started to interlace in serpentine pathways. For a lover of all things French and Russian, her story proved compelling, her idiosyncrasies a challenge: a Russian émigré living in the cultural capital of the interwar period, but mostly disengaged from the émigré intelligentsia;1 a stateless Jew in Occupied France, who left her destiny in the hands of a Christian God.2 © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_1

1

2

M.-L. CENEDESE

Against the backdrop of the history of the first half of the twentieth century, and doubting the apparent disconnect between Némirovsky and her Russian cultural heritage, I sensed a need for a thorough investigation of her relationship with the literature of her native country. Not only were there archival notes that justified my perception of this correspondence, but as a reader and student of Russian literature I also suspected that it had been a source of great influence on her work. The names of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov came naturally and were chosen either for their consistent presence in the manuscripts (Tolstoy), for incidental but evocative references (Dostoevsky), or for published evidence (Chekhov). Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov’s influence on Némirovsky vary, and yet it speaks directly to the cultural foundations of her work and to her practice.3

Creative Reception and the Ethics of Influence The notion of influence is at the heart of my analysis of Némirovsky’s relationship with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. In this book, I use the term influence to indicate the capacity of Russian literature to have an effect on Némirovsky as well as to affect her, and in that sense I call it creative. I originally articulated this notion after coming across Brigitte Le Juez’s (2014) suggestion that the study of influence should be revived as “creative reception,” which implies the acknowledgment (sometimes reluctant) that at the basis of creative production there are artists who act as “sources of inspiration and sometimes influence.”4 Le Juez summons as examples of such inspiration/influence excerpts from Martin Amis, Gustave Flaubert, Elizabeth Bowen and Oscar Wilde in order to show how, instead of proving a lack of talent or imagination, “following in others’ footsteps” is a common and transparent practice and nothing to be ashamed of. She highlights that time and again writers have openly expressed gratitude to their predecessors, and she notes that in their tributes “[t]he language used by writers to discuss the question of their reception of others tends to indicate an emotional response. Their own understanding of what moves them into creative action can be vague or at least difficult to articulate” (emphasis added). And she continues: “[i]t is therefore the role of the comparatist to attempt a critical appraisal of such a fundamental, artistic phenomenon as the continuously innovative meeting of artistic minds ” (emphasis added). This book intends to do precisely that: to propose a critical appraisal of the “meeting of artistic

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

3

minds” that took place in interwar Paris between Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. It attempts to show the ways in which the Russian masters came alive in Némirovsky’s mind, how being their reader nurtured her writing, but also wishes to find a critical dialogue with the inherent challenges of defining what “moved her into creative action.” That is, this book foregrounds the role of imagination in criticism as a creative and playful mode of constructing new meanings. Therefore, alongside Le Juez, this book suggests that, indeed, the comparatist needs to play an active role and that such a role would bring more fruitful results if she allowed herself to be part of such “creative meeting.” Under these premises, the term “influence” is a “temporal operator” (Brewer 2013: 12) that maps the relations between texts and between texts and subjects—writers, readers, and researchers, as expressed in this chapter’s subtitle. The phenomenon of reception presented by Le Juez uncovers feelings “of intimacy and of lineage” that know no boundaries (geographical, temporal and cultural), no hierarchies and no bias, and which, as Flaubert had it, “give birth to an eternal family among all human beings” (letter to Louis Colet 19/02/1854, qtd. in Le Juez 2014). Le Juez’s initial emphasis on hard-to-explain ties that are oftentimes based on affective impetus and emotive affiliations opens up a new dimension for articulating these connections. Her accent on “the reader’s sensitivity and experience” implicates a critical appraisal that should, indeed, remember that the writer is a reader with her sensitivity and set of experiences. However, I suggest that we should also account for the reader embodied in the writer-researcher, who has her own sensitivity and experience, and therefore is subjected to her own “creative impetus.” To emphasize the departure from Le Juez’s “creative reception,” therefore, I use the term creative influence, which includes the process of the writer’s reception, the ensuing response that moves her into “creative action,” and finally the reading practice and creative response operated by the (reader-writer-) researcher in her own writing. Surely the noun “influence” and the adjective “creative” do not give full justice to the complex relations implicit in my formulation, but at least they set apart “creative reception” from creative influence. In this specific case, creative influence describes not only the meeting of Némirovsky with her predecessors, but also the meeting with readers of Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Thus, my concept accounts for ever-expanding hermeneutic possibilities that allow the scholar, or indeed any reader, to articulate a creative

4

M.-L. CENEDESE

encounter of her own. Therefore, where the word influence is concerned, my understanding of creative influence goes beyond the simple confluence of influence with both “source study” and “reception,” and instead it encompasses and blends processes of intertextuality, aesthetic reception, cultural transfers, artistic and critical creation in ways that bring together authors, readers and writers. This combination of approaches is far from being what may be called a “negative eclecticism” and instead becomes a “positive necessity” (Suleiman 1980: 7). As I was finalizing the book and rewriting this Introduction, I chanced upon Ivan Jablonka’s methodological discussion of his Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (2012. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had, 2016). A few years after the publication of the book about his grandparents’ life, which he declines as “investigation, testimony, biography, autobiography, narrative, and literature all at once” (Jablonka 2018: 236), Jablonka reflects, as a trained social scientist, on the methods he had used. The clarity with which he describes the reflexive mode and its principles resonated with what I was trying to convey when writing that creative influence includes the researcher within the research, but without making it a simple emotional fancy. Explaining one of the four principles of the reflexive mode, Jablonka writes that “the ‘I’ of method can be implemented regardless of the subject under study.5 […] For the ‘I’ of method is not only a way of reasoning and a form, but also a line of reasoning within a form. […] By means of framed stories, the ‘I’ of method reminds us that a situated individual set out on an investigation, searched, saw, and felt” (245). Jablonka’s emphasis on the researcher’s positionality—earlier in the book he speaks of the “situated researcher” as that who “assumes responsibility for their situated selves” (239)—is a partial nod to long-held feminist claims for positionality and embodiment, from Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” (1988) to, among the most recent examples, Sara Ahmed’s “embodied experience” as a resource to generate knowledge (2017: 10).6 In this book, creative influence is also the methodology used to analyse the connections between Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. As will be evident in the outline of the chapters, this method has the merit of embracing several theories and methodologies: critical and literary theory; archival data and source analysis (which establishes acknowledged connections while prompting further hypotheses); and close textual analysis of the literary works. Indeed, this method allows the author of this (or any) study the freedom to go on a hunt for direct influences, while

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

5

at the same time it encourages her to speculate, or better yet, to envision the ramifications of a novel’s sentence or a journal annotation and thus to engage in a creative approach that opens the imagination to possibilities that would have not otherwise been considered. I would like to suggest that the method of creative influence connects literary criticism with Martha Nussbaum’s “imaginative activity” (Nussbaum 2010: 109). In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2010), Nussbaum suggests that from a very young age we should cultivate the empathic capacity of the thinking mind—through “narrative imagination” and “positional thinking”—in order “for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle and complicated manner” (6). Here Nussbaum is discussing this activity within the field of education and the role of the humanities in the creation of democratic societies, but I would argue that, in a similar vein, creative influence promotes the researcher’s “positional thinking” and “narrative imagination” insofar as it allows a more sympathetic approach, one that opens out to more imaginative perspectives and dimensions in considering how works interact with each other, thus nearing Nussbaum’s ideal of “critical thinking and empathetic imagining” (19). Thinking about the role of the humanities (and within it, of literature) in our societies, the interaction between works and worlds, the interconnectedness involved in practices of writing and reading, and hence the influence that texts have on people and that people have through texts as much as on texts, raises the question of an ethical understanding of influence. For Daniel Brewer (2013), an ethics of influence exists in the moment we reimagine literary studies to be that which deals not only with forms and identities, but “more crucially with acting ethically” (16). Le Juez suggests that a new avenue for examining reception and influence may be found in the experience of a literary work, that is, in the ethical dimension of literature (2014). And indeed, Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe have argued that “there is no narrative that is free of ethical issues, no reading, viewing, or listening to a narrative that does not require some ethical sensitivity and the exercise of moral discrimination on the part of the reader, viewer or listener. Such issues arise at different stages in the process whereby narratives are created and experienced” (2013: 6). Although the question of the ethics of literature goes beyond the focus of this book, its concern with the creative act of reading and writing is on a par with the possibility of whether there can be such a thing as an

6

M.-L. CENEDESE

“ethics of influence.” In Chapters 8 and 9, this thought will underline my reflections on the potential to read Némirovsky’s ethical engagement. Finally, it must also be specified that creative influence does not sanction a praxis of “applying theory to literature” by virtue of the researcher’s whim or as a purely rhetorical, yet empty, exercise. Rather, it underscores the connections between creative engagement and theoretically based writing in the same way Kristeva claimed that Roland Barthes taught us that “the relationship between theory and literature” is not “one of application, but of implication” (Becker-Leckrone 2005: 16). Here the same simultaneous scientific approaches are employed as those of Barthes’s analytical model, which were “controlled by the discreet and lucid presence of the subject of this ‘possible knowledge’ of literature, by the reading that he gives of texts today, situated as he is within contemporary history” (Kristeva 1980: 94). “Reading” (and “readers”) is thus a keyword in the method of creative influence since it implicates both the researcher’s reading of Némirovsky and Némirovsky’s reading of Russian and other literatures. It seems essential at this point to take a detour through the birth and developments of the concepts of influence and intertextuality, as well as the notions of readers, writers and authors.

Influence, Intertextuality, Readers and Writers When influence is mentioned within the discipline of literary studies, one cannot help but immediately think of Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973, Bloom 1997) and A Map of Misreading (1975, Bloom 1980). In his seminal studies of literary influence, Bloom analyses pervasive references and allusions in English Romantic and American poetry in order to grasp the relation that individual artists have with their precursors. Starting from the presumption that great writing is always a misreading of previous writing (Bloom 1997: xix), Bloom describes intra-poetic relationships (i.e. poetic influence) as hierarchical, vertical and diachronic, and envelops them in an emotional struggle akin to the Oedipus Complex that leads to the bespoke anxiety. Such anxiety “comes out ” of the act of misreading and is a “creative interpretation,” or else a “consequence of poetic misprision” that follows the act of reading (xxiii; emphasis Bloom’s). Different from source study and set in motion by two conflicting desires (imitation and originality), influence is a critical act, “a misreading or misprision, that one poet performs upon another” (Bloom 1980: 3), and thus

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

7

traces an agonistic/rebellious aesthetic going from an older writer (the precursor) to a younger one, which is described as a complex journey, a poetic apprenticeship of six techniques or stages—clinamen; tessera; kenosis; daemonization; askesis; apophrades —7 that the young writer must go through if he wants to come full circle.8 As Bloom reminds his readers, “[p]oetic influence, in the sense I give to it, has almost nothing to do with the verbal resemblances between one poet and another” (Bloom 1980: 19). The meaning inscribed in the word “influence” presented in this book is quite different from Bloom’s, although I would like to highlight his understanding of the phenomenon of misprision as a “creative” act, which is an essential component of the theory proposed here.9 The concept of creative influence and the related methodology used in this book take their cue from Bloom’s “creative misprision,” although at the same time they seek to dissociate from his monologic and decontextualized approach. In fact, to advance my view I find a more productive terrain of discussion in the French post-structuralist theory of “intertextuality,” which owes its name to Bulgarian-born philosopher Julia Kristeva. As any introduction to Kristeva’s work will remind her readers, however, a full engagement with her theory of intertextuality cannot be comprehensive without considering her mentor and colleague Roland Barthes, nor without reaching back to Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin.10 Indeed, Kristeva sees Bakhtin as a precursor of intertextuality by virtue of his new dynamic conception of the literary text, which comes forward in his understanding of the novel as the “polyphonic” space where the conflict between “monologism” (an authoritative power) and “dialogism” (a subversive tendency) take place (Brewer 2013: 4). Bakhtin’s ideas anticipate the reflections on the heterogeneity of texts and the roles played by writers and readers that will occupy the pens of Kristeva and her contemporaries. According to Kristeva: Bakhtin was one of the first to replace the static hewing out of texts with a model where literary structure does not simply exist but is generated in relation to another structure. What allows a dynamic dimension to structuralism is his conception of the “literary word” as an intersection of textual surfaces rather than a point (a fixed meaning), as a dialogue among several writings: that of the writer, the addressee (or character), and the contemporary or earlier cultural context. (Kristeva 1980: 64–65. Emphasis Kristeva’s)

8

M.-L. CENEDESE

Unknown in the West until then, Bakhtin owes his introduction into the (French) intellectual world to Kristeva, who presented his work at Barthes’s seminar in 1966 (“Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” then published in Séméiotiké: Recherches pour une sémanalyse in 1969).11 Drawing on Bakhtin, Kristeva will famously formulate that “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (66), thus summarizing the conviction she shares with Barthes that literature is not a static product but rather a process, a soto-speak “work in progress” where different voices interweave, collide, assimilate (cf. Becker-Leckrone 2005: 11–12, 92). This is the original intertextuality that “replaces [the notion of] intersubjectivity” (Kristeva 1980: 66).12 Through the mediation of Kristeva, Bakhtin’s work also informs Barthes’s thought and explains the process that led him to his radical dismissal of the Author. In Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” (1968, Barthes 1990a), an echo of Bakhtin’s polyphony and dialogism can be found in the criticism of the importance given by capitalist ideology to the man or woman producing the work, which is also the same “voice of a single person,” that is the author, to whom the meaning of the work is ascribed (Barthes 1990a: 143). Bakhtin’s denunciation of the pervasiveness of “the author’s field of vision,” emblematic of a monologic discourse (Bakhtin 1984: 71), and the importance of the “carnival” in dialogism reverberate in Barthes’s affirmations that a text is “an irreducible […] plural” (Barthes 1990b: 159). It is “not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture” (1990a: 146. Emphasis added). Furthermore, Barthes writes, the author may come back in the text “inscribed in the novel like one of his characters, figured in the carpet; no longer privileged, paternal, aletheological, his inscription is ludic” (1990b: 161). Barthes’s “tissue of quotations” distinctly recalls Kristeva’s “mosaic of quotations,” but it also connects to “From Work to Text” (1971, Barthes 1990b), in which he reiterates the beautiful image of “a tissue, a woven fabric” (159). In this same essay Barthes also defined intertextuality as that “in which every text is held, it itself being the text-between of another text” (160). Here Barthes clearly distinguishes intertextuality from clear-cut source study and influence, which he sees as falling in with “the myth of

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

9

filiation; the citations which go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas” (160).13 What Barthes brings forward in his definition of intertextuality is the inseparable link between cultural context and textual production, and the unconsciousness it may be filled with. Besides remarking upon the repetition of the word “quotations” and the evocation of Bloom’s Freudian vocabulary in Barthes’s lexical choices (“filiation,” “paternal” and “Father”),14 in order to explain the concept of creative influence, it is important to pause on the “anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read” quotations that he mentions. Susan Bassnett recalls that early programmes in comparative literature were experimental and unstructured. Therefore, the attempt to break out of the confines of national literatures would urge students to go on treasure-hunt-like explorations of direct and demonstrable links between writers, based on incontrovertible and trustworthy evidence left by the writers themselves. However, such indisputable proof is often lacking, and so demonstrating the influence of one writer on another becomes difficult if not impossible (Bassnett 2007: 137). Furthermore, Bassnett underlines that “writers draw their inspiration from all kinds of sources, some conscious, some unconscious, some acknowledged, some vehemently denied. All that we, as readers, can do is to see parallels, connections, affinities, and this is a more fruitful approach than one which seeks to prove certainty where certainty is a chimera” (138).15 This is where creative influence, building on Le Juez’s “creative reception”, becomes most useful; in its capacity “to contain both the conscious and the unconscious, the acknowledged and the denied” (Kershaw 2015: 348. Emphasis Kershaw’s), it elicits new parallels and affinities that engage with the already read. Likewise Barthes’s intertextuality allows the reader to be “the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost” (Barthes 1990a: 148), in contrast to Bloom’s idea of influence as that which delineates a map of names and identifiable sources. Therefore, the reader may envisage intertextual connections when there is no “incontrovertible proof” of such connections. Creative influence seizes the creative and embracing role that the reader holds in Barthes’s intertextuality, but also challenges the statement that “the reader is without history, biography, psychology” (148) by instead situating her firmly in her history, biography and psychology. Thus, in creative influence the reader is that who brings her own “horizon of aesthetic experience” (Jauss 1982: 23), which opens up to a “dimension of historical experience

10

M.-L. CENEDESE

that must include the historical standpoint of the present observer, that is, the literary historian” (34). Otherwise said, the situated subjectivity of the reader (i.e. Jablonka’s “situated researcher”) becomes an essential moment of the hermeneutic process, insofar as she brings her own knowledge and experience to the analysis. Given the importance assigned to the reading process, it is evident that this book’s critical method is also rooted in the work of Constance School theorists Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. In Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Reception (1982), Jauss proposed a critical approach based on the understanding that a response to a literary work is mediated both by its context of production and the context of its reception. Next to the historical time of the author, his analysis brings forward the historical situatedness of the reader. Similarly, Iser’s phenomenological approach claimed that the literary work comes into existence when text and reader converge (Iser 1974: 275). The act of reading is a dynamic experience of sense-making in which the reader, through her own imagination and by choosing from (or excluding) various possibilities of realization, fills elements of textual indeterminacy (or “gaps”). In The Implied Reader (1974), Iser writes that as we read “we uncover the unformulated part of the text, and this very indeterminacy is the force that drives us to work out a configurative meaning while at the same time giving us the necessary degree of freedom to do so” (287). The act of reading is the construction of a “virtual dimension” that implicates the reader’s creative role and involves “viewing the text through a perspective that is continually on the move” (280). However, despite this emphasis on the reader’s creativity, Iser’s stance is ambiguous: he downplays the degree of freedom of the imagination by affirming that the author is supposed to activate the reader’s imagination so that she can “realize the intention of his text” (282). This reiterates what Iser had mentioned in a previous essay—that “the meaning is conditioned by the text itself” and that the author “compels the reader to be that much more aware of the intention of the text” (“Indeterminacy and the Reader’s response in Prose Fiction,” qtd. in Suleiman 1980: 25). Furthermore, Iser’s reading subject “is not a specific, historically situated individual but a transhistorical mind whose activities are, at least formally, everywhere the same” (25). Although Jauss’s conception of a reader that is “actual” rather than implied, anchored yet evolving within a historical context, is more relevant for our purposes, Iser’s insistence on the reader’s creative role, albeit limited by its own

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

11

ambiguity, reminds us of the importance of subjectivity and creativity in reading practices. Throughout the book, I make use of the notion “horizon of expectations” (Erwartungshorizont ). Simply put, the horizon of expectations indicates the dialectic between the cultural and social expectations of production and reception “in the historical moment of [the work’s] appearance” (Jauss 1982: 22) and the different expectations of later readers of that same work. Such a historical-sociological variety of reception “bring[s] to view the hermeneutic difference between the former and the current understanding of a work” (28). This thereby determines the readers’ changing horizons of expectations, “which are themselves the result of both literary evolution and the evolution of cultural, political, and social conditions and norms in the society at large” (Suleiman 1980: 36). Thus, the horizon of expectations acknowledges that the future reception of a text is open to new questions and interpretations that unfold with the mutations of horizons. However, although he appreciates the “multiplicity of literary phenomena,” Jauss’s investigation presupposes that reading is a collective phenomenon in which the individual reader is part of a homogenous reading public. In fact, he writes that, from the point of view of an aesthetics of reception, the heterogeneity of literary phenomena “coalesces again for the audience that perceives them and relates them to one another as works of its present, in the unity of a common horizon of literary expectations, memories, and anticipations that establishes their significance” (Jauss 1982: 38; Jauss’s emphasis. Cf. also Suleiman 1980: 35–37). For Jauss, then, reception is not a dynamic process that allows a multiplicity of reading publics , and even though he takes into account the changes in readers’ horizons of expectations, they do not produce heterogeneous reading positions (cf. Kaakinen 2017: 6–8).

The Archive and Affective Reading Although my method comes close to Jauss’s approach in considering the reader as moving through changing historical conditions, creative influence includes a more differentiated conception of reading positions that takes into account the act of reading as a private and affective experience. Such experience comes to the fore in the study of Némirovsky’s archive. Jeffrey Wallen has argued that the archive is “a repository, a place of storage” that “contains droplets of time—observations, pieces

12

M.-L. CENEDESE

of data that can reawaken a memory”: as such, the archive awaits the “researcher who can make use of this information” (Wallen 2009: 261). While the archive provides an encounter with the “traces of memory,” it also shows “processes of ordering and transforming experience” (276),16 and thus contributes an insight into the act of reading as well as into the unfolding of the creative act. Among others, Arlette Farge (1989/2013), Natalie Zemon Davis (1987), Michel Foucault (1977/2001) and Maria Tamboukou (2013) have demonstrated how archival research involves creative forces that entangle researcher, archival space and historical records.17 A large part of the research included in this book comes from different French archives and is at the core of the analysis proposed. The archive has not only been a source of factual knowledge, but also a place of creative and affective encounter between readers, writers and researchers. When I talk about an affective encounter, I associate with what Tamboukou (2017) calls “archival sensibility,” which considers that archival documents provide more than just citable sources—they can also surprise us, direct us, interrogate us. As much as possible, I tried to let Némirovsky’s archival documents speak to me. I engaged with them empathetically, with the conviction that “we need to be sensitive to the lives of the documents found in the archive, try to understand and map the conditions of their possibility and attempt to imagine their lives before and after our encounter with them,” persuaded that “we need to be sensitive to their potentiality, the forces and effects of their intensity, which we need to facilitate and set in motion, rather than block, hide or sidestep” (Tamboukou 2017: 4). In particular, Parts I and III of this book are largely built on archival evidence that they use not only to advance their respective arguments, but also to preserve the memory of a creative process.18 The IMEC, Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine (Institute for Contemporary Publishing Archives), was handed down Némirovsky’s papers by her daughters in 1995, and in 2005 it added to the inventory the documents that were under the collections of the publishing house Albin Michel. The archive incorporates miscellaneous content encompassing: hand-written manuscripts; work journals; research notes; typescript manuscripts; proofs; letters from and to different senders and recipients; photographs; reviews, interviews, and other “profile” articles. The material ranges from the period of Némirovsky’s life until the present day, and can be divided into four temporal segments: (1) 1919–1929; (2) 1929–1942; (3) 1942–2004; and (4) 2004–present. The first includes

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

13

Némirovsky’s early notebooks and first literary works (her juvenilia, so to speak), such as the Nonoche series (Fantasio 1921), La Niania (Le Matin 1924), and the novels published in Les Œuvres libres —Le Malentendu (1926. The Misunderstanding ), L’Enfant genial (1927. The Child Prodigy), and L’Ennemie (1928. The Enemy). The second segment spans the entirety of Némirovsky’s successful lifelong career, starting with the publication of David Golder in 1929 and closing with Les Chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves ) in 1940, and including what was published under pseudonym (Pierre Nerey/Neyret or Denise Mérande) while she was in Issy l’Évêque. The third segment includes posthumous publications (La Vie de Tchekhov, 1946. A Life of Chekhov; Les Biens de ce monde, 1947. All Our Worldly Goods; Les Feux de l’automne, 1957. The Fires of Autumn; Dimanche et autres nouvelles , 2000. Dimanche and Other Stories; Destinées et autres nouvelles, 2004. Destinées and Other Stories ) and letters written after hers and her husband’s respective deportations. Thus, this third segment covers the timespan until the publication of Suite française in 2004, which marks the beginning of the fourth and final archival segment, during which Némirovsky’s name came back to the fore of French letters and scholarship.19 In the last fifteenplus years Némirovsky’s novels and short stories have been republished and translated into several other languages; scholars have analysed and assessed her work under different critical lenses; the public has rediscovered Némirovsky’s name and turned her into a sensation; her works are being once again adapted for the screen—after Julien Duvivier’s David Golder (1930) and Wilhelm Thiele’s Le Bal (1931), most recently Saul Dibb adapted Suite française to the screen (2015)—as well as for the stage (David Golder by Fernand Nozière in 1930 and the double bill Tempête en juin and Suite française, adapted by Virginie Lemoine and Stéphane Laporte in 2018–2019). Several international museums have organized exhibitions where Némirovsky’s life and works have been presented to the general public, without omitting to show the manuscripts, the leatherbound notebook, the suitcase that contained Suite française, and to organize events seeking to put her into perspective and to showcase her idiosyncrasies and polemical aspects (such as “the Jewish question”).20 Besides the important corpus of the IMEC, other material was available in the following establishments: at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF–National Library of France) I was able to consult the original periodicals and journals that published Némirovsky’s work; at

14

M.-L. CENEDESE

the Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA–National Audiovisual Institute), housed at the BnF, I listened to several radio programmes on Némirovsky (this was before the “podcast revolution”), and one in particular needs to be singled out because it offered an excerpt from an original interview with Némirovsky, which was also diffused at the 2010– 2011 exhibition at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.21 Finally, at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand I had access to two dossiers documentaires alongside books, press cuts and some original publications.22 This book also mentions documents from the National Archives (Archives nationales ) related to Némirovsky’s education at the Sorbonne, which I did not consult myself but that were referenced by Angela Kershaw (2010, 2015) and by Némirovsky’s biographers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt (2009, 2010). Loosely organizing the archive allows me to highlight the fluctuating fortunes of Némirovsky, reflecting her journey from her young apprenticeship, to popular writer, to forgotten author, and to recently rediscovered novelist. Such temporal segmentation also shows how Némirovsky must be considered a writer who is solidly anchored within her time (i.e. her cultural context of production and reception)23 but who has also been able to reach far beyond it. As “the place where one can find the ‘facts’” (Wallen 2009: 268), the archive defines and demarcates the concrete (“factual”) limits of our research material; however, at the same time, by exceeding the boundaries of Némirovsky’s life, it also sets the conditions to trespass the archive’s own boundaries.24 That is, if the archive is “a place where secrets are revealed or where one can now find truths that had been hidden” (268), the innumerable questions that it raises give us the freedom to think imaginatively through its gaps, or lack thereof. The encounter with the archive takes the researcher to a space “between the living and the dead, the personal and the impersonal, the public and the private, the fragment and the whole” (262), which is where spontaneous affective practices can be imagined and undertaken.

Outline of the Book After this introductory chapter, the book is divided into three sections, each one an exploration of creative influence in relation to Némirovsky and, respectively, Tolstoy (“Creative Reception”), Dostoevsky (“Unconscious Influence”) and Chekhov (“Reading in Context”). In each part, single chapters open a conversation among texts, writers, readers and

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

15

researchers that seeks to emulate the unfurling of the creative flow in processes of influence, reception and creation. Overall, each part considers Némirovsky’s work alongside one of the three Russian masters and analyses the complexity of each of these relationships, as well as the different modes in which they appear. Together, integrating reading and writing, reception and creation, fiction and archive, they aim to show how Némirovsky engaged with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov; to what degree they influenced her; how this influence affected her work; and to what effect. Part I looks at Némirovsky’s connection to Tolstoy, focusing on the relationship between War and Peace (1867) and Suite française (1940– 1942/2004), and largely exploring matters of form. Chapter 2 begins from the direct link between Némirovsky and Tolstoy, which can be firmly established through interviews she gave to the interwar press; records of her enrolment in the degree in Russian literature at the Sorbonne, where Tolstoy’s novels were certainly on the syllabus; in the active role she affords him in her biography of Chekhov (La Vie de Tchekhov); and, especially, through the multiple references available in the writing journal for Suite française. These documents allow us to map a “meeting of artistic minds” (Le Juez 2014) by foregrounding how Némirovsky received her precursor’s work and critically engaged with it both in her private creative practice as well as in the public eye. Perusing the archive in relation to “the making of” Suite française, Chapter 2 projects us in the midst of Némirovsky’s creative process, as she elaborated her novel responding to what she knew had been criticized in War and Peace, namely its lack of unity or focus due to an ambitious form that moves between historical reflections and fictional narrative. The attentive analysis of the archive brings to the fore the mediation of British modernist writer and critic E. M. Forster in Némirovsky’s reception of Tolstoy. In Aspects of the Novel (1927) Forster frequently referenced Tolstoy’s magnum opus and stressed its relation to what he called “expansion”—a technique of “opening out” rather than “closing in” that Némirovsky used in Suite française and in previous novels. It is thanks to the idea of expansion that Némirovsky, concerned (like Tolstoy) with the interrelations of history, individuals and communities, was able to find the central focus of her narrative interest in the human (rather than the historical). Once she established that she wanted to portray what would be relevant in fifty or a hundred years—not

16

M.-L. CENEDESE

the specifics of history but the universalities of human lives and interactions—Némirovsky set out to write a novel that would expose readers to a multiplicity of perspectives. Chapter 3 elaborates on Suite française’s unfixed narrative voice by posing two questions: is Suite française a polyphonic novel? And if so, how is it possible to reconcile this with its Tolstoyan influence? Most critical readings of Suite française have favoured a “monologic” reading by virtue of Némirovsky’s allegedly active authorial criticism of Vichy and its collaborators. After a brief overview of Bakhtin’s concepts of dialogism and the polyphonic novel, the chapter reviews his contradictory remarks about Tolstoy’s “monolithically monologic” novels and his inconsistent stance about Tolstoy’s work—monologic, yet also dialogic. Renewing the dialogue with the archive and the extant manuscript of Suite française, first I underline the novel’s variety of points of view and their social diversity. Then, I propose a detailed analysis of Némirovsky’s narrative strategies that pinpoint the ways in which, through irony and satire, Némirovsky is able to create a polyphonic narrative. Thus, in this Chapter, I suggest that we should see in Némirovsky’s dialogism and polyphonic narrative voice an overcoming of Tolstoy, which projects Némirovsky’s creative reception beyond the limits of War and Peace and Suite française. Indeed, Chapter 4 takes the reader beyond the limits of Tolstoy’s creative influence on Némirovsky by turning to the creative tool she chose in order to overcome the issues of structural unity that Chapter 2 delineated, and that the multivoiced narrative analysed in Chapter 3 had exacerbated. From the title of her novel, Suite française, the French suite, we are evidently in front of a novel that was inspired by music: therefore, starting with the presence of music in Némirovsky’s previous work, I explore in great detail its expression in Suite française. Dancing through the manuscripts and existing scholarship, the chapter shows at first how Némirovsky used music to structure her fictional material from an external point of view, that is, playing on oppositions and counterpoints à la Bach and following the sonata form. Next, the chapter studies the role of music as an internal structuring component. The focus is in particular on one chapter from “Dolce” (and the journal notes connected to it) where Némirovsky sets the scene for the description of the German officer Bruno von Falk’s musical piece, which for Olivier Philipponnat represents the mise en abyme of the whole novel (Philipponnat 2012). Finally, Chapter 4 suggests that, besides working as a structuring agent that reveals the inner

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

17

workings of the novel, music is an element that provides the “expansion” or open-endedness that would enable the engagement of future readers. Part II explores what I call the “unconscious” influence, or Chaudier’s “oblique reception” (2008: 71), of Dostoevsky. Starting from the observation that, unlike for Tolstoy (Part I) or Chekhov (Part III), neither in interviews nor archival notes is there direct evidence of Dostoevsky’s impact on Némirovsky, in the three chapters I explore the meaning of one reference to Dostoevsky included in Les Chiens et les loups , and from then on I follow the “materialization” of his influence through an exploration of the Dostoevskian qualities of Némirovsky’s work. This exploration is strongly grounded in the theories of Julia Kristeva. Chapter 5 focuses on Les Chiens et les loups and in particular on a central sentence: “Don’t you find there’s something Dostoevskian about her?” (DW: 125).25 Starting from the premise that Némirovsky is referring to Ada herself (rather than to her artwork), in this chapter I look at what may associate this character with two typically Dostoevskian figures: the Dreamer and the Underground Man. Dostoevsky’s The White Nights (1848) and Notes from the Underground (1864) are put into close-textual dialogue with Les Chiens et les loups, and the resulting analysis reveals a common interplay between dream and reality, where art performs a major role in connecting the two. The insistence on the dichotomy dream/reality is linked to the phenomenon of the “double,” of which Dostoevsky is a notorious portraitist and that often recurs in Némirovsky’s production too. Les Chiens et les loups offers several configurations of the theme, and in turn allows us to consider questions of aesthetic opposition (French vs. Russian), as well as gender and sexuality. As a result, we come to the conclusion that in Les Chiens et les loups Némirovsky is problematizing the use of normative stereotypes linked to masculinity and femininity, and also undermining the hegemonic male–female power structure. Chapters 6 and 7 continue to underline the relationship with Dostoevsky by operating a Kristevan reading of Némirovsky (Kristeva 1982, 1987, 1992). Chapter 6 explores the presence of “abjection” in Némirovsky’s work, in particular in the short story “Fraternité” (1937) and the novel Les Chiens et les loups . In “Fraternité,” abjection arises when the assimilated Jew meets his Eastern-European counterpart; thus, because of its in-betweenness, Jewish assimilation is presented as an abject space, a space of danger that locates the Jew neither inside (Frenchness) nor outside (Jewishness). Likewise, Les Chiens et les loups also suggests

18

M.-L. CENEDESE

the failure of assimilation and offers several examples of how the sense of foreignness materializes through abjection. Furthermore, the novel also exemplifies the transgressive, menacing nature of abjection: for instance, Harry’s marriage proposal to Laurence Delarcher performs abjection’s disturbance of borders and subversion of the pre-constituted social order. Another example of such overthrowing happens early in the novel, in the episode that describes the pogrom and the children’s frantic arrival at the house of their rich relatives, up on the hills outside of the Ghetto. Finally, building on Foucault’s discussion of heterotopic spaces (Foucault 1967/2000) and the connection between heterotopia and abjection (Li 2016), the chapter shows how the Ghetto is a heterotopic space, hence the ultimate abject space. The idea of a typically Dostoevskian “anthropology of suffering,” advanced by Kristeva in Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1992), introduces the analysis of Chapter 7, which aims to establish whether such an anthropology can also be at the heart of Némirovsky’s work. How does suffering manifest itself in Némirovsky’s work? Does it adopt the Dostoevskian way or can one speak of an ontology of its own? The language of suffering used by Némirovsky in her novels harmoniously ties with Kristeva’s vocabulary of sensuality and voluptuousness—lexical choices that in both cases also describe the frequent entanglements between love, passion and suffering. According to Kristeva, suffering can only lead to two solutions: either to death (murder or suicide) or to forgiveness, and it is towards the latter that, according to her, Dostoevsky’s work gravitates. However, in striking contrast to what Kristeva observes in Dostoevsky’s novels, my analysis notes how Némirovsky seems to repeatedly deny the redeeming potential of forgiveness in favour of a secular view of death, welcomed as a relief against a life of suffering. The in-depth study of some novels, open to a gendered reading, prompts us to define the agency of suffering and to also establish a love–pain–death triangulation, suggested by Kristeva’s Histoires d’amour (1983—Tales of Love, 1987). This reading connects with the themes of the previous chapter, in particular with the tension between subject and object (self/other, dream/reality) proper of abjection, and therefore it further emphasizes the affinities between Dostoevsky and Némirovsky. As a whole, the second part of the book aims to show that, in order to highlight the Dostoevskian elements of Némirovsky’s work, it is important to establish a productive dialogue, that is, both critical and creative, between different agents carrying heterogeneous horizons.

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

19

Part III turns to Anton Chekhov, playwright and indefatigable shortstory writer greatly admired by Némirovsky, on whom she wrote her only full-length biography, La Vie de Tchekhov (1946). The biography is at the core of the present book’s final section: this choice is due to the desire to bring a variety of genres to the corpus analysed—Parts I and II having examined a large selection of Némirovsky’s novels and short stories. Part III, therefore, seeks to widen the range of texts by including a genre that Némirovsky had wanted and tried to approach on multiple occasions, as evidenced by the manuscripts. Indeed, in the archive we find many references to possible biographical works: a biography of Pushkin, of which exists an article published in the journal Marianne (25 March 1936); a life of young Napoleon (1937–1938); a radio programme on empress Joséphine’s life, with its remaining typescript probably dating to 1939; and, finally, between 4 January and 15 March 1939, under the title “Grandes Romancières Étrangères,” Némirovsky gave six radio conferences at Radio Paris (Lussone 2013: 459; Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 403).26 In addition, a focus on biography permits an engagement with Némirovsky’s place within the literary field of its production, as well as that of its reception. In this way, Part III demonstrates the productivity of the creative influence method as a means to foreground the ethical and metanarrative aspects within Némirovsky’s late work. In Chapter 8 I consider La Vie de Tchekhov within its context of production in interwar France. I start by looking at the book’s reception upon its posthumous publication. I notice that critics singled out Némirovsky’s double affiliation as a privileged position to understand Chekhov’s “Russian soul” and to make him intelligible to French readers—a view that Némirovsky seems to have shared, too. In the chapter I review Némirovsky’s attentive research on Chekhov by referring to previously unpublished material from the archive, where there are notebooks covered in Némirovsky’s Russian handwriting. Perusing the archive, one can find typescript manuscripts of La Vie de Tchekhov with Némirovsky’s comments, her husband’s corrections, as well as funny exchanges between spouses. All these details from the archives—what Némirovsky studied, the lists and descriptions she deemed useful, the selections she made, the transliteration she settled on—enable us to peek into Némirovsky’s creative process. The last part of Chapter 8 assesses the biography within the evolution of biographical writing, up until the first decades of the 1900s, when the genre was more or less “codified”

20

M.-L. CENEDESE

upon the requirement for a vivid rendering of the subject’s inner life and a strong authorship. Chapter 9 takes its cue from the final remarks made in the previous chapter about the involvement of the author’s subjectivity, and in this way takes La Vie de Tchekhov “to the twenty-firts century.” Here I argue that the (self-)reflexive elements of the biography allow us to read it as: (1) a metanarrative text in which Némirovsky considered the role of writers as creators of narratives that may have an impact on the public space and in people’s perceptions of each other (for example, the Jewish émigré minority that she often portrayed in her previous works); (2) a space where she deployed a “cautious engagement ,” that is, where she connects with the ethical potential of literature and the prefiguration of the écrivain-engagé. For these reasons La Vie de Tchekhov does not lose potential when seen alongside recent romanced biographies (ca. 2000– 2018): indeed, to bring it into dialogue with contemporary forms of life writing and to assess it through the eye of narrative hermeneutics can only foreground the multidirectional memory work of the self-reflexive passages, which in turn enhance the modernity of Némirovsky’s work. The Conclusion (Chapter 10) draws together the different approaches to the study of influence developed in the book, which illustrate the depth of cultural resonance that connects Némirovsky’s French-language work to the Russian literary heritage of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. By bringing together the overall results provided by the different modes of analysis, this final chapter underlines the relevance of Russian literature for a more exhaustive understanding of Némirovsky’s work. It also stresses how reception, influence and creativity form an interdependent relationship that is essential in order to understand the work and creative practice of transnational authors. At the same time, it foregrounds how this method of comparative analysis may serve as a theoretical and analytical resource for studying phenomena of influence, reception and reading, without forgetting the role of creativity and personal affective responses.

Notes 1. For instance, Lienhardt and Philipponnat write that Némirovsky was never part of the Russian literary emigration because she was not only “too young and too French” but also she belonged to a milieu, that of Jewish bankers, that would have made taking part in the life of the Russian intelligentsia quite unlikely (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 88). See also

1

2. 3.

4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

21

Stemberger (2013: 57). However, Lienhardt and Philipponnat also nod to Némirovsky’s “resolutely modernist, syncopated style” (88) of the Russian verses found in IMEC, NMR 7.1, Carnet avec poèmes et notes. Némirovsky converted to Catholicism in 1939. One of her journal notes says that the future is “in the laps of the Gods” (SF: 357). While I explain the reasons for choosing Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov, who are without any doubt crucial references in Némirovsky’s work, there is scope for investigating other Russian authors and intertexts. For instance, in this book I mention Némirovsky’s project of a Pushkin biography and her connection to Turgenev. Other traces of Russian literary influences worth exploring might be the role of classical Russian literature (e.g. Gogol’) or her representation of St Petersburg. (Thank you to Martina Stemberger for pointing out these two connections in her reading of this book’s manuscript). Le Juez points out that “comparatists began approaching the reception question from very early on in the history of the discipline under the notion of ‘influence’” (2014. Emphasis added). Jablonka is thinking of subjects of historical study, but as his book argues, history and literature have only evolved to become separate disciplines, though they should not be considered as categorically so. Jablonka acknowledges (although in my opinion without giving its due weight) the crucial contribution of gender studies on this point and mentions Sandra Harding’s 1987 Feminism and Methodology (Jablonka 2018: x). Cf. Bloom (1997: 14–16) for a synthesis of these terms. In Bloom’s study the poet is always a white male, and the reader is also always a “he.” In A Map of Misreading , Bloom connects writing to reading by equating the critical act of misprision, which is at the root of poetic influence, to “the necessary critical acts performed by every strong reader upon every text he encounters. The influence-relation governs reading as it governs writing, and reading is therefore a miswriting just as writing is a misreading” (1980: 3). For more details on some of Bakhtin’s main ideas, such as “polyphony,” “monologism” and “heteroglossia,” see Chapter 3 “Departing from Tolstoy: Polyphony and Monologism” (sect. “Reading with Bakhtin,” pp. 57–61). Now in the essays collection Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980). Kristeva will later propose, instead of the term intertextuality that “has often been understood in the banal sense of ‘study of sources’,” the term transposition, “because it specifies that the passage from one signifying system to another demands a new articulation of the thetic—of

22

M.-L. CENEDESE

13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

enunciative and denotative positionality” (qtd. in Becker-Leckrone 2005: 107). Emphasis Barthes’s. “As for the Text, it reads without the inscription of the Father” (Barthes 1990b: 161). It is important to point out that Barthes is not making a direct polemical reference to Bloom, who published The Anxiety of Influence in January 1973. At the same time, since Bloom says he originally wrote his book in the summer of 1967 and revised it in the following years, we could speculate whether in the meantime he might have had access to Barthes’ essays, which were published respectively in Mantéia V , 1968 and Revue d’esthétique 3, 1971 (cf. Bloom 1997: xi; Barthes 1990: 13). However, such a speculation goes beside the scope of this book and is not necessary to its argument. On this aspect, see also the following passage from Kershaw: “It is important not to exaggerate the significance of literary allusions, though they do function as both ‘sources’ and ‘influences’. The identification of such ‘sources’ can never provide a complete explanation of a given text, and the analysis of literary influences should not lead to a search for some point of textual origin. Concrete relations do exist between works of literature, and they can be traced, but the search for influences must not be fetishised. It is perhaps helpful to keep in mind the image of a web of interrelations, and to reject the idea of a chain of causality leading back to some point of origin” (Kershaw 2010: 50). Wallen refers to systemic processes such as state archives (in his case, the Stasi archive). I am grateful to my friend and colleague, Samira Saramo, for these useful references. The creative process being part of one’s identity, which the archive “actively shapes and produces” (Wallen 2009: 269). For a comprehensive bibliography with publication details, cf. Lienhardt and Philipponnat (2010: 441–444). For a study of “the Némirovsky question,” cf. Suleiman (2016); see her “Introduction,” p. 10, for a brief mention of the first exhibitions in New York (2008) and Paris (2011). “L’humeur vagabonde” radio broadcast with Némirovsky’s biographers Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Lienhardt, France Inter 13 September 2007 (INA—DL R VIS 20070913 FIT 12). Given the fairly recent events involving this institution that mobilized a great number of people in France and internationally, I would like to add a few words about it here, as a testament of active support for such a fundamental institution and others alike. The Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand is the Paris city library specialized in the history of women, feminism and gender, founded in 1932 in the 5th arrondissement and

1

23.

24.

25.

26.

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

23

since 1989 housed in the 13th next to the médiathèque Jean-Pierre Melville (see: Archives du féminisme, “Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand”). In 2016 the Municipality of Paris had planned to transfer this archive to the Bibliothèque historique de la ville de Paris (BHVP) in order to give it “a central and prestigious” space where its content would have been better promoted and enhanced. Fearing the opposite, syndicates and notable intellectuals and scholars opposed the project. Mobilized around the collective Sauvons la BMD (http://sauvonslabmd.fr), they organized several demonstrations throughout 2017 (the last one on 18 November 2017). Finally, the project was cancelled by the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, in December 2017 (see e.g. Archives du féminisme, “Sauvons la bibliothèque Marguerite Durand !” ; Moran 2017. Listen also to podcast La Poudre, épisode Bonus – Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, 2/11/2017). The library reopened on 14 February 2020. Angela Kershaw’s Before Auschwitz (2010) aims precisely at situating Némirovsky’s works “in relation to the literary field in which they were produced” (2). Indeed, Wallen also suggests that archival materials “exceed what can be remembered and are not screened by the filters with which we understand and view ourselves” (269–270). “Her” refers to the protagonist of the novel, Ada Sinner. Similar references to Dostoevsky also recur in the short stories “Ida” (1934, Némirovsky 2006) and “Espoirs” (1938, Némirovsky 2004). Cf. Chapter 5 n8. There are no records on the subject of these radio conferences, since they were neither recorded nor published in Cahiers de Radio Paris (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 609 n53).

References Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham and London: Duke UP. Archives du Féminisme. “Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand”. https://www.archiv esdufeminisme.fr/liens/bib-marguerite-durand-presentation/. ———. “Sauvons la bibliothèque Marguerite Durand !”. http://www.archivesd ufeminisme.fr/actualites/sauvons-bibliotheque-marguerite-durand/. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Barthes, Roland. 1990. Image–Music–Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press. ———. 1990a. “The Death of the Author.” In R. Barthes, Image–Music–Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 142–148. ———. 1990b. “From Work to Text.” In R. Barthes, Image–Music–Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. London: Fontana Press, 155–164.

24

M.-L. CENEDESE

Bassnett, Susan. 2007. “Influence and Intertextuality: A Reappraisal.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43:2, 134–146. Becker-Leckrone, Megan. 2005. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bloom, Harold. 1973/1997. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP. ———. 1980. A Map of Misreading. Oxford: Oxford UP. Brewer, Daniel. 2013. “Influence: Form, Subjects, Time.” In James Fowler, Ana de Medeiros, and Tom Baldwin (eds.), Questions of Influence in Modern French Literature. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1–17. Chaudier, Stéphane. 2008. “‘Une humanité fantastique’: Némirovsky et Dostoïevski.” Tangence, 86, 67–88. David Golder. 1930. Dir. Julien Duvivier. David Golder by Irène Némirovsky. 1930. Dir. Fernand Nozière (Théâtre de la Porte St Martin). Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1987. Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France. Stanford: Stanford UP. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2009a. White Nights. In A Gentle Creature and Other Stories. Trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1–57. ———. 2009b. Notes from Underground. In Notes from Underground and The Double. Trans. Ronald Wilks. London: Penguin, 1–118. Farge, Arlette. 1989/2013. The Allure of the Archives. Trans. T. Scott-Railton. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Foucault, Michel. 1967/2000. “Different Spaces”. In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 2. Trans. Robert Hurley, edited by James Faubion. London: Penguin, 175–186. ———. 1977/2001. “Lives of Infamous Men.” In J. D. Faubion (ed.), Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984. New York: The New Press, 157–176. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14:3, 575–599. Howthorn, Jeremy and Lothe, Jakob. 2013. “Introduction: The Ethical (Re)Turn.” In Jakob Lothe and Hawthorn Jeremy (eds.), Narrative Ethics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–10. IMEC, NMR 7.1—Carnet avec poèmes et notes. Iser, Wolfgang. 1974. The Implied Reader. Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins UP. Jablonka, Ivan. 2018. History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences. Trans. Nathan Bracher. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Jauss, Hans Robert. 1982. Towards an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press.

1

INTRODUCTION: CREATIVE ENCOUNTERS OVER TIME AND SPACE …

25

Kaakinen, Kaisa. 2017. Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Reading Conrad, Weiss, Sebald. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York: Routledge. ———. 2015. “Influence Revisited: Irène Némirovsky’s Creative Reading of English Literature.” Modern Language Review, 110:2, 339–361. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Desire in Language. A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 1987. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 1992. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP. La Poudre. 2017. Épisode Bonus–Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, 2/11/2017 https://www.nouvellesecoutes.fr/la-poudre/. Le Bal. 1931. Dir. Wilhelm Thiele. Le Juez, Brigitte. 2014. “Creative Reception: Reviving a Comparative Method” (unpaginated). http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/creative-receptionreviving-comparative-method. Li, Xiaofan Amy. 2016. “The Abject Heterotopia: Le Città Invisibili and ‘Junkspace’.” Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52:1, 70–80. Lienhardt, Patrick and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2009. La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus. Lussone, Teresa Manuela. 2013. “Vie de l’impératrice Joséphine, un inédit d’Irène Némirovsky.” Revue italienne d’études françaises 3, 457–476. Moran, Anaïs. 2017. “À Paris, la bibliothèque Marguerite Durand restera finalement dans ses locaux.” Libération (10 December 2017). https://www. liberation.fr/france/2017/12/10/a-paris-la-bibliotheque-marguerite-dur and-restera-finalement-dans-ses-locaux_1615708. Némirovsky, Irène. 2004. “Espoirs.” In I. Némirovsky, Destinées et autres nouvelles. Pin-Balma: Sables, 137–166. ———. 2006. “Ida.” In I. Némirovsky, Ida, suivi de la Comédie bourgeoise. Paris: Denoël. ———. 2008a. Les Chiens et les loups. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2008b. La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2009. The Dogs and the Wolves. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 2011. “Fraternité.” In Dimanche et autres nouvelles. Paris: Albin Michel, 84–100. ———. 2014. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage.

26

M.-L. CENEDESE

Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Philipponnat, Olivier. 2012. “‘Un ordre différent, plus puissant et plus beau’. Irène Némirovsky et le modèle symphonique.” Roman 20–50, 54, 75–86. Sauvons la BMD. http://sauvonslabmd.fr. Stemberger, Martina. 2013. “«… vous appelez ça du ‘Nietchevo’ n’est-ce pas? » Mises en scène de la langue « étrangère » chez Irène Némirovsky.” In Évelyne Enderlein and Lidiya Mihova (eds.), Écrire ailleurs au féminin dans le monde slave au XX e siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 55—84. Suite Française. 2015. Dir. Saul Dibb. Suite française by Irène Némirovsky. 2018. Dir. Virginie Lemoine (Festival Avignon). Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 1980. “Introduction: Varieties of Audience-Oriented Criticism.” In Susan Rubin Suleiman and Inge Crosman (eds.), The Reader in the Text. Essays on Audience and Interpretations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 3–45. ———. 2016. The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in Twentieth-Century France. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Tamboukou, Maria. 2013. “Archival Research: Unravelling Space/Time/Matter Entanglements and Fragments.” Qualitative Research 14:5, 617–633. ———. 2017. “Reassembling Documents of Life in the Archive”. European Journal of Life Writing 6, 1–19. Tempête en juin by Irène Némirovsky. 2018. Dir. Virginie Lemoine (Festival Avignon). Tolstoy, Leo. 2009. War and Peace. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage. Wallen, Jeffrey. 2009. “Narrative Tensions: The Archive and the Eyewitness.” Partial Answers 7:2, 261–278.

PART I

Tolstoy: Creative Reception

CHAPTER 2

From Russia to France, Via England: Suite française, War and Peace, and E. M. Forster

Referencing Tolstoy En ce qui concerne la Russie, je ne mets rien au-dessus de Tolstoï : il contient tout. Je crois que les Français, en général, préfèrent Dostoïevski, mais je ne partage pas ce goût : Dostoïevski est un genre purement russe, Tolstoï est humain ; Le drapeau d’Ivan Ilitch, par exemple, peut être compris par n’importe quel homme, vieux et malade et qui craint la mort, tandis que pour se mettre dans l’esprit de Raskolnikof ou de l’Idiot, il faut une mentalité spéciale et pour tout dire être un peu fou … (GRS 315 LAC ) As far as Russia is concerned, I place no one above Tolstoy; he has everything. I believe the French, in general, prefer Dostoevsky, but I do not share this taste: Dostoevsky is a purely Russian genre, Tolstoy is human; The Death of Ivan Ilyich, for example, can be understood by any man, old and sick and frightened of dying, whereas to put yourself in the mind of Raskolnikov or the Idiot you need a particular mentality and, to tell the truth, to be slightly mad … (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 151)1

Thus answered Némirovsky to journalist Frédéric Lefèvre, when he enquired about her “literary admirations” for Le Sud de Marseilles in 1933. Némirovsky’s reverence for Tolstoy is in fact well documented by excerpts from interviews she gave to the interwar literary press, such as © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_2

29

30

M.-L. CENEDESE

the one above, as well as by the regular reference to the Russian writer in the notes that accompany the composition of Suite française. For instance, in March 1930 Chanteclair reported that among her literary preferences were “Les grands Russes : Tolstoï, Dostoïevski” (GRS 315 DG. The great Russians: Tolstoy and Dostoevsky).2 In her notes we find entries such as: “Relire Tolstoï” (Read Tolstoy again) or “les scènes historiques les meilleures (voir Guerre et Paix) […]” (NMR 2.1. “the historical scenes are the best (see War and Peace) […]” [SF: 360]). Indeed, Némirovsky was a lifelong enthusiast of Tolstoy’s art. From her last annotation on the manuscript of Suite française we know that, only a few days before she was arrested, she was (re)reading Anna Karenina: “Les pins autour de moi. Je suis assise sur mon chandail bleu au milieu d’un océan de feuilles pourries et trempées par l’orage de la nuit derrière comme sur un radeau, les jambes repliées sous moi. J’ai dans mon sac le tome II d’Anne Karénine, le journal de K. M. et une orange” (NMR 2.1. “The pine trees all around me. I am sitting on my blue cardigan in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night’s storm, as if on a raft, my legs tucked under me. In my bag I have Volume II of Anna Karenina, K. M.’s Journal and an orange” [SF: 362]).3 Why such a penchant for Tolstoy? And what exactly was Némirovsky’s interpretation of the Russian author? In La Vie de Tchekhov (1946 but written in 1939–1940), Tolstoy plays a central role in Némirovsky’s reading of Chekhov, as she juxtaposes their works in order to critically engage with Chekhov’s oeuvre. Némirovsky shows an insightful knowledge of both writers, while articulating the artist’s struggle to find a voice of one’s own. In her reading of Chekhov’s early attempts to emulate the master, Tolstoy assumes the role “du doctrinaire, du pessimiste qui voyait la mort au fond de toutes choses, qui s’efforçait, avec une sincérité désespérée, de comprendre pourquoi il existait, qui enseignait l’oubli de soi et le dévouement total à l’humanité malheureuse” (VT: 117. “The teacher who in his pessimism saw death at the end of everything, and who struggled with desperate sincerity to understand the reason for his existence, who preached self-effacement and total devotion to suffering humanity” [Némirovsky 1950: 104]). Némirovsky delivers a portrait of Tolstoy as a man “pétri de passion, d’entêtement sublime” who “brûle comme une flamme” (118. “Wholly made up of passion and sublimely head-strong” who “burns like a flame” [105]). She describes him as strong, earthly, profoundly spiritual:

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

31

Le grand seigneur, Tolstoï, idéalisait les humbles ; […] Tolstoï méprisait l’élégance, le luxe, la science, l’art. […] Tolstoï haïssait les femmes et l’amour charnel, parce que le renoncement était difficile à sa nature passionnée, à son corps vigoureux. […] Tolstoï était croyant […] avait une foi torturée […] Tolstoï professait le désespoir […] son organisation puissante, son tempérament de fer décuplaient la souffrance, mais aussi la jouissance. Mais ce que l’homme, Tolstoï, aimait, l’écrivain le refusait à autrui ; il enseignait que l’homme n’a besoin ni de terre, ni d’espace, ni de liberté, ni d’amour humain pour retrouver son âme, que, par-dessus tout, il ne doit rien désirer. (VT: 118–120) The great aristocrat, Tolstoy, idealized the humble […] Tolstoy despised elegance and luxury, science and art […] Tolstoy hated women and carnal love because of the effort it cost him, with his passionate nature and vigorous body, to renounce them […] Tolstoy was a believer […] he had a tortured faith […] Tolstoy professed despair […] [a]nd if, through his powerful make-up and iron constitution, his sufferings were multiplied tenfold, so too were his pleasures. But what Tolstoy loved as a man, he denied to others as a writer: he taught that man needs neither earth nor space nor freedom nor human love in order to find his soul, and that above all he must desire nothing. (Némirovsky 1950: 105–106)

Némirovsky’s interviews, her education, her manuscripts, as well as published works like La Vie de Tchekhov give us a sense of her deep-rooted connection to Tolstoy, and they gift us with direct evidence of her meticulous knowledge of Tolstoy’s oeuvre and its place within the Russian and international literary panorama. In addition, the aforecited remarks on Tolstoy’s temperament and ethos also let us access Némirovsky’s own practice, insofar as they draw attention to essential qualities and experiences that she found crucial in a writer’s education and for the purpose of literary creation. Némirovsky believed in humankind’s need to “know” (i.e. learn through experience) everything and repudiate nothing, thereby conveying her disagreement (even a tinge of disappointment) with Tolstoy’s later conversion, his refusal of earthly pleasures and the denial of his past: “Au vivant, il faut tout, toute la terre … Dieu a créé l’homme pour qu’il soit vivant, pour qu’il connaisse la joie et l’angoisse, et le malheur” (119–120. “The living man needs everything, the whole world … God created man in order that he should live, and know joy and anguish, and misfortune” [106]). By comparing and contrasting Chekhov and Tolstoy, their respective writings and work ethics, Némirovsky was

32

M.-L. CENEDESE

carving a space where she could reflect on the role of experience and the act of writing; consider her debt towards other writers and thus recognize her models; appraise the value of emulation; and finally, verbalize her strategies within the creative process. By underscoring the interweaving of narrative and self-reflexivity, we can better appreciate Némirovsky’s critical point of view as a means to access her own practice and the legacy that War and Peace bestowed on Suite française.4 As it will become clear in the following pages, there is abundant evidence that Tolstoy’s War and Peace was an influence (sans anxiety) for Némirovsky’s Suite française, confirming that Tolstoy’s great historical novel was her model while writing her own historiographical narrative. Building on Kershaw’s observation that her relation to Tolstoy is a creative one (Kershaw 2013: 267), in this chapter I want to bring to light the ways in which Némirovsky used Tolstoy’s work as a creative canvas, and how she developed her thoughts on themes and issues brought up by the novel. A thorough understanding of the writing process behind Suite française must take into account Némirovsky’s reception of War and Peace, which was mediated by Edward Morgan Forster’s Aspects of the Novel (1927).5 Frequent transcriptions from Forster’s book punctuate Némirovsky’s manuscripts and preparatory notes for Suite française. Angela Kershaw remarked that other quotations from this source “occur in Némirovsky’s notes for her 1935 novel Le Vin de solitude and in her notes relating to the ‘chroniques’ published in the Revue hebdomadaire in that year” (Kershaw 2015: 349). According to her, “in addition to the notion of ‘expansion,’ Némirovsky engages with Forster’s concepts of ‘flat’ and ‘round’ characters, ‘story’,” and attempts to “reconcile literary tradition and innovation” (349), albeit rejecting modernist formal experimentation. Kershaw conceded that, while Némirovsky did not “neglect form altogether,” she was “suspicious of modernism’s tendency towards abstraction” (351) and thus deemed form secondary to content and representation. By nuancing this view, my analysis presupposes instead a strong interdependence between form and content, whereby neither prevails yet they shape one another, and suggests that the tension between the two was capital in the “complex transaction between multiple writers and languages” (351) that led to the creation of Suite française.6

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

33

Structure of Suite franc ¸ aise Questions of her novel’s structure and unity bore significant importance for Némirovsky, who never got tired of reflecting upon them: a detailed study of the changes she operated on the manuscript, as well as mention of her personal notes, will support this claim and eventually show the role of War and Peace in the process of structuring and finding a unifying thread for Suite française. An account of Suite française’s final structure proves to be a fairly delicate task, since Némirovsky was deported from her house of Issy-l’Évêque on 13 July 1942, before she could finish her novel. However, there is some evidence of her plans and ideas for the evolving narrative: she left behind details on the organization of the unwritten parts—at times accurate, at times tentative—but the novel’s final structure was left unresolved and unrevised. The hesitancy is enhanced by the fact that Némirovsky was “writing about events that are not yet over and whose ‘design’ cannot yet be perceived clearly” (Kershaw 2015: 350).7 Hence, despite the detailed chapter sequence for “Captivité” (Captivity) and the various blueprints for the final parts—“Batailles” (Battles) and “La Paix” (Peace)—in no way can we establish a comparison between Suite française’s structure and the multitude of drafts for War and Peace. However, looking at the two novels alongside each other and with the interpreting support of Némirovsky’s notes, we become aware of the fundamental role Tolstoy’s novel had in terms of practice and creative solutions. We can imagine Némirovsky perusing her Russian volumes and her notebooks, asking herself how could she better structure “her own War and Peace.” How to weave form and content together? What strategies could she use to make its parts easily flow, to link them and their characters in a smooth but complex narrative? First of all, one should keep in mind that Tolstoy wrote War and Peace about sixty years after the temporal setting of his novel, while Némirovsky was following the immediate historical events to build her fictional narrative and, therefore, could only speculate on the unfolding of “Batailles” and “La Paix”: “Dire que dans vingt ans d’ici tous ces courants seront si clairs, et maintenant, c’est un tel chaos. Enfin …” (Corpet 2008: 130. “To think that twenty years from now all these trends will be so clear, and now, it’s such chaos. Oh well …” [Corpet and White 2010: 146]). Secondly, Tolstoy wrote a preliminary version of his novel that reached almost four thousand pages; for instance, he worked on the beginning

34

M.-L. CENEDESE

for over a year, rewriting it over and over again, troubled by the problem of the digressions and of the narrator’s voice (Feuer 2008: 17). Upon the publication of its first chapters in the late 1860s, War and Peace ignited and inflamed criticism both in Russia and in Europe. Critics, among them Tolstoy’s admirers Ivan Turgenev and Gustave Flaubert, were taken aback by its apparent lack of order and unity. Its structure and prose created dismay among the readers, who saw the historical digressions as unrelated and unnecessary pauses in the development of the story; they had trouble identifying the main characters; they could not recognize a plot or the connections between episodes; they did not understand the leaps from fiction to history, from narration to philosophical reflection. Henry James notoriously described War and Peace as a “large loose baggy monster” (qtd. in Peaver 2009: xii–xiii). As a result, in its third edition (1873) Tolstoy collected all the historical parts and moved them into one appendix, so that the fictional narrative could be read uninterrupted. As an avid reader of Tolstoy, Némirovsky was likely aware of the response that the publication of War and Peace had engendered. Her education in Russian language and literature (1920–1922) and in littératures modernes et comparées (1924) at the Sorbonne further suggests that she was more than acquainted with the most iconic texts of nineteenthcentury Russian literature.8 At the time of her studies, the newly established department of comparative literature (by Fernand Baldensperger, Paul Hazard and Paul van Tieghem) sought to demonstrate the binary presence of actual and provable cultural interactions and influences between foreign literatures. Although in letters to her friend Madeleine Avot Némirovsky frequently deprecates her modest efforts (“Pas d’examens pour moi cette année : finalement je n’ai rien fichu et je ne veux pas m’exposer à un échec certain. Je continue donc à ne rien faire, bravement” [NMR 5.2]; No exams for me this year: finally, I didn’t do a thing and I don’t want to expose myself to certain failure. So I keep doing nothing, bravely),9 she was surely exposed to the department’s philosophy, even if its binary understanding of the nature of comparative literature might have been reductive for someone like Némirovsky, who was “clearly aware that comparative literature is a complex phenomenon involving more than the unidirectional passage of ‘something literary’ across a single linguistic border” (Kershaw 2015: 345). Nonetheless, as a foreigner and a student of comparative literatures, we can assume that the department’s context, with its newly launched Revue de littérature comparée, must have resonated within her identity as a novelist and occasional critic of foreign

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

35

literature and thus foregrounds the twofold interest she had in literature as a creative practice and an academic discipline (Kershaw 2010: 43–44 and 69–70; see also Kershaw 2015: 343; cf. Lienhard and Philipponnat 2010: 87, 101–103, 110 and 122.) The criticism over War and Peace’s lack of focus and unity10 must have provoked a dart of recognition in Némirovsky; so much so that, writing her Tolstoy-like novel, she paid close attention to the development of plot and characters, to their interconnections, to the role of history and its interdependence with the fictional: in sum, to ensure that form and content would work together. For instance, her notes show that she took care to maintain a certain stability and consistency of characters and their mutual relationships: Gare au danger : oublier les modifications de caractères. Évidemment, le temps écoulé est court. Les trois premières parties, en tous les cas, ne couvriront qu’un espace de trois ans. Pour les deux dernières, c’est le secret de Dieu et je donnerai cher pour le connaître. Mais à cause de l’intensité, de la gravité des expériences, il faut que ces gens à qui ces choses arrivent soient changés […]. (NMR 2.1) Beware: forget the reworking of characters. Obviously, the time-span is short. The first three parts, in any case, will only cover a period of three years. As for the last two, well that’s God’s secret and what I wouldn’t give to know it. But because of the intensity, the gravity of the experiences, the people to whom things happen must change […]. (SF: 350)

Clearly, when planning “Captivité” and the rest of her novel, Némirovsky was conscious of the small temporal gap between episodes but was also very much aware that the intensity and significance of the characters’ experiences meant that they were bound to react and evolve following the emotional toll of the events. According to Némirovsky, the panic11 of “Captivité,” like in “Storm,” “fait sortir ce qu’il y a de fou, de sauvage, en tous les cas, de contradictoire dans l’âme humaine […]. D’abord, la lâcheté. […] Le feu devient plus concentré, brûle plus fort, dévore le cœur” (Corpet 2008: 137. “Brings out what is mad, savage, in everything, what is contradictory in the human soul […]. First of all, cowardice. […] The fire spreads, burns stronger, devours the heart” [Corpet and White 2010: 153]). A passage she transcribed from Edmond Jaloux’s Vie de Goethe (1933) illuminates the relations and connecting motions among characters: “Tout les réunissait et les dispersait à la

36

M.-L. CENEDESE

fois, des actions déchaînées les jetaient les uns contre les autres” (139. “Everything both united and isolated them, frenetic events threw them against one another” [155]). All in all, however, unlike War and Peace, the published version of Suite française contains only circa five hundred pages. “Dolce,” the second part of the novel, four months before Némirovsky’s arrest was still far from its final shape and, even when completed, it was never edited. As for the composition of “Captivité,” the intended third section, notes […] were written by Irène Némirovsky between March 6 and March 31, 1942. They comprised a total of thirty-eight pages, of which only twelve have survived […]. It is not possible to say what shape Captivity might have taken simply by reading these notes. The novelist was struggling to choose one plot from among the “vague ideas for various chapters” that filled her imagination. (Corpet and White 2010: 145)

Némirovsky lacked time, paper and ink, shortages that Tolstoy did not experience while writing War and Peace. Although there is no evidence that could refute the manuscript entries, the elaboration of such resolutions might have been only temporary. Had Némirovsky lived another year or two, or survived the war, what would have become of Suite française? Would it be different from the published copy we are holding now in our hands? The impossibility of a direct comparison between Suite française’s tentative structure and the multiple drafts for War and Peace, however, does not impede the potential for reading them in pairs, and, in fact, the evidence described above urges such an analysis. The weight of questions of structure, unity and coherence is important for understanding Némirovsky’s reception of War and Peace and the creative drive it instilled in conjunction with her study of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel . The assessment of the novel’s structure and the process that led Némirovsky to certain choices underline the creative mark of War and Peace, its effect on Némirovsky’s work in progress and how it prompted her creative response. Némirovsky’s unfinished plan shows that despite some doubts over the number of sections, she resolved to organize Suite française as a five-part novel: “Oui, pour bien faire, il faudrait cinq parties de 200 pages chacune. Un livre de 1000 pages. Ah ! God !”12 (NMR 2.1. “Yes, to do it well, should have five parts of 200 pages each. A 1000-page book! Ah! God!” [SF: 358]). In another entry, she reiterates:

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

37

Pour bien faire, il faudrait faire 5 parties. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

« « « « «

Tempête » Dolce » Captivité » Batailles » ? La Paix » ?

Titre général : « Tempête » ou « Tempêtes » et la première partie pourrait s’appeler « Naufrage ». (NMR 2.1) To do it well, need to make five parts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

“Storm” “Dolce” “Captivity” “Battles”? “Peace”?

General title: “Storm” or “Storms” and the first part could be called “Shipwreck”. (SF: 355)

The paucity of time and the menace of the increasingly difficult situation of Jews and stateless residents never escaped Némirovsky’s attention; the rush, the lack of time that she felt is palpable from her glosses, in which she recorded practical aspects of the unravelling novel: Je crois que (résultat pratique), « Dolce » doit être court. En effet, visà-vis des 80 pages de « Tempête », « Dolce » en aura probablement une soixantaine, pas plus. « Captivité », en revanche, devrait aller jusqu’à 100. Mettons donc : « Tempête » « Dolce » « Captivité » Les deux autres (NMR 2.1)

80 pages 60 pages 100 pages 50 pages

I think that (for practical reasons), “Dolce” should be short. In fact, in comparison with the 80 pages of “Storm”, “Dolce” will probably have about sixty or so, no more. “Captivity”, on the other hand, should make a hundred. Let’s say then:

38

M.-L. CENEDESE

“Storm” “Dolce” “Captivity” The two others (SF: 349–350)

80 pages 60 pages 100 pages 50 pages

The quotations provided above and the following ones show how the novel’s overall unity and formal structure were a recurring preoccupation for Némirovsky: Ce qui me manque surtout, c’est une idée directrice. « Tempête » était un chaos ; ça se défend, mais dans « Captivité » qq. chose doit se dessiner. Ça devrait être l’effort de libérer la France, d’une part, même par des moyens différents de l’autre, la plus simple et banale aventure : amitié des deux hommes ; amour de l’un deux pour Brigitte. Moments of happiness snatched.13 L’espoir des jeunes qui se préparent à la vie malgré tous les dangers. (Corpet 2008: 140) What I feel I most lack is one central theme. “Storm” was chaos; that holds up, but in “Captivity” smthg must take shape. It should be the attempts made to liberate France, on the one hand, even by different means, and on the other, the simplest and most banal experiences: the friendship between the two men, the love one of them feels for Brigitte. Moments of happiness snatched. The hope of the young people who want to get on with their lives in spite of all the dangers. (Corpet and White 2010: 156)

Indeed, she had barely finished writing the first two parts that she was already absorbed by the final form of the whole novel, debating the consistency and continuity of sub-plots and characters, worrying about readers’ ease (or lack thereof) to follow their deeds. The following comments provide further evidence: 2 juin ’42. Commencer à me préoccuper de la forme qu’aura ce roman terminé ! Considérer que je n’ai pas encore fini la 2e partie, que je vois la 3e ? Mais que la 4e et la 5e sont dans les limbes et quelles limbes ! C’est vraiment sur les genoux des dieux puisque ça dépend de ce qui se passera. Et les dieux peuvent s’amuser à mettre 100 ans d’intervalle ou 1000 ans comme c’est à la mode de dire : et moi je serai loin. Mais les dieux ne me feront pas ça […]. Maintenant question plus terre à terre et à laquelle je ne peux trouver de réponse : N’oubliera-t-on pas les héros d’un livre à l’autre ? C’est pour

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

39

éviter cet inconvénient que je voudrais faire non un ouvrage en plusieurs volumes mais un gros volume de 1000 pages. (NMR 2.1) 2 June ’42. Starting to worry about the shape this novel will have when finished! Consider that I haven’t yet finished the second part, and I see the third? But that the fourth and fifth are in limbo, and what limbo! It’s really in the lap of the gods since it depends on what happens. And the gods could find it amusing to wait a hundred or even a thousand years, as the saying goes: and I’ll be far away. But the gods wouldn’t do that to me […]. Now for a more basic question and one to which I cannot find an answer: won’t people forget the heroes from one book to the next? It is to avoid this problem that I would like to create one large volume of 1000 pages rather than a work made up of several volumes. (SF: 357)

In “Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française and the Crisis of Rights and Identity,” Christopher Lloyd observes that Suite française was conceived as a five-part roman-fleuve and writes that “the main problem with the book in its unfinished state (as Némirovsky’s notes to herself suggest) is the lack of plausible connections both between the two parts and between the diverse characters and episodes that constitute the first part, ‘Tempête en juin’” (Lloyd 2007: 168). Indeed, in the manuscript we find several entries that confirm and reiterate Némirovsky’s concern with the final structure and as many reminders on the importance of having a clear sense of the entire novel’s layout: “Je crains un peu le foisonnement. Il faut le garder, si cela fait partie de la chose,14 mais l’ordonner” (Corpet 2008: 139. “I’m worried a little about the way it’s expanding. It must be kept, if it’s part of the thing but get it organized” [Corpet and White 2010: 155. Emphasis added]).

“Expansion:” Tolstoy, Forster and Némirovsky As we have seen, Némirovsky worried over the way her novel was “expanding”; the term expansion is mentioned more than once in her side notes on the manuscript, and she derived it from her reading of E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel . Forster first advanced the idea of expansion in the chapter on “Pattern and Rhythm.” “Pattern” is “an aesthetic aspect of the novel, and that though it may be nourished by anything in the novel—any character, scene, word—it draws most of its nourishment from the plot” (Forster 1990: 136); it is also what makes us see a book as

40

M.-L. CENEDESE

a whole, what gives it “unity” by way of its constant presence. However, to combine “pattern” with “the immense richness of material which life provides” (145) is problematic. Hence comes “rhythm”: “easy” rhythm, “which we can all hear and tap to” (146) and “may be defined as repetition plus variation” (149); and the “whole rhythm of a symphony,” “due mainly to the relation between its movements—which some people can hear but no one can tap to” (146). After showing how the “easy rhythm” stitches together Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (146–148), later in the chapter Forster tries to express the literary equivalent of “the whole rhythm of a symphony”: Is there any effect in novels comparable to the effect of [Beethoven’s] Fifth Symphony as a whole, where, when the orchestra stops, we hear something that has never actually been played? The opening movement, the andante, and the trio-scherzo-trio-finale-trio-finale that composes the third block, all enter the mind at once, and extend one another into a common entity. This common entity, this new thing, is the symphony as a whole, and it has been achieved mainly (though not entirely) by the relation between the three big blocks of sound which the orchestra has been playing. I am calling this relation “rhythmic.” (149)

Forster wonders whether there is any analogy to this “rhythmic relation” in literature, granted that he believes that “in music fiction is likely to find its nearest parallel” (149). This is where Forster expresses the concept of expansion: Music, though it does not employ human beings, though it is governed by intricate laws, nevertheless does offer in its final expression a type of beauty which fiction might achieve in its own way. Expansion. That is the idea that the novelist must cling to. Not completion. Not rounding off but opening out. When the symphony is over, we feel that the notes composing it have been liberated, they have found in the rhythm of the whole their individual freedom. (149. Emphasis added)15

According to Forster, a clear example of such an expansive/expanding novel is War and Peace: “Is not there something of it in War and Peace? […] Such an untidy book. Yet, as we read it, do not great chords begin to sound behind us, and when we have finished does not every item—even the catalogue of strategies—lead a larger existence than was possible at the time?” (150). In fact, Tolstoy had originally planned to write a novel

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

41

about the Decembrists, a group of young aristocrats who rose in favour of a constitutional monarchy at the death of Emperor Alexander I in 1825, and for which they were later executed or confined to Siberia. In 1856, after Alexander II’s pardon and his own return from the Siberian exile, Tolstoy set about writing a novel on this group of young people and the year of the uprising. He then retroceded his narrative to the heroes’ childhood and youth, which took place around Napoleon’s Russian Campaign of 1812 (known in Russia as “the Patriotic War of 1812”). Fascinated by this episode, its causes and consequences, he went further back to the events of 1805, the year he decided to mark as the beginning of the novel. The final version of this novel is what we know as War and Peace, where all that remains of the Decembrists are just hints about the futures of Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrey Bolkonsky’s son Nikolay (Peaver 2009: x–xi). It is in this temporally “unlimited” vision of his novel, in a narrative that stems “from his conception of the form as huge, composite, almost open-ended” (Feuer 2008: 14) that Némirovsky locates Forster’s expansion: Je crois que ce qui donne à Guerre et Paix cette expansion dont parle Forster, c’est tout simplement le fait que dans l’esprit de Tolstoï, Guerre et Paix n’est qu’un premier volume qui devait être suivi par Les Décembristes, mais ce qu’il a fait inconsciemment (peut-être, car naturellement je n’en sais rien, j’imagine), enfin, ce qu’il a fait consciemment ou non est très important à faire dans un livre comme Tempête etc. … même si certains personnages arrivent à une conclusion, le livre lui-même doit donner l’impression de n’être qu’un épisode … ce qu’est réellement notre époque, comme toutes les époques bien sûr. (NMR 2.1) I think that what gives War and Peace the expansion Forster talks about, is quite simply the fact that in Tolstoy’s mind, War and Peace is only the first volume that was to be followed by The Decembrists, but what he did unconsciously (perhaps, for naturally I really don’t know, I’m imagining), in the end what he did consciously or unconsciously is very important to do in a book like Storm etc. … even if certain characters are wrapped up, the book itself must give the impression of only being one episode … which is really what is happening in our times, as in all times of course. (SF: 360)

42

M.-L. CENEDESE

Yet, it was not the first time that Némirovsky made use of Forster’s concept in her creative work: this idea of “opening out” so as to avoid the novel’s own finitude in favour of an open-ended view was already present in Deux. The novel was published in 1939, though its genesis can be dated back to the early thirties: in a 1934 note Némirovsky admitted the novel needed more time, a few more years of work as it was “not ready yet, and the characters, especially, are extremely vague” (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 210). Hailed as Némirovsky’s first “romance,” in her own words Deux is “l’histoire de deux êtres, de nature folle, mauvaise, instable, que la vie, l’amour, le mariage perfectionnent” (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 360 and OCII: 13. “The story of two people, who are crazy, bad and unstable, and whom life, love and marriage improve” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 255]). More than a simple story on the intricacies of love, family and friendship, Deux allows Némirovsky to assume a new perspective as the pitiless observer and storyteller of the generation born at the beginning of the century. Her novel describes and dissects the unravelling lives of young men and women in the immediate aftermath of war, following them for almost twenty years, until the eve of the Second World War. Accordingly, Némirovsky chronicles their journeys across time and history: she describes their hopes and desires, their conflicts with the older generation, and their tender look at the younger one. At the same time, the ever-evolving characters are incomplete, likely bound to change more with the years. Indeed, in a radio interview Némirovsky mentioned the possibility of returning to Deux’s characters and writing a “sequel.”16 In the early forties Némirovsky herself asserted that Deux was an antecedent for Suite française in practicing what Forster called “expansion:” “J’ai essayé de faire ça avec DEUX je me rappelle, mais ceci est bien plus difficile, plus important, du moins en ‘42 semble plus important” (NMR 2.1. I remember I tried to do that with DEUX, but this is more difficult, more important, at least in [19]42 it seems more important). Why did Némirovsky think that the idea of expansion was more important in 1942? In the case of a novel like Suite française, we can see “expansion” as being twofold. First of all, by 1942 Némirovsky seemed to think that her novel was destined for the future, rather than the present: “Il faut faire quelque chose de grand et cesser de se demander à quoi bon. Ne pas se faire d’illusions : ce n’est pas pour maintenant. Alors il ne faut pas se retenir, il faut taper à tour de bras où on veut” (NMR 2.1. “I must create something great and stop wondering if there’s any point. Have no

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

43

illusions: this is not for now. So mustn’t hold back, must strike with a vengeance wherever I want” [SF: 353]). The second element stems from her awareness of the novel’s “non-immediacy,” and grants the historical detail a role of lesser importance than human reactions and interactions in said circumstances. Therefore, prominence is given to individuals and communities: Ne jamais oublier que la guerre passera et que toute la partie historique pâlira. Tâcher de faire le plus possible de choses, de débats … qui peuvent intéresser les gens en 1952 ou 2052. Relire Tolstoï. Inimitable les peintures mais non historiques. Insister sur cela. Par exemple, dans « Dolce », les Allemands au village. Dans « Captivité », la première communion de Jacqueline et la soirée chez Arlette Corail. (NMR 2.1) Never forget that the war will be over and that the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as much as possible: things, debates … that will interest people in 1952 or 2052. Reread Tolstoy. Inimitable descriptions but not historical. Insist on that. For example in Dolce, the Germans in the village. In Captivity, Jacqueline’s First Communion and Arlette Corail’s party. (SF: 356–57)

Therefore, with Suite française Némirovsky was writing a historical narrative in which, against a backdrop of historical crisis, fictionalized reactions and actions on the part of individuals and communities were to take predominance for their universal and ordinary qualities: Maintenant, ne pas oublier que ce qu’il y a de bien dans Guerre et Paix par ex. c’est qu’au milieu de tous ces bouleversements inouïs, les gens poursuivent leur vie plus ou moins ordinaire et ne pensent en somme, surtout, qu’à survivre, aimer, bouffer, etc. D’ailleurs tout ceci est une question d’accent. C’est sur la vie personnelle « égoïste » qu’il faut mettre l’accent. (Corpet 2008: 132) Now, don’t forget what is good in War and Peace, e.g., it’s in the middle of all these incredible upheavals that people carry on with their lives more or less normally and, in the end, only think about surviving, loving, eating, etc. Besides, all this is a matter of emphasis. It is the “egotistical” personal life that must be stressed. (Corpet and White 2010: 148)

If Forster thought of expansion as what lingered in the reader’s mind after the end of the novel, Némirovsky saw it as a quality that would

44

M.-L. CENEDESE

communicate with future generations on an empathic and ethical level, notwithstanding the context. Although a notion such as “expansion,” with its implications of “openness,” “open-endedness” and “limitlessness,” might have hindered any attempts to contain the narrative in the form of “pattern,” it nevertheless illuminates the process by which Némirovsky resolved to focus her narrative voice on people’s reactions amidst the vicissitudes of the war.

History, Individuals and Communities In her notes, Némirovsky wrote: “War and Peace is like an Iliad, the story of certain men, and an Aeneid, the story of a nation, compressed into one book” (Corpet 2008: 139).17 Indeed, the main focus of War and Peace is set forth by its very title: on the one side there is the world, man’s quotidian existence,18 and on the other there is war, that is, history and its movements, which enter into individuals’ lives and carry them away. In the relation between the two, Tolstoy saw an insurmountable duality whose causes were elusive: he could only concede the existence of a “power” that dominated everything and everybody (Chiaromonte 1985: 32–33). “What is power?” was the essential question of history (WP: 1187), and this concept of “a force that makes people direct their activity towards a single goal” was the only way for historians to “describe the movement of mankind” (1186). This “so-called power over other people […] in its true meaning is only the greatest dependence on them” (1224)—he wrote in an 1868 article published in the magazine Russkii Arkhiv (Russian Archive) and now the afterword of War and Peace. In approaching the interrelation between history and mankind, Tolstoy was led mainly by an interest in causes and consequences: “What force produces the movement of peoples?” (1199)—why do things happen the way they do, and why do people react as they do? The historical novel, bringing to the surface the socio-historical context as a means to explain characters’ actions, is a recurrent and scholarly established feature of nineteenth-century French and European literature (e.g. Balzac and Stendhal for the French context).19 But while the majority of authors treated historical events as momentary and accessory episodes, contingent to the understanding of a character’s arch, Tolstoy raised history to be the central theme of his narrative (Chiaromonte 1985: 31). Not only did he weave the reflection on the contemporaneous into the historical

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

45

action, but he also made it central by embroidering onto it the fictional individual stories. In this way: the narrative continually expands to construct a more comprehensive, objective narrative edifice that overcomes and preserves subjective points of view by linking them together in a multi-layered mesh of distinctively recurrent patterns according to certain characteristic similarities; part and whole are thus brought together in a unifying narrative, a collective identity, that does not efface but rather safeguards the individual by locating it perspicuously within the whole. (Love 2004: 19. Emphasis added)

Upon the contentious reception of War and Peace, Tolstoy included as an epilogue his considerations on the relations between the historical essays and the fictional narrative, where he tries to ground and unify the different stages of the novel and reflects on the relation between the two competing forces within it: individual subjects and the objective reality that impinges on them (123). In the second part of the epilogue, Tolstoy discusses the subject of history and identifies the troubles incurred when modern historians attempted to answer what he deemed were the wrong questions. Accounting for the failure of historians, Tolstoy discloses his own philosophy of history, rooted in the contradictory “question of man’s free will,” which consists in the relation between reason (which “expresses the laws of necessity”) and consciousness (which “expresses the essence of freedom”). For Tolstoy, historical analysis is a discipline that understands the movements of people and mankind in the interconnection of man’s freedom, the external world and the laws of reason that define that freedom (WP: 1210–1215). Less than two hundred years later, Némirovsky was observing the same relationship and “produce[d] a Tolstoy-like novel about various protagonists pursuing personal happiness in the throes of historical upheavals that called their very lives into question” (Bracher 2010: 255). The mutual desire to show the works of the irrational forces of history on individuals and communities was also followed by the aspiration to evoke the reader’s emotional engagement with the characters in order to provoke “[…] one’s desire to discover how men live in society and how they are affected by one another and by their environment” (Berlin 1999: 29). In fact, Némirovsky herself notes that:

46

M.-L. CENEDESE

[m]on idée était de faire une tragédie à plusieurs plans : premièrement, cette idée qui doit être dans l’air […] que nos destinées dépendent toutes les unes des autres. […] Deuxièmement, a panoramic vision of people and places … intensely vivid, inexhaustible stirring 20 […]. Troisièmement (et c’est cela qui semble si simple, qui est le plus difficile) il faut faire une histoire humaine. (Corpet 2008: 130) My idea was to create a tragedy on several levels; first, the idea that’s going on around […] that our destinies all depend on each other. […] Secondly, a panoramic vision of people and places … intensely vivid, inexhaustible stirring […]. Thirdly (and this is what seems so simple, yet is the most difficult) need to create a human story. (Corpet and White 2010: 146)

Maria Rubins remarks how, by organically linking the two world wars, Némirovsky “comes close in her vision to Tolstoy’s historiography,” even if “in her analysis of the causes and consequences of global events” she “avoids speculative or philosophizing digressions” and instead “filters her historic vision through the destiny of her protagonist[s]” (Rubins 2015: 128). In fact, despite the common interest in the interconnections between humankind and history, in Némirovsky’s view the presence of history in a fictional work did not have an equally strong hold as Tolstoy thought it should. History had to be seen through people’s eyes: “Oui, prendre garde que ces circonstances extraordinaires soient toujours vues du point de vue du héros” (Corpet 2008: 140. “Yes, make sure that these extraordinary circumstances are always seen from the point of view of the hero” [Corpet and White 2010: 156]). In her opinion, the historical part was bound to “fade away,” whereas human struggle was elected the core of her inquiry: “1 Juillet 1942. En unifiant, en simplifiant toujours le livre (en son entier) doit se résoudre en une lutte entre le destin individuel et le destin communautaire” (NMR 2.1. “1 July 1942. By unifying, always simplifying the book [in its entirety] must result in a struggle between individual destiny and collective destiny” [SF: 360]). She wanted to highlight the world of man’s everyday life: “Il faudrait faire davantage de Paix,21 de jeux paisibles là-dedans. Maintenant, il ne faut pas oublier que la plupart de ces démonstrations sont d’ordre humain : l’amour, le désir du gain, la jalousie […]” (Corpet 2008: 139. “Must make more of Peace, put peaceful little games in it. Now, must not forget that most of these descriptions are about people: love, the desire to earn money, jealousy […]” [Corpet and White 2010: 155]). Undeniably, throughout Némirovsky’s production, one can discern her

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

47

constant interest in the everyday (Diana Holmes spoke of a “poetry of the everyday” in addressing Némirovsky’s work)22 and a special attention to ordinariness, which she believed Tolstoy, unfortunately, lacked: Naturellement, la faiblesse, l’unique, de Guerre et Paix, à mon avis, c’est que T. met en scène des héros authentiques. Mais c’est égal, si on me dit, de quoi s’agit-il ? De donner un tableau, forcément incomplet mais le plus vaste et le plus fort possible, de certaines gens ordinaires (car tout le monde est ordinaire) dans des circonstances extraordinaires. (Corpet 2008: 140) Naturally, the weakness, the only one in War and Peace in my opinion, is that T[olstoy] depicts authentic heroes. But it’s the same if people ask me, what’s it all about? Present a tableau, necessarily incomplete but the most extensive and the strongest one possible, about certain ordinary people (because everyone is ordinary) in extraordinary circumstances. (Corpet and White 2010: 156)

Indeed, it has been argued that the focus of Suite française lies not on the forces of history as much as on the “mechanics of class politics”: the (incomplete) picture that results at the intersection between the historical moment and the struggles of individuals shows “behavioral patterns, and thought processes constantly at work in everyday life,” where one social class is ancestrally divided from the other and which are “vividly exposed by the dramatic context of the German Occupation” (Bracher 2010: 144). The beginning of Suite française offers a clear example of such interest in the human. Through the use of a third-person narrative and direct discourse with focalization Némirovsky is able to provide the setting of her work in space and time and to usher the reader towards the multiplicity of human thoughts: Chaude, pensaient les Parisiens. L’air du printemps. C’était la nuit en guerre, l’alerte. Mais la nuit s’efface, la guerre est loin. Ceux qui ne dormaient pas, les malades au fond de leur lit, les mères dont les fils étaient au front, les femmes amoureuses aux yeux fanés par les larmes entendaient le premier souffle de la sirène […] Les dormeurs rêvaient de la mer […] jusqu’à ce qu’enfin le sommeil cédât et que l’homme murmurât, en ouvrant à peine les yeux. « C’est l’alerte ? » Déjà, plus nerveuses, plus vives, les femmes étaient debout. Certaines, après avoir fermé les fenêtres

48

M.-L. CENEDESE

et les volets, se recouchaient. La veille, le lundi 3 juin, pour la première fois depuis le commencement de cette guerre, des bombes étaient tombées à Paris ; mais le peuple demeurait calme. Cependant les nouvelles étaient mauvaises. On n’y croyait pas. On n’eût pas cru davantage à l’annonce d’une victoire. « On n’y comprend rien », disaient les gens. À la lumière d’une lampe de poche on habillait les enfants. Les mères soulevaient à pleins bras les petits corps lourds et tièdes : « Viens, n’aie pas peur, ne pleure pas. » C’est l’alerte. (Sf: 33–34) Hot, thought the Parisians. The warm air of spring. It was night, they were at war and there was an air raid. But dawn was near and the war far away. The first to hear the hum of the siren were those who couldn’t sleep—the ill and bedridden, mothers with sons at the front, women crying for the men they loved […] Those still asleep dreamed of waves breaking over pebbles […] until finally sleep was shaken off and they struggled to open their eyes, murmuring, “Is it an air raid?” The women, more anxious, more alert, were already up, although some of them, after closing the windows and shutters, went back to bed. The night before—Monday, 3 June— bombs had fallen on Paris for the first time since the beginning of the war. Yet everyone remained calm. Even though the reports were terrible, no one believed them. No more so than if victory had been announced. “We don’t understand what’s happening,” people said. They had to dress their children by torchlight. Mothers lifted small, warm, heavy bodies into their arms: “Come on, don’t be afraid, don’t cry.” An air raid. (SF: 3)

The short sentences are like quick brush strokes: it is hot, we are in Paris, it is the war, and there is an air-raid warning. They resemble the opening scenes of a film; the first shots are aerial views of summertime Paris, until the camera approaches and zooms into people’s houses, where we observe sleepless mothers and young women, children, sick men, men soundly asleep, all disturbed by the alarm and reacting in different ways.23 The city of Paris participates by reflecting its entire people and their different thoughts and actions in the multiple sparkles of the Seine: “Quant à la Seine, elle semblait concentrer en elle toutes les lueurs éparses et les réfléchir au centuple comme un miroir à facette” (Sf: 34. “As for the Seine, the river seemed to absorb even the faintest glimmers of light and reflect them back a hundred times brighter, like some multifaceted mirror” [SF: 3]). This kind of incipit—a beginning in medias res and “from a distance” that leaves space for the visualization of different indeterminate voices before leading to its main action and characters—was mentioned by Némirovsky as “side-paths beginning,” which she indicated

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

49

as being Tolstoyan: “Remember : Guerre et Paix ne commence pas par les Rostov ni par Anatole Kouragine mais side-paths, probablement involontaire. Toutefois, à la réflexion, Tolstoï a dû vouloir relier comme moi affectivement ce side-path qui se confond avec the main road. Chez Anna Nabrovna [sic], on voit Pierre qui, après, avec Natacha, etc.” (NMR 2.1. Remember: War and Peace does not begin with the Rostovs nor Anatole Kuragin but side-paths, probably unintentionally. However, on reflection, Tolstoy must have wanted, just like myself, to connect affectively this sidepath which merges with the main road. At Anna Nabrovna’s [sic] we meet Pierre who, later, with Natasha, etc.).24 The first scene of Tolstoy’s novel takes place at Anna Pavlovna’s soirée, where the time and space of the actions are set by conversations on the war and Napoleon; direct dialogue dominates the first pages. The two interlocutors, Anna Pavlovna and Prince Vassily, are marginal characters variously connected to the central heroes of the novel, who will make their entrance only later on: “Eh bien, mon prince, Gênes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des estates, de la famille Buonaparte. Non, je vous préviens, que si vous ne me dites pas que nous avons la guerre, si vous vous permettez encore de pallier toutes les infamies, toutes les atrocités de cet Antichrist (ma parole, j’y crois)— je ne vous connais plus, vous n’êtes plus mon ami, vous n’êtes plus my faithful slave, comme vous dites. Well, good evening, good evening. Je vois que je vous fais peur, sit down and tell me about it.” So spoke, in July 1805, the renowned Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and intimate of the empress Maria Feodorovna, greeting the important and high-ranking Prince Vassily, the first to arrive at her soirée. (WP: 3)25

Although it may (reasonably) appear that the two excerpts are completely different, the manuscript notes show that Suite française’s opening was freely inspired by War and Peace’s, which Némirovsky qualified as a “side-path.” That is, Némirovsky “learnt” from Tolstoy, who starts his novel with a mundane, non-notable event that the heroes only marginally attend, if at all. Similarly, Némirovsky introduces her narrative from the distance of the city with its indistinctive crowd of citizens belonging to different social classes. (She referred to this initial chapter as a “Prelude,” the initial movement of a Suite, and intended to have one such “Prelude” for each part of the novel). Némirovsky’s creative reception is thus marked from the very onset by an appropriation

50

M.-L. CENEDESE

of a Tolstoyan beginning—a “side-paths beginning,” as she called it— which she completely transforms and creatively integrates within her chief interest in the portrayal of individuals and collectivities. Némirovsky’s notes allow us to unearth the source of the novel’s beginning and to show how her reception of War and Peace was used in a creative way to befit her intentions. Leaning towards a novel that accentuates human interactions instead of historical events, Némirovsky was also trying to portray “a number of contrasting and at times contradictory perspectives” (Bracher 2010: 26– 27) in order to allow her readers to be exposed to an array of opinions that would prevent siding in the name of one absolute truth: “Ne rien prouver surtout. Ici moins que partout ailleurs. Ni que les uns sont bons et les autres mauvais, ni que celui-ci a tort et un autre raison. Même si c’est vrai, surtout si c’est vrai. Dépeindre, décrire” (Corpet 2008: 139. “Must especially avoid proving anything. Here even less than anywhere else. Not that some are good and others are bad, not that one person is wrong and another is right. Even if it’s true, especially if it’s true. Depict, describe” [Corpet and White 2010: 155]). Bracher labels Suite française’s inclination to approach history through the mediation of the voices of its multiple characters in their varying socioeconomic environments as “historical agnosticism”. In his opinion, this agnosticism is achieved mainly through the use of “indirect free style, the narrative device that gives the reader direct access to characters’ thoughts and perceptions without having those characters speak in the first person” (Bracher 2010: 15).26 As a result, from the very first chapter we are confronted by the extensive scope of Némirovsky’s storytelling: by picturing the reactions of “the people living on the sixth floor,” “in the poorer neighbourhoods,” as well as those of “the wealthy” (SF: 4), Némirovsky shows the “commonality of experience” (Bracher 2010: 41) in the face of tragic wartime suffering, where “the poor were just as afraid as the rich” (SF: 4). Thus, the narratorial exposition is built on a variable point of view “that makes it possible to lead her narrative voice everywhere while nowhere allowing it become permanently fixed in any particular perspective” (Bracher 2010: 41). Despite the choice of such unfixed narrative perspective, scholars like Bracher have argued that Suite française is clearly critical of the Vichy Republic and of the collaborationist part of French society, because of the irony with which these characters and their small vices are portrayed by the authorial voice.27 According to this point of view, therefore,

2

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

51

Némirovsky seems to also have inherited Tolstoy’s propensity for authorial control over the narrative, i.e. what Bakhtin called “monologism,” which he opposed to “dialogism” and “polyphony” (cf. Bakhtin 1984). But polyphony, monologism and Suite française’s narrative voice, are the focus of the next chapter, to which we should then turn with no further ado.

Notes 1. According to Christian Donadille, the parallel drawn here between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky suggests that Némirovsky might have read and been influenced by Nikolay Berdiaev, a Russian philosopher and mystic who resided in Paris since 1924, where he opened an Academy of philosophy and religion (Donadille 2012: 11). 2. Unless otherwise stated, translations from archival material are my own. 3. Excerpt dated “Bois de la Maie (Maie woods), 11 July 1942”. “K. M.” is Katherine Mansfield. 4. On the role of self-reflexivity in La Vie de Tchekhov, see Chapter 9. 5. The English modernist writer and literary theorist E. M. Forster originally addressed the aspects of the novel in the Clark Lectures at Trinity College Cambridge in 1927. The lectures were later published in book form under the title Aspects of the Novel . 6. Incidentally, it is interesting to point out that Némirovsky shares such desire to blend form and content with Anton Chekhov, who was concerned that “content, form, and sound should work together.” Chekhov, who was a very musical writer, once said that his work “should not produce an effect only with its content, but also with its form, and should not only convey an idea, but a sound, creating a distinct aural impression” (qtd. in Bartlett 1998: 312). On Némirovsky and music see Chapter 4. 7. The use of the term “design” in Kershaw has significant ramifications, since it is employed quite specifically in Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), which is integral to her argument. Lubbock objects to the way Tolstoy integrates history and individual stories in War and Peace on the basis that it lacks precisely what he calls “design.” 8. Details available at Archives nationales: AJ/16/5006; AJ/16/4820; AJ/16/4824; AJ/16/4825; AJ/16/8329; AJ/16/8332. See (Kershaw 2010, 2015; Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009/2010). 9. In several letters Némirovsky reiterates her resolution to be more committed to her studies: “J’ai recommencé la Sorbonne, sérieusement cette année-ci” (I started back at the Sorbonne, for real this year); “Quant

52

M.-L. CENEDESE

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

à moi, j’ai repris ma vie d’avant Noël. Mais je vais vraiment plus sérieusement à la Sorbonne” (as for me, I resumed life as it was before Christmas. But I’m really more serious at the Sorbonne) (NMR 5.2). According to Peaver, critics reproached War and Peace for having “no real beginning, and no resolution. It was as if the sheer mass of detail overwhelmed any design Tolstoy might have tried to impose on it” (Peaver 2009: xii). One of the possible titles for “Tempête en juin” was, indeed, “Panique” (note written in November 1940 [NMR 7.1]). In English in the original. In English in the original. Strikethrough in the original. As already mentioned, for the role of music in Suite française, see Chapter 4, pp. 77–92. Excerpt listened to at the exhibition Irène Némirovsky : « il me semble parfois que je suis étrangère » at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris, 13 October 2010–18 March 2011. Also in “L’humeur vagabonde” radio broadcast with Némirovsky’s biographers Olivier Philipponat and Patrick Lienhardt, France Inter 13 September 2007 (INA—DL R VIS 20070913 FIT 12). In English in the original. The Russian word mir (mir) means both “peace” as well as “the world.” E.g. see Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1968) (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1991). In English in the original. Underlined in the original. Némirovsky here might be also playing with the double meaning of the word “peace” in Russian, already indicated in footnote 18. Lecture given at Warwick University on 12 November 2014. Cf. Diana Holmes. (2018). Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque (Liverpool: Liverpool UP), 114– 125. I use here a “cinematic vocabulary” as a nod to Némirovsky, who was a devout goer and admirer of the seventh art: “J’aime beaucoup le cinéma” (I love cinema very much), she said to the journal Poslednye novosti (Latest News ) on 1 May 1931. She was used to “think in images” before writing her novels and hoped in the future there would be more pronounced relationships between literature and film. In an interview to the film review Pour Vous, she said: “Si j’aime le cinéma ? Ah ! mais oui ! Le cinéma est l’art qui se rapproche le plus de la vie, qui a le plus de parenté avec la vérité …” (78NMR 15; Do I love cinema? Ah! But of course! Cinema is the art form that most resembles life, that is most closely related to the truth [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 182]). See also some of

2

24. 25. 26. 27.

FROM RUSSIA TO FRANCE, VIA ENGLAND: SUITE FRANÇAISE …

53

her writings—among which there are screenplays and novels that try to use a cinema-like form—e.g. the short story “Film Parlé” (1931) or the scenarios “La Symphonie de Paris” (1931) and “La Comédie bourgeoise” (1932). In English in the original. It should go without saying that the French is in the original. See also Chapter 3, pp. 55–75. E.g. see Bracher (2010: 1–27, Chapter 1: “Timely Representations”).

References Archives nationales: AJ/16/5006 Fiches individuelles des étudiants. Licence-ès-lettres certificats d’études supérieures liste des candidats inscrits par séance: AJ/16/4820 Session de juillet 1922; AJ/16/4824 Session de juin-juillet 1924; AJ/16/4825 Session des mars 1925; AJ/16/8329 Affiches des enseignements supérieures—Faculté de lettres de Paris; AJ/16/8332 Affiches des enseignements supérieures—Instituts d’université; Auerbach, Erich. 1991. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1968). Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Bartlett, Rosamund. 1998. “Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and the Russian Elegy.” In Leslie Kearney (ed.), Tchaikovsky and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 300–318. Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History. London: Phoenix. Bracher, Nathan. 2010. After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Chiaromonte, Nicola. 1985. The Paradox of History: Stendhal, Tolstoy, Pasternak, and Others. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Corpet, Olivier, eds. 2008. Irène Némirovsky un destin en images. 2010. Paris: Denoël/IMEC. Corpet, Olivier and Garrett White, eds. 2010. Woman of Letters: Irène Némirovsky and Suite Française. New York: Five Ties Publishing. Donadille, Christian. 2012. “David Golder: un itinéraire de la dépossession et du rachat.” Roman 20–50, 54, 7–18. Feuer, Kathryn B. 2008. Tolstoy and the Genesis of War and Peace. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Forster, Edward M. 1990. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin.

54

M.-L. CENEDESE

Holmes, Diana. 2018. Middlebrow Matters: Women’s Reading and the Literary Canon in France Since the Belle Époque. Liverpool: Liverpool UP. IMEC, GRS 315 DG–Dossier de presse David Golder. IMEC, GRS 315 LAC–Dossier de presse L’Affaire Couriloff . IMEC, NMR 2.1–Suite française, 1940–1942. IMEC, NMR 5.2–Lettres d’Irène Némirovsky à Madeleine Avot (2/2). IMEC, NMR 7.1–Carnet avec poèmes et notes. IMEC, 78NMR 15. Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York: Routledge. ———. 2013. “Les Intertextes anglais de Suite française.” In Bruno Curatolo and Julia Peslier (eds.), Les Écrivains théoriciens de la littérature (1920–1945). Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 251–268. ———. 2015. “Influence Revisited: Irène Némirovsky’s Creative Reading of English Literature.” Modern Language Review, 110:2, 339–361. “L’humeur vagabonde,” France Inter, September 13, 2007, Institut National del’Audiovisuel (INA), DL R VIS 20070913 FIT 12. Lienhardt, Patrick and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2009. La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus. Lloyd, Christopher. 2007. “Irène Némirovsky’s Suite Française and the Crisis of Rights and Identity.” Contemporary French Civilization, 31:2, 161–182. Love, Jeff. 2004. The Overcoming of History in War and Peace. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. Némirovsky, Irène. 1950. A Life of Chekhov. Trans. Erik de Mauny. London: Grey Walls Press. ———. 2006. Suite française. Paris: Folio. ———. 2008. La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2011. Œuvres complètes, tome II. Introduction, présentation et annotations des textes par Olivier Philipponnat. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2014. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage. Peaver, Richard. 2009. “Introduction.” In Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage, xi–xviii. Rubins, Maria. 2015. Russian Montparnasse: Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tolstoy, Leo. 2009. War and Peace. Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.

CHAPTER 3

Departing from Tolstoy: Polyphony and Monologism

Written with the hope that one day it would become the French War and Peace, Suite française is a choral novel in which Némirovsky tried to describe the unfolding events of the years 1940–1942 with as much impartiality and detachment as possible: “Mon Dieu ! Que me fait ce pays ? Puisqu’il me rejette, considérons-le froidement, regardons-le perdre son honneur et sa vie” (Sf: 521. “My God! what is this country doing to me? Since it is rejecting me, let us consider it coldly, let us watch as it loses its honour and its life” [SF: 347]). Feeling rejected and abandoned by the very country in which she had lived for years and where she felt she belonged, Némirovsky set about writing a novel where each character’s voice could be heard without censorship—where the authorial point of view does not quell other positions and where characters are allowed the agency to speak freely. Gearing towards potentially uncensored speech follows Némirovsky’s conviction that this particular novel would reach future generations as her last effort. In addition, the desire to provide an ideologically uncompromised account of events underlines the will to, in turn, give agency of opinion to future readers. This attempt to “empower” readers may also be linked to the previously mentioned idea of “expansion,” which was at the heart of Némirovsky’s creative process.1 Indeed, Suite française’s writing journal seems to confirm the disillusionment felt by Némirovsky towards her own fate as well as that of her novel, convinced as she was that it would only be a posthumous publication: © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_3

55

56

M.-L. CENEDESE

“Il faut faire quelque chose de grand et cesser de se demander à quoi bon. Ne pas se faire d’illusions : ce n’est pas pour maintenant. Alors il ne faut pas se retenir, il faut taper à tour de bras où on veut” (NMR 2.1. “I must create something great and stop wondering if there’s any point. Have no illusions: this is not for now. So mustn’t hold back, must strike with a vengeance wherever I want.” [SF: 353]) As the previous chapter illustrated, while writing a novel deeply steeped in History, Némirovsky’s unrelenting interest was always on the side of human actions, reactions and interactions, which she believed to be universal, and therefore fundamentally independent from single historical events and processes. Although History creates the stage where man performs his role, the hold on people’s imagination was, for Némirovsky, in the subsumption of the performing act itself: “Ne jamais oublier que la guerre passera et que toute la partie historique pâlira. Tâcher de faire le plus possible de choses, de débats… qui peuvent intéresser les gens en 1952 ou 2052” (NMR 2.1. “Never forget that the war will be over and that the entire historical side will fade away. Try to create as much as possible: things, debates … that will interest people in 1952 or 2052” [SF: 356]). Therefore, from her point of view the task of the novelist was to create a realist image of how people behave during times of conflict and an impartial image at that. For this reason, in Suite française Némirovsky attempted not only to describe, realistically, life in France during the exodus (which she did not personally witness) and the German Occupation but also to endow each character—whether occupant or occupied, collaborator or maquisard—with their own right to speak, thus creating a polyphony of socio-politically divergent voices. The use of this technique—the unfixed perspective that Bracher deems characteristic of Suite française’s narrative voice, where a variable point of view allows her to direct “the eyes and ears of her narrator and her readers from character to character, scene to scene, individual consciousness to individual consciousness, and even from human consciousness to imagined animal experience” (Bracher 2010: 41)—raises the question of whether Némirovsky achieved her aim to “[not] hold back” and “strike with a vengeance” (SF: 353). In particular, this chapter asks the following questions: Is it possible to define Suite française as a polyphonic novel? And how does Suite française reconcile the influence of Tolstoy with its polyphonic tendencies?

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

57

Reading with Bakhtin The concepts2 of polyphony and the polyphonic novel were introduced by the Russian theorist Mikhail Bakhtin in his essays on the novel and, in particular, in his monograph on Dostoevsky, “the creator of the polyphonic novel” (Bakhtin 1984: 7). In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929 and 1963) and the essays collected in The Dialogic Imagination (1975) Bakhtin introduces the principles of dialogism and its complementary concepts, among which are “polyphony,” “heteroglossia,” “hybridization,” and “double-voiced discourse.” The word “polyphony” translates the Greek etymology poluph¯ onia, comprising polu-“many” and ph¯ on¯e “sound,” whereby the definition of the polyphonic novel as a text in which different points of view are expressed and interact with one another. As Bakhtin identifies in Dostoevsky’s novels, each character is not the “object of authorial discourse,” but instead he is able to express his own opinions and interpretations of the world “as a fully weighted ideological conception of his own” (5).3 The character is “a fully valid, autonomous carrier of his own individual word” (5) and heroes are “the subjects of their own directly signifying discourse” (7).4 For Bakhtin, Dostoevsky’s characters possess the independence to speak through an idiosyncratic and subjective discourse that eliminates any ruling authorial voice: Dostoevsky, like Goethe’s Prometheus, creates not voiceless slaves (as does Zeus), but free people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with and even of rebelling against him. A plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices is in fact the chief characteristic of Dostoevsky’s novels. What unfolds in his work is not a multitude of characters and fates in a single objective world, illuminated by a single authorial consciousness; rather a plurality of consciousnesses, with equal rights and each with its own world, combine but are not merged in the unity of the event. Dostoevsky’s major heroes are, by the very nature of his creative design, not only objects of authorial discourse but also subjects of their own directly signifying discourse. (6)

Consequently, a polyphonic novel does not grant privileges upon one “official” point of view or ideological position to the expense of any other(s): the Dostoevskian hero “is treated as ideologically authoritative and independent” (5) and is the author of his own free speech. The polyphonic novel presents a world where no specific discourse can objectively

58

M.-L. CENEDESE

stand above another; hence, the character’s word “possesses extraordinary independence in the structure of the work; it sounds, as it were, alongside the author’s word and in a special way combines both with it and with the full and equally valid voices of other characters” (7). In sum, the polyphonic novel does not propose the objective discourse of a dominant authorial voice, which introduces characters and explains their thoughts and the relationships between them; on the contrary, it creates a world where each character, alongside the author, has agency of their own discursive consciousness. As the researcher reads Bakhtin with Némirovsky’s intentions still in mind, she notices that Suite française might fall under the genre of the polyphonic novel. After all, was it not Némirovsky’s proclaimed aim to convey a variety of viewpoints, interpretations and understandings of the world and its current happenings? Indeed, this “novel without heroes” (Baudelle 2012: 112) explores the present moment from different socioeconomic and ideological positions, which are clearly visible from the novel’s beginning, where the narrator’s gaze hovers over the French capital and offers people’s thoughts through direct discourse with focalization.5 It is precisely the use of such a variable point of view that connects Suite française to Dostoevskian polyphony. However, is it possible to define “polyphonic” a novel that is so obviously influenced by War and Peace, to the extent it sees itself as its new incarnation, when Bakhtin himself called Tolstoy a “monologic” novelist? In his analysis of Dostoevskian heroes, Bakhtin notices their compelling and autonomous capacity for self-expression, which never merges with the author’s discourse: “the author’s word stands opposite the fully valid and pure unalloyed word of the hero” (Bakhtin 1984: 56). Bakhtin places Dostoevsky at the opposite spectrum from Tolstoy, whose world is, according to him, “monolithically monologic” (56), and where: [t]he hero’s discourse is confined in the fixed framework of the author’s discourse about him. Even the hero’s final word is given in the shell of someone else’s (the author’s) word […] For all their thematic importance in Tolstoy’s work, a character’s self-consciousness and discourse never become the dominant by which he is constructed. A second autonomous voice (alongside the author’s voice) does not appear in Tolstoy’s world; for that reason there is no problem of linking voices, and no problem of a special positioning for the author’s point of view. Tolstoy’s discourse and his monologically naïve point of view permeate everywhere, into all corners of the world and the soul, subjugating everything to its unity. (56)

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

59

Further on in the same chapter Bakhtin uses Tolstoy’s short story “Three Deaths” (1858) to clarify, as to leave no doubts, the difference between polyphonic and monologic narratives in regards to the author’s position. In Tolstoy’s story, he says, the lives and deaths of the noblewoman, the coachman and the tree are externally connected, but there is no internal connection, what he calls “a connection between consciousnesses ” (69). The external connection is the author’s objective world, wherefrom the three heroes are authoritatively portrayed. It is the author’s vision that unifies the three characters’ “self-enclosed worlds” (70): he makes the connection between them so that their lives and deaths “are made meaningful to one another” but only from his “allencompassing” field of vision, which enjoys what Bakhtin calls “a surplus” (70). Unlike the author of a polyphonic novel, the monologic author speaks not with his heroes—questioning, agreeing or disagreeing with them—but about them. Bakhtin concludes that, although one can recognize its different levels, Tolstoy’s story contains no polyphony: “there are only objectivized dialogues of characters, compositionally expressed within the author’s field of vision” (71). It may seem impossible to see Tolstoy as other than the master puppeteer; however, Bakhtin’s stance on Tolstoy is not consistent throughout his writing. In the essay “Discourse in the Novel” (1934– 1935) he affirmed that discourse in Tolstoy is “characterized by a sharp internal dialogism” and that it “harmonizes and disharmonizes […] with various aspects of the heteroglot social-verbal consciousness” (Bakhtin 1981: 283). Tolstoy’s authorial discourse is dialogic because it enters into a polemic with itself and with the reader’s active process of understanding: it is “everywhere determined by heteroglossia […] that dialogically— polemically or pedagogically—permeates discourse” (399). Heteroglossia (raznoreˇcie) is the stratification or “social diversity of speech types” (263); a constitutive part of the novel, heteroglossia surfaces by means of its different interacting and intertwining speeches—the author’s, the narrator’s, the characters’. In a heteroglot world (i.e. heteroglot novel), dialogism is its epistemological compass (426). If in Tolstoy’s world there is dialogism, then Bakhtin seems to be contradicting himself when, elsewhere, he says that “a dialogic position with regard to his characters is quite foreign to Tolstoy” (Bakhtin 1984: 70). Hence, we are left with what seems like a self-contradicting criticism. Ann Shukman remarks that the early Bakhtin grouped all of Dostoevsky’s characters “together with Pierre (War and Peace) and Levin (Anna

60

M.-L. CENEDESE

Karenina) among those characters who ‘take possession of the author’6 (Avtor 18–20),” which is inconsistent with monologism (Shukman 1984: 59. Emphasis Shukman’s). Furthermore, Shukman notes that, when later on Bakhtin approaches dialogism from a larger perspective (“Discourse in the Novel”), Tolstoy “loses his monologic mask and is revealed as participating in the greater dialogue” (59). Caryl Emerson observes that Bakhtin was not a particularly good reader of Tolstoy, his engagement being selective and limited: “he does not […] confront the many uses to which Tolstoy puts his authorial discourse: Tolstoy’s frequent, deliberate undermining of illusions of authority, for instance, or his varied techniques for evading closure. […] the interaction between the worlds of the characters and the ‘rhetorical’ passages that come, or so it seems, direct from the author’s mouth” (Emerson 1985: 75). Bakhtin’s ambiguous views on and partial engagement with Tolstoy can be quite productive when trying to assess whether the War and Peace-like Suite française might be a polyphonic novel. At the same time, mapping the differences between Suite française and War and Peace as potential departures from the model shall confirm Némirovsky’s creative re-elaboration that followed the reception of Tolstoy’s novel. From her earliest works Némirovsky aspired to describe the world as it appeared to her eyes and as she experienced it,7 even at the risk of bitter criticism. Whilst writing Suite française, her intention to relay reality as she witnessed it did not diminish; on the contrary, in order to give as clear and objective an image of the exodus and the German Occupation as possible, she was resolved to withdraw her voice and personal judgements as much as she could. Indeed, the desire to relinquish any authorial subjectivity and authority is evident from her notes: “Mon idée est que cela se déroule comme un film, mais la tentation est grande par moments, et j’y ai cédé en paroles brèves ou bien dans l’épisode qui suit la séance à l’école libre en donnant mon propre point de vue. Fautil pourchasser cela sans merci ?” (NMR 2.1. Emphasis added. “My idea is for it to unravel like a film, but at times the temptation is great, and I’ve given in with brief descriptions or in the episode that follows the meeting at the school by giving my own point of view. Should I mercilessly pursue this?” [SF: 344]). Elsewhere, Némirovsky wrote that “Il n’y a pas à prendre parti […] en tant qu’écrivain je dois poser correctement le problème” (NMR 2.1. “Must not take sides […] As a writer, I must state the problem correctly” [SF: 360–361]). In several journal entries she repeatedly evoked the multiple social realities that she needed to portray for

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

61

posterity. Chapter 2 of this book pointed out how the novel’s beginning showcases the experience of the alert through the consciousness of people belonging to different socio-economic positions.8 After that first chapter (“La Guerre”), Suite française continues to narrate life in war-torn France by following the vicissitudes of characters whose origins stretch over several social classes. In “Tempête en juin” (“Storm in June”), we meet the Péricand, a family of the Parisian wealthy middle-class (haute bourgeoisie); the Michaud family, bank employees whose son, Jean-Marie, is a former student wounded while fighting for the French army; Monsieur Corbin, employer of the Michaud and the bank’s director; his mistress, the dancer Arlette Corail; the renowned writer Gabriel Corte with his partner Florence; and the aesthete, Charles Langelet. In “Dolce” we are introduced to Lucille Angellier and her mother-in-law, Madame Angellier, heir to an old family of provincial landowners; to farmers Benoît and Madeleine Labarie;9 to the old aristocracy turned collaborationist, the Viscount and Viscountess de Montmort; to German lieutenants Bruno von Falk, intellectual musician, and Kurt Bonnet, the vicious interpreter; and to many more minor characters, including a cat. The variety of voices explored in Suite française is undeniable, as it can be immediately inferred from this quick overview of its main characters. The world portrayed in the novel is heteroglot by reason of its social diversity, which illustrates class stratification and class conflict during the invasion (Kershaw 2010: 182).10 Remarkably, Némirovsky’s multivoiced world also reaches beyond human consciousness in the case of Chapter 20 of “Tempête en juin,” where the world is seen from the point of view of Albert the cat. However, just as Tolstoy’s discourse, according to Bakhtin, could be both heteroglot and monologic, we need to consider whether Suite française is, like Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a heteroglot narrative where the expression of different viewpoints is, ultimately, governed by the author’s towering point of view; or whether Némirovsky managed to move beyond Tolstoy’s practice and to create a dialogic novel. For this reason we need to turn to her use of irony and satire.

Between Monologism and Polyphony Critics of Suite française are inclined to see in Némirovsky’s ironic portrayal of certain characters an active critique of the Vichy Republic, and they otherwise tend to find reasons to see her siding with the

62

M.-L. CENEDESE

ill-treated petite bourgeoisie, represented by the Michaud.11 Although criticism of Vichy on her part is probable, the failing of this reading lies in what Kershaw calls an anachronism, or “backshadowing” (after Michael André Bernstein’s Foregone Conclusions, 1994), associated with a twentyfirst century and post-Holocaust interpretation of the novel, which fails to take into account the cultural environment and trajectory of its production, that is France in 1939–1942 (Kershaw 2010: 180–181).12 Yves Baudelle argues that the tragic circumstances of Suite française’s discovery and the self-consciousness attached to the Dark Years have meant that the novel has only been treated as a serious, dramatic narrative, instead of the satire that it is; therefore, oftentimes Némirovsky’s caustic tone and irony have been misinterpreted, thus leading to a misprision of the narrator’s intents (Baudelle 2012: 111). Furthermore, building on Bakhtin’s indictment against representing “the author’s sympathies and antipathies, his agreement or disagreement with the individual characters, nor his personal ideological position” (Bakhtin 1984: 66), Baudelle rejects the idea that Némirovsky’s favours side with the Michaud, the family that articulates the predictable complaints of the little bourgeoisie—“the notorious sacrifice of the middle class” (114). Baudelle’s analysis of Suite française as a great satirical novel embedded with irony is illuminating. He finds multiple examples of Némirovsky’s vis comica: from the “comique de contraste” (comic of contrast) that highlights the thoughtlessness and egoism of people, to the tragi-comic that breaks any pitiful feeling; from parody to the grotesque (112–117). An example of Némirovsky’s playful use of comedic nuances is evident in Chapter 27 of “Tempête en juin,” when Gabriel Corte and his mistress Florence arrive at the Hôtel de Vichy, after a long trip “dans un univers incohérent de cauchemar. […] Mais, Dieu merci, la reine des stations thermales de France demeurait intacte et le lac vivait d’une existence bruyante, fiévreuse mais somme toute normale” (Sf: 239. “[…] into the nightmare of an incoherent world […] But, thank God, this Queen of French spas had remained intact and the feverish, noisy activity at the lake was simply the way it always was” [SF: 148]). Safe in a world that is polite, discreet, and muffled (“discrète, ouatée, convenable” [Sf: 240; cf. SF: 149]), already oblivious to the real tragedy that surrounded him before setting foot in Vichy, Corte is finally able to lament the great sorrows of his escape from Paris: “—Moi j’ai failli perdre mes manuscrits, dit Corte.—Ah ! Mon Dieu, quel malheur !” (Sf: 240–241. “‘Well, I nearly lost my manuscripts,’ said Corte. ‘Good gracious, how awful!’”

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

63

[SF: 149]). Welcoming and listening to the writer is the hotel’s director, sketched by Némirovsky as a caricature of the man who turns a small mishap into tragedy, whose reactions are exaggerated, and whose words naturally find the hyperbole: Et il demeura quelques instants immobile, le front baissé comme au cimetière lorsqu’on a salué la famille et qu’on n’ose pas se précipiter tout de suite vers la sortie. Il avait pris si souvent cette attitude depuis quelques jours que sa figure aimable, potelée, en était toute changée. […] Exagérant encore ses dispositions naturelles, il était arrivé à circuler silencieusement, comme dans une chambre mortuaire […]. (Sf: 241) And he stood motionless for a few moments, his head down like a mourner at a funeral who wants to rush to the exit, but feels obliged to pay his respects to the family. He had put on this expression so often in the past few days that his kindly, chubby face had been transformed. […] Now he exaggerated his natural tendencies even further, crossing the room utterly silently, as if he was in a funeral parlour […]. (SF: 149)

The scene continues under the auspices of Némirovsky’s parodic tone, which in fact becomes even more biting when Corte is forced to come back “avec peine à la réalité quotidienne et à ses futiles soucis” (Sf: 241. “[Returning] with difficulty to reality and the trivial problems of everyday life” [SF: 149–150]). Although in the morning he had enjoyed a copious meal: il avait mangé distraitement à cause de son extrême fatigue et du trouble où le jetaient les malheurs de la Patrie. Il lui semblait encore être à jeun.— Oh ! mais il faut vous forcer, monsieur ! Oh ! je n’aime pas vous voir comme cela, monsieur Corte. Il faut prendre sur vous. Vous vous devez à l’humanité. Corte fit un petit signe de tête désespéré qui indiquait qu’il le savait, qu’il ne contestait pas les droits de l’humanité sur lui-même, mais qu’en l’occurrence on ne pouvait exiger de lui plus de courage que du plus humble citoyen. (Sf: 241–242) he had eaten absent-mindedly because of his extreme exhaustion and the concern he felt at the tragedy taking place in France. He felt as though he hadn’t eaten. “Oh, but you must force yourself, Monsieur! I don’t like seeing you like this, Monsieur Corte. You mustn’t give in. You owe it to mankind.” Corte nodded in resignation; he didn’t dispute his obligation

64

M.-L. CENEDESE

to mankind, but at the moment he couldn’t be expected to have more courage than the most humble citizen. (SF: 150)

It goes without saying that the “malheurs de la Patrie” have for Corte no interest in comparison to his life and his manuscripts; this impression is confirmed by Némirovsky’s notes for “Captivity,” where we read that later Corte would have played a double role, both the pro-Nazi collaborationist and the official writer of the Communist party, depending on the immediate personal gains.13 The passage above is wholly drenched in Némirovskian satire: she stages a paradoxical situation, where the writer who has had the chance to escape the chaos of the exodus without any significant loss, pities himself as the victim of the moral mishaps of the country, encouraged by the hotel’s director. With Corte, Némirovsky is sharply criticizing the vain intellectual who considers himself indispensable to humanity by virtue of his position, but who also is, however, unable to see beyond the veil of his personal profit and therefore uses his talent with words to adapt and to legitimize even the most despicable reality.14 Indeed, in her notes she writes the following: Corte est un de ces écrivains dont l’utilité se révèle éclatante dans les années qui suivirent la défaite ; il n’y avait pas son pareil pour trouver les formules décentes qui servaient à parer les réalités désagréables. Ex : l’armée française n’a pas reculé, elle s’est repliée ! Quand on baise la botte des Allemands c’est qu’on a le sens des réalités. Avoir l’esprit communautaire signifie l’accaparement des denrées à l’usage exclusif de quelques-uns. (Sf: 528) Corte is one of those writers whose usefulness will become glaringly obvious in the years following the defeat; he has no equal when it comes to finding euphemisms to guard against disagreeable realities. E.g.: the French army was not beaten back, it withdrew! If people kiss the Germans’ boots it is because they have a sense of reality. Having a communal spirit means hoarding food supplies for the exclusive use of the few. (SF: 354)

The notion of sacrifice15 and man’s sense of moral duty are severely attacked by Némirovsky on multiple occasions throughout “Tempête en juin.” When the Péricand family makes a halt on their journey from Paris to Nîmes, Mme Péricand, who despite leaving in a haste did not forget to bring food for the route, takes pride in her generous offering of biscuits and chocolate to a young mother and her baby. Their conversation is

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

65

courteous and polite, in singular contrast with the actual circumstances of this encounter and the earlier descriptions of the refugees’ disarray: Elles parlaient du ton le plus gai, le plus gracieux, avec des gestes et des sourires qu’elles eussent pris en temps ordinaire pour accepter ou refuser un petit-four et une tasse de thé […] Elle [Mme Péricand] éprouvait un sentiment de satisfaction en se voyant à la fois si comblée de richesses de toutes sortes et si charitable ! Cela faisait honneur à sa prévoyance et à son bon cœur. Elle offrit des sucres d’orge non seulement au petit garçon mais à une famille belge qui était arrivée dans une camionnette encombrée de cages à poules. (Sf: 96) The two women conversed cheerfully and graciously, with the same gestures and smiles they used when being offered a petit four and a cup of tea on any ordinary day. […] She [Mme Péricand] got a feeling of great satisfaction from seeing herself as possessing such plenty and, at the same time, being so charitable. It was a credit to her foresight and kindness. She offered the lollipops not only to the little boy but to a Belgian family who had arrived in a truck jammed with hen-coops. (SF: 47)

Soon, however, she realizes that local shops will not have any more food to sell until they reach their destination. The semblance of Christian charity—this “mansuétude des siècles de civilisation” (“the compassion of centuries of civilization”)—are quick to drop and show her real “âme aride et nue” (“bare, arid soul”). The mother of four finds herself alone against a world that is hostile, where her only aim is to feed her children: “Ils étaient seuls dans un monde hostile, ses enfants et elle. Il lui fallait nourrir et abriter ses petits. Le reste ne comptait plus” (Sf: 99. “She and her children were alone in a hostile world. She needed to feed and protect them” [SF: 49]). By juxtaposing the narrator’s voice with the character’s free indirect discourse, a technique she uses systematically in this novel, Némirovsky is refusing to concede to pathos, and thus introduces a sarcastic breakage within the scene, which stresses the disproportion between the collective disaster and private interests. It is useful to pause on free indirect discourse, that “indirect method” (la méthode indirecte [NMR 2.1 and Sf: 535] that Némirovsky learnt from Flaubert (“the famous ‘impersonality’ of Flaubert”, NMR 2.1 and Sf: 527).16 At its most technical execution, free indirect discourse allows the boundaries between character and narrator to become loose, permeable to ambiguity, prone to overlapping and mixing. Baudelle remarks the

66

M.-L. CENEDESE

connection between free indirect discourse’s propensity towards breaking boundaries and what Bakhtin calls a “hybridization” (Baudelle 2012: 118). A hybridization is “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of an utterance, between two different linguistic consciousnesses,” and as a system of novelistic devices, it allows two languages17 to mix within the boundaries of discourse (Bakhtin 1981: 358). Owing to the porosity of speech acts, phenomena of hybridization are similar to free indirect discourse, as they are “a mixture of two individualized language consciousnesses […] and two individual language-intentions as well: the individual, representing authorial consciousness and will, on the one hand, and the individualized linguistic consciousness and will of the character represented on the other” (359). Furthermore, in hybrid constructions the different utterances are not separated (or “isolated”) by formal compositional and syntactic boundaries, such as quotation marks, and indeed they seem to belong, “by its grammatical (syntactic) and compositional markers, to a single speaker,” although in reality it contains two languages (304). In Suite française, the extended use of free indirect discourse with internal focalization, where “the boundaries are deliberately flexible and ambiguous” (308), allows the mixing of and playing with consciousnesses proper to hybridization phenomena, which are also one of the essential traits of comic style (308). In addition, Baudelle also observes how Némirovsky’s internal focalization, whereby everything is filtered by the character’s consciousness, and the absence of markers in free indirect discourse are embodiments of Bakhtin’s “character zones” (Baudelle 2012: 119), which are “the field[s] of action for a character’s voice, encroaching in one way or another upon the author’s voice” (Bakhtin 1981: 316). As a consequence, Suite française is able to carry forward a plurality of discourses that, by virtue of its very narrative technique that filters events through the character’s consciousnesses, outlines a social atmosphere that juxtaposes socio-ideological micro-worlds as a way to show France’s internal divisions (Baudelle 2012: 120). In “Dolce”, the second part of the novel, Némirovsky’s biting ironic tone persists. Almost no one is exempted from her irony, although it appears to be distinctly aimed at the Vicomtesse de Montmort, the emblem of Pétainism (at one point she calls the Maréchal the “vénérable Vieillard qui nous rend l’espérance” [Sf: 444]. “Venerable Wise One who restores hope in our hearts” [SF: 294]). An ardent patriot and classist,

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

67

the Viscountess even rejoices in the enemy’s invasion: “Oui, la vicomtesse de Montmort en était venue à se demander s’il ne fallait remercier le Bon Dieu d’avoir permis l’entrée des Allemands en France” (Sf: 445. “Yes, the Viscountess de Montmort had reached the point where she wondered if she shouldn’t thank the Good Lord for the German occupation of France” [SF: 295]). When she speaks, it is often in long monologues, pompous and melodramatic—parodies that show how, deep down, she is completely uninterested in the destinies of her fellow villagers (cf. Bracher 2010: 149–155). However, she is not the only target. The following passage comes after one of the Viscountess’s harangues to the mothers and wives of the mobilized men, who are for the most part either dead or prisoners in German camps: Mais l’image, celle d’un camp en Allemagne, avec ces hommes parqués derrière les barbelés, les émut. Toutes ces fortes et lourdes créatures avaient là-bas un être qu’elles aimaient ; elles travaillaient pour lui ; elles épargnaient pour lui ; elles enfouissaient de l’argent pour son retour, pour qu’il dise : « Tu as bien fait tout marcher, ma femme. » Chacune revit en esprit l’absent, un seul, le sien ; chacune imagina à sa façon le lieu où il était captif ; l’une pensait à des forêts de sapins, l’autre à une chambre froide, l’autre encore à des murs de forteresse, mais toutes finissaient par se représenter ces kilomètres de barbelés qui enfermaient les hommes et les séparaient du monde. Bourgeoises et paysannes sentirent leurs yeux se remplir de larmes. « Je vais vous apporter quelque chose », dit l’une d’elle. (Sf: 355) But the image of a German prisoner-of-war camp, with men herded behind barbed wire, touched them, Every one of these large, heavy women had someone they loved in one of those camps; they were working for him; they were saving for him; they were putting money aside for his return, so he could say, “You really took care of everything; you’re a good wife.” Each woman pictures her absent man, just hers; each woman imagined in her own way the place he was held captive; one thought of a pine forest, another of a cold room, yet another of fortress-like walls, but each of them ended up imagining miles of barbed wire surrounding their men and isolating them from the rest of the world. The farmers’ wives and villagers alike felt their eyes fill with tears. “I’ll bring you something,” one of them said. (SF: 228–229)

The feelings of tenderness and compassion that rise in the women’s hearts clash with their description as “fortes et lourdes créatures.” The

68

M.-L. CENEDESE

images they summon are both bucolic (“les forêts de sapins”) and frightening (“ces kilomètres de barbelés qui enfermaient les hommes.”) Having listened to and been deeply touched by the Viscountess’s words, the women feel the urge to donate for their children, their spouses and even for strangers. Yet, despite the generous impulse, they do not forget that everyone is observing their neighbours’ possessions, that spies abound,18 and that it is imperative to appear poorer than one actually is. Therefore, they whisper their gifts: Chacune se levait de sa place, s’avançait vers la présidente et lui chuchotait quelque chose à l’oreille, parce que maintenant elles étaient touchées au cœur, attendries, […]. Seulement, elles se méfiaient de la voisine ; elles ne voulaient pas paraître plus riches qu’elles n’étaient ; elles craignaient les dénonciations : de maison à maison on cachait ses biens ; la mère et la fille s’espionnaient et se dénonçaient mutuellement ; les ménagères fermaient la porte de leur cuisine au moment du repas pour que l’odeur ne trahisse point le lard qui crépitait sur la poêle, ni la tranche de viande interdite, ni le gâteau fait avec de la farine prohibée. (Sf: 356) Every one of the women stood up, went over to the President and whispered something in her ear, because now they were all deeply moved and touched; […] However, they didn’t trust each other; they didn’t want to seem richer than they were; they feared being denounced. There wasn’t a single household that didn’t hide its provisions; mothers and daughters spied on each other, denounced each other; housewives closed their kitchen doors at mealtimes so they wouldn’t be betrayed by the smell of lard sizzling in the pot, or the piece of prohibited meat, or the cake made with illegal flour. (SF: 229)

This passage makes very clear that Némirovsky’s mockery in “Dolce” is not directed solely at the class represented by Mme de Montmort, or at those who ended up fraternizing with the Germans: Némirovsky is subtly mocking the whole village, whether they are farmers or landowners, fervent patriots or collaborators. In the passage, the ironic contrast between the highly emotional moment and the trivial preoccupations and suspicions creates a dissonance where one can easily read Némirovsky’s ferocious denunciation of the behaviour of French people. This is exactly the episode where Némirovsky believed that she had let her own point of view come to the fore in too obvious a manner.19 As mentioned above,

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

69

many critics see in her irony an indication of an authorial consciousness that unifies the fictional world under a hierarchical structure of her choosing. Is the use of irony, parody and other tools of le comique, then, a mark of monologism? In reality, contrary to assumptions, Bakhtin believed that a parodic element could neutralize the monologic orientation of the novel. He wrote that “to introduce a parodic and polemical element into the narration is to make it more multi-voiced, more interruption-prone, no longer gravitating towards itself or its referential object” (Bakhtin 1984: 226). The “polemical element” he mentions is the same element that in the essay “Discourse in the Novel” makes Tolstoy’s novels dialogic and their world heteroglot. Yet, Bakhtin also added that parody “strengthens the element of literary conventionality in the narrator’s discourse, depriving it even more of its independence and finalizing power in relation to the hero” (226); it ensues that, thanks to parody, the hero’s discourse assumes an ever-increasing self-sufficiency and independence from the author (“the direct and autonomous signifying power of the hero and independence of the hero’s position” [226]). As a consequence of this “literary conventionality” there appears to be an amplification of “the signifying- and idea-content of his novels” (226). Bakhtin’s stance in relation to parody suggests that the presence of parody and irony in Suite française should not be interpreted so much as Némirovsky’s way to downplay her characters’ beliefs, but as a means to exclude a higher authorial control of the heroes’ points of view and thus to enhance such views. Instead of showcasing authorial monologism, satire corroborates the novel’s multivoicedness: indeed, Baudelle argues that in Suite française one can find most elements of a “vision carnivalesque du monde” (i.e.: Bakhtin’s “carnival”). According to Bakhtin, the diverse varieties of “the carnivalistic,” one of the three fundamental roots of the novelistic genre, start in the realm of the “serio-comical” (109). The main characteristics of this genre are: a new relationship with reality based on “the living present, often even the very day. […] [A] zone of immediate and even crudely familiar contact with living contemporaries” (108); and a reliance on experience and free invention and high criticism, even to the point of cynicism. Finally, the serio-comical rejects stylistic unity in favour of a multistyled, hetero-voiced and multitoned narration that mixes speeches, registers, languages, and genres (108). Thus, irony and satire are firmly linked to a heteroglot narrative.

70

M.-L. CENEDESE

Irony, parody, satire, free indirect discourse: the analysis of these elements in a few excerpts from “Tempête en juin” and “Dolce” has drawn attention to the resolutely anti-monologic perspective of Suite française. Némirovsky’s preoccupation with structural unity, as seen in Chapter 2,20 is not an impediment to the heterogeneity of points of view. The overall vision of the novel as the chronicle of the struggle between individuals and communities enabled Némirovsky to write autonomous miniatures representing events from different angles without breaking the comprehensive unity of the novel (“unité dans le film … mais variété entre les parties,” NMR 2.1. Unity within the film but variety among its parts). Indeed, without having a hero or a main character, and lacking a thèse (Baudelle 2012: 122; Kershaw 2010: 184), Suite française is a dialogic novel born out of the “gigantic breakdown,” the “gigantic shifts and unexpected collisions […] between social structures and systems” (Bakhtin 1984: 33)21 that were the French defeat and the German invasion/occupation (what Baudelle calls “cet éclatement politique, civique, sociologique, mais aussi phénoménologique et ontologique que fut la défaite” [Baudelle 2012: 123. The political, civic, sociological, but also phenomenological and ontological explosion that was the defeat]). For Baudelle, the collapse of the nation can only be narrated through the fragments of its citizens’ discourses, opinions and consciousnesses, even when they contradict one another—a clear indication that Suite française does not propose a singular “truth”: “il n’est personne ici, ni narrateur ni personnage dominant pour tirer les leçons de l’Histoire et donner au texte son achèvement sémantique” (122. There is no one here, neither narrator nor main character drawing lessons from History and giving the text its semantic completion). What then, at the end of this discussion, can we say about Suite française: is it possible to call it a polyphonic novel, and have it remain heir to Tolstoy’s War and Peace? Does it embrace the characteristics of the polyphonic novel? Most importantly, are the characters’ voices able to express their own subjectivity alongside the author’s own voice, blending with it and with each other, or is Némirovsky offering an unquestionable hierarchy? The diversified descriptions of the French people and the nuanced (even sympathetic) portrayal of German soldiers; the panorama of different socio-economic and ideological positions; the spectrum of angles under which the years 1940–1941 are outlined; they all converge towards creating a polyphonic narrative. Indeed, one last argument needs to be raised. As Emerson pointed out:

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

71

wherever monologic perception dominates, everything is seen in false unity—as the spirit of a nation, of a people, of history. This unity is false because it is only an apparent oneness; in fact, monologism demarcates, abstracts, excludes, and it is only from within this closed and lopped-off system that everything can be seen as one. Dialogism alone allows for the restoration of a larger, inclusive unity in diversity […]. In a dialogic universe, inclusive unity is celebrated by the fact that truth about the world is linked with specific position, with truth for the individual personality. (Emerson 1985: 69)22

Following this reading of Bakhtin we can therefore suggest that Némirovsky’s ironic tone against Mme de Montmort or Gabriele Corte or the farmers should not be understood as the sign of a master monologism, but rather as a way to discredit the “false unity” of the traditional “harmonious society” advanced by Vichy ideology (Bracher 2010: 149). Instead of such ideological unity, Némirovsky reintroduces a diversity of individual positions, while attempting to be impartial (though not absent) in the face of the events and the dominant ideologies of war-torn and occupied France.23 Her position as outsider at the time of writing allowed her to weigh and express different alternatives: Mon parti : régime bourgeois représenté par Angleterre, malheureusement fichu, demande du moins à être renouvelé car au fond il est immuable dans son essence ; mais il ne se reprendra sans doute qu’après ma mort ; restent donc en présence deux formes de socialisme. Ne m’enchantent ni l’un ni l’autre mais there are facts ! Un d’eux me rejette, donc … le second … mais ceci est hors de la question. En tant qu’écrivain je dois poser correctement le problème. (NMR 2.1)24 My option: England’s style of government by the middle classes, unfortunately impossible, at least wishes to be revived, for in the end its essence is immutable; but it definitely will not happen until after I die: therefore left with two types of socialism. Neither of them appeals to me but there are the facts ! One of them rejects me, therefore … the other … But that is out of the question. As a writer, I must state the problem correctly. (SF: 361)

These conflicting alternatives are juxtaposed in what Bakhtin called, metaphorically speaking, a “novelistic counterpoint” (Bakhtin 1984: 43). The musical analogy helps Bakhtin to evoke the complexity of polyphony as that which foregrounds voices that remain independent, while they are

72

M.-L. CENEDESE

combined in a unity “of a higher order than homophony” (21). Considering the material of music and the novel too dissimilar, Bakhtin did not take the analogy any further. In the next chapter we will see how the musical analogy is instead instrumental in Némirovsky’s creative practice, and indeed, how she turned it into a compelling tool to move beyond the reception of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

Notes 1. Cf. Chapter 2, “‘Expansion’: Tolstoy, Forster and Némirovsky”, pp. 39– 44. 2. Concepts, and not theory/theories. In the “Editor’s Preface” to Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , Caryl Emerson reminds that “theory, in the quantitative sense of a ‘technology,’ is not to be found in [Bakhtin’s] work” (Emerson 1984: xxxi). 3. Because of Bakhtin’s use of the masculine pronoun to refer to Dostoevsky’s character(s), in this chapter I will proceed to use the masculine pronoun as well, in order to avoid confusing the reader. 4. Unless otherwise stated, emphasis is always Bakhtin’s. 5. Cf. Chapter 2, “History, Individuals and Communities,” in particular pp. 47–51. 6. This is one out of the three typologies of author–hero relationship that Bakhtin identifies. 7. In an interview given to Marie-Jeanne Viel in 1934, “Comment travaille une romancière” (How does a novelist work), Némirovsky said: “Aussi, je continue à peindre la société que je connais le mieux” (Indeed, I continue to depict the kind of society I know best) (NMR 11.1). 8. Cf. Chapter 2, “History, Individuals and Communities,” in particular pp. 47–51. 9. Madeleine and Benoît are introduced already in “Tempête en juin”. Specifically, the storyline follows Madeleine, who, alongside her fostersister Cécile, takes care of Jean-Marie Michaud during the period of his convalescence in the village. 10. On this issue, Chapter 2 already mentioned how Bracher argues that Suite française is focused on the “mechanics of class politics” (Bracher 2010: 144; cf. above p. 47). 11. For instance, see Bracher (2010: 86–88). 12. However, in reference to a remark by Jonathan Weiss (Irène Némirovsky, Paris: Éditions du Félin, 2005, p. 167), who wrote that Némirovsky failed to “connect her narrative to the urgent historical issues of her time,” Bracher highlights how “we have everything to gain by understanding her

3

13.

14.

15.

16. 17.

18.

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

73

Suite française in its own narrative terms,” hence without anachronistic interpretations (Bracher 2010: 92). “Corte a eu très peur des bolcheviks. Il est violemment collaborationniste mais, par suite d’un attentat commis sur son ami ou par vanité déçue, il a l’idée que les Allemands sont perdus. Il veut donner des gages aux gauches-gauches !” (NMR 2.1 and Sf: 532–533. “Corte was very afraid of the Bolsheviks. He is extremely collaborationist but, following an attack on one of his friends or out of wounded pride, he gets the idea that the Germans are finished. He wants to commit himself to the extreme left!” [SF: 358]). The models for Corte seem to have been André Chaumeix and Abel Bonnard (“A.C.” and “A.B.” in the manuscripts); one could also think of Paul Morand, given the role he was asked to play by Némirovsky’s spouse, Michel Epstein, after his wife’s arrest. Cf. letters between André Sabatier and Michel Epstein, where they mention Mme Paul (Morand). Also published in Appendix II of Suite française (cf. Sf: 556–563 and SF: 380–387). On the topic of sacrifice, this is what Némirovsky wrote in one of her notes: “Sacrifice (tout le monde étant d’accord sur la nécessité du sacrifice à condition que ce soit celui du voisin)” (Sf: 528. “Sacrifice (everyone agrees about the necessity of sacrifice just as long as it’s your neighbour’s)” [SF: 353]). In English in the original. Némirovsky is quoting from E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel . The concept of “language” in Bakhtin is derived from Jurij Lotman’s The Structure of the Artistic Text and has the following broad definition: “any communication system employing signs that are ordered in a particular manner,” from which, then, Bakhtin differentiates among “alien/other’s language,” “social language,” and “national language” (Bakhtin 1981: 430). At the end of Chapter 19, Lucile remembers something that Bruno had told her in confidence: “À la Kommandantur, avait-il dit, le jour même de notre arrivée, nous attendait un paquet de lettres anonymes. Les gens s’accusaient mutuellement de propagande anglaise et gaulliste, d’accaparement des denrées, d’espionnage. S’il avait fallu en tenir compte, tout le pays serait en prison ! J’ai fait jeter le lot entier au feu. Les hommes ne valent pas cher, et la défaite éveille ce qu’il y a de plus mauvais en eux. Chez nous, c’était la même chose” (Sf: 479–480. “‘The very first day we arrived,’ he’d said, ‘there was a package of anonymous letters waiting for us at Headquarters. People were accusing one another of spreading English and Gaullist propaganda, of hoarding supplies, of being spies. If we’d taken them all seriously, everyone in the region would be in prison. I had the whole lot thrown on to the fire. People’s lives aren’t worth

74

M.-L. CENEDESE

19. 20. 21. 22.

23.

24.

much and defeat arouses the worst in men. In Germany it was exactly the same’” [SF: 319]). Cf. above p. 60 (quotation from NMR 2.1). Cf. Chapter 2, pp. 33–44. Here Bakhtin is quoting A. V. Lunacharksy’s article “On Dostoevsky’s ‘Multi-voicedness’.” In fact, Bakhtin writes that “[t]he unity of the polyphonic novel” is “a unity standing above the word, above the voice, above the accent” (1984: 43). Indeed, dialogism does not imply the author’s absence: “it would be absurd to think that the author’s consciousness is nowhere expressed in Dostoevsky’s novels. The consciousness of the creator of a polyphonic novel is constantly and everywhere present in the novel and is active in it to the highest degree. But the function of this consciousness and the forms of its activity are different than in the monologic novel: the author’s consciousness does not transform others’ consciousnesses (that is, the consciousness of the characters) into objects, and does not give them secondhand and finalizing definitions” (Bakhtin 1984: 67–68). In English in the original.

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. ———. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Baudelle, Yves. 2012. “‘L’assiette à bouillie de bonne-maman’ et ‘le râtelier de rechange de papa’.” Roman 20–50, 54, 109–123. Bracher, Nathan. 2010. After the Fall: War and Occupation in Irène Némirovsky’s Suite française. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Emerson, Caryl. 1984. “Editor’s Preface.” In Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, xxix– xliii. ———. 1985. “The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin.” PMLA 100:1, 68–80. Forster, Edward M. 1990. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin. IMEC, NMR 11.1—Dossier réuni par Elisabeth Gille et Denise Epstein. IMEC, NMR 2.1—Suite française, 1940–1942. Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York: Routledge, 2010. Némirovsky, Irène. 2006. Suite française. Paris: Folio. ———. 2014. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage.

3

DEPARTING FROM TOLSTOY: POLYPHONY AND MONOLOGISM

75

Shukman, Ann. 1984. “Bakhtin and Tolstoy.” Studies in Twentieth Century Literature 9:1, 57–74. Weiss, Jonathan. 2005. Irène Némirovsky. Paris: Éditions du Félin.

CHAPTER 4

Beyond Tolstoy: Music

This final chapter of Part I brings to a close the analysis of Tolstoy’s influence on Némirovsky. As seen in the previous two chapters, Némirovsky’s readings of, and on, Tolstoy provided the grounds for a creative engagement with his work in respect to both form and content. As the analysis progressed, I argued that Suite française is a polyphonic novel. Besides serving as a prelude to this book’s second part, calling the Tolstoyinspired novel polyphonic—hence gravitating towards a Dostoevskian model—suggests that the process of reception was followed by a creative act that took Némirovsky “beyond Tolstoy.” The creative act that allowed Némirovsky to overcome the limitations imparted by Tolstoy will be the focus of this chapter. In the following, I argue that music was the creative tool that enabled Némirovsky to merge the processes of reception and creation. Indeed, everywhere in Némirovsky’s work music can be seen as a powerful instrument to organize the narrative both externally (the novel’s architecture) and internally (its theme and subject). Although she talked about herself as “résolument antimusicienne” (“decidedly unmusical” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 218]), Némirovsky named Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin her favourite musicians (Philipponnat 2012: 75) and filled her manuscripts with musical references. For instance, the working journal of Le Vin de solitude (1936. The Wine of Solitude) shows that, as early as 1934, she was organizing the novel on the basis of César Franck’s Symphony in D minor:1 © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_4

77

78

M.-L. CENEDESE

Premier mouvement : Kiev, Pétersbourg, Lento-Allegro non troppo, a) suavité, b) innocence déçue, c) joie incompréhensible. Deuxième mouvement : Finlande, Allegretto-poco più lento, a) méditation, b) inquiétude, c) angoisse, d) indifférence. Troisième mouvement, Allegro non troppo, a) haine, b) tristesse, c) espoir douloureux, d) confiance, e) espoir de vengeance. (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 309) First movement: Kiev, Petersburg, Lento–Allegro non troppo, a) sweetness, b) thwarted innocence, c) incomprehensible joy. Second movement: Finland, Allegretto–Poco più lento, a) meditation, b) anxiety, c) anguish, d) indifference. Third movement: Allegro non troppo, a) hatred, b) sadness, c) sorrowful hope, d) trust, e) hope of revenge. (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 218)

According to Philipponnat, Némirovsky’s comments about her lack of musical knowledge are only a mark of excessive modesty; in fact, besides the working notes for Le Vin de solitude, other archival excerpts prove how sensitive (if not even knowledgeable) Némirovsky was to music and how much of a creative source it was for her writing. For example, in a notebook we find a list that includes the following: “Trouver pour les Baal Shem d’Ernst Bloch cette sonorité large, profonde et troublante et ce coup d’archet poignant rattachant cette mélodie hébraïque de tout un passé de douloureux servage” (NMR 7.1. “[Find for Ernst Bloch’s Baal Shem] that vast, deep and disturbing tone, and the poignant sound of the violins that link this Hebrew lament to an entire past of sorrowful bondage” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 218]).2 Increasingly, Némirovsky shows the adoption of music as a method to think about her writing and to frame some of her ideas. The following citation is just one example of how musical structures entered her reflexive process: L’idée de la symphonie est séduisante pour moi surtout qui trouve un plaisir sadique à jouer avec ce que je comprends le moins, comme la musique, mais il est certain qu’il faut une composition, et qu’autant la composition architecturale convient quand il s’agit d’un récit nettement délimité ayant un commencement, un milieu et une fin, autant la composition d’une symphonie, d’ailleurs également en trois parties—convient à ce qui ne finit pas proprement dit, à une vie humaine. (Philipponnat 2012: 78. Emphasis Némirovsky’s)

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

79

Personally, I find the idea of the symphony seductive, especially since I find a sadistic pleasure in playing with that which I understand the least, like music. It is certain, though, that I need a composition, and as much as architectural composition is fitting when it comes to a story that has clear borders, with a beginning, a middle and an end, at the same time the composition of a symphony, which is also in three parts, is convenient to that which does not properly end, to a human life. (Emphasis Némirovsky’s)

Music as External Structure Until the spring of 1942, Némirovsky used to call her novel “the storms series,” and only in April did she decide that “I must make a suite of ‘Tempête,’ ‘Dolce,’ ‘Captivité’” (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 363). The choice of a title with such musical undertones echoes the references to music found in the manuscripts. There, we find entries such as the following: “Il faudrait retrouver tous ces termes de musique (presto, prestissimo, adagio, andante, con amore, etc.)” (NMR 5.37. “Must rediscover all these musical terms (presto, prestissimo, adagio, andante, con amore, etc.)” [SF: 356]). Another note reads: “Musique : Adagio de l’op. 106, l’immense poème de la solitude—la 20, variation sur le thème de Diabelli, ce sphynx [sic] aux sourcils sombres qui contemple l’abîme—le Benedictus de la Missa Solemnis et les dernières scènes de Parsifal ” (NMR 5.37. “Music: Adagio from Op. 106, that immense poem of solitude—the twentieth variation on the theme of Diabelli, the sphinx with the dark eyebrows who contemplates the abyss—the Benedictus of the Missa Solemnis and the final scenes of Parsifal ” [SF: 356]).3 Dominique Délas and Marie-Madeleine Castellani suggest that other works may have contributed to finding the novel’s final structure, such as the Alpensinfonie by Richard Strauss, Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (The Pastoral Symphony) or Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (Délas and Castellani 2012: 94–95). When it came to Suite française, Némirovsky was working with the idea of the sonata form,4 to which she refers in one of the manuscripts: La Sonate classique de piano. Division en trois mouvements, articulation de l’adagio et du dernier mouvement (exposition du thème, développement, rappel). Appeler les volumes :

80

M.-L. CENEDESE

1) « Tempête » : 1er mouvement 2) « Dolce » : 2ème mouvement 3) « Captivité » : 3ème mouvement ? : 4ème mouvement (NMR 5.37) The classical piano sonata. The division in three movements, the articulation of the adagio and the last movement (presentation of the theme, development, recapitulation). Call the volumes: 1) “Storm”: 1st movement 2) “Dolce”: 2nd movement 3) “Captivity”: 3rd movement ? : 4th movement

Elsewhere Némirovsky also mentioned Bach, master of the counterpoint.5 The reference to Bach strikes the reader first and foremost in the novel’s title, which may bring to mind the Französische Suiten (BMW 812–817, ca. 1722–1725) or the Cello Suites (BWV 1007–1012, ca. 1717–1723), but is also evident in the relay of chapters. Both “Tempête en juin” and “Dolce” open on an ouverture, an initial chapter introducing collective voices: the alert in Paris and the German army’s entrance to Bussy.6 Similarly, they end with an all-encompassing finale—a synthesis of everyone’s winter in “Tempête en juin” and the exit of the German army at the end of “Dolce.” Throughout the narrative, the chapters’ focalization alternates between collectivities and individuals, most prominently in “Tempête en juin”. Additionally, the variation within the structure mirrors the opposition between tutti and soli, the central theme of Suite française (Délas and Castellani 2012: 94–95). Indeed, it seems that at the time of writing the idea of contrasts and oppositions7 was quite significant for Némirovsky: Bach ramène sa matière à deux thèmes contrastants, dont une phase finale, sans lourdeur, fait la synthèse. La ligne mélodique, le sujet de la fugue, à certains moments disparaissent comme un fleuve souterrain où n’affleurent pas que par des simples accords de temps à autres—des allusions … Art inégalable des contrastes. (NMR 5.37) Bach reduces his material to two contrasting themes, in which a final phase, without any heaviness, creates the synthesis. The melodic line and the

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

81

subject of the fugue disappear at certain moments like an underground river or only reappear in simple harmonies from time to time—allusions … An incomparable art of contrasts. (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 368)

Némirovsky’s desire to describe the weaving of contradicting realities reverberates throughout her writing journal: “ce n’est pas la misère que je montrerai mais la prospérité à côté d’eux […] Oui ! Ça doit être fait à force d’oppositions : un mot pour la misère, dix pour l’égoïsme, la lâcheté, la confrérie, le crime” (NMR 5.37. I won’t show the destitution, but the prosperity next to it […] Yes! It must be made by using oppositions: a word for deprivation, ten for selfishness, cowardice, privilege, crime). By foregrounding the “game of oppositions” Némirovsky thought to have found a new and persuasive way to describe the lives of individuals and the chaos generated by collective events: “Oppositions ! Oui, il y a quelque chose là-dedans, quelque chose qui peut être très fort et très neuf” (NMR 5.37. Oppositions! Yes, there is something there that can be very powerful and very new).8 Among her many notes on music, Némirovsky often refers to Forster’s Aspects of the Novel . In the sixth chapter, “Pattern and Rhythm,” Forster uses a musical analogy to try and express the idea of a “sensory” sense of unity, namely, the presence of a rationally inexplicable “tempo” in a novel. In his opinion, pattern implies a “unity” that should embrace “the immense richness of material which life provides” (Forster 1990: 145). When he turns to a novel’s rhythm, he connects it to musical rhythm: like in music, the rhythm of a novel should “fill us with surprise and freshness and hope” by way of “its waxing and waning” and not be constantly present “all the time like a pattern” (148). Forster identifies two kinds of rhythm within a musical composition: the “easy rhythm,” created by repetitions and variations of the same theme; and the “difficult rhythm,” which provides a relation between the movements (149). For example, in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony the first rhythm is “the diddidy dum that everybody can hear and tap to” (146); conversely, only a few people can hear the rhythm of “the symphony as a whole” (146), the second kind of rhythm, which cannot be tapped to. In literature, he continues, “the first kind of rhythm, the diddidy dum, can be found in certain novels and may give them beauty. And the other rhythm, the difficult one— the rhythm of the Fifth Symphony as a whole—I cannot quote you any parallels for that in fiction, yet it may be present” (146). Forster found the best exemplification of this use of rhythm in Proust’s À la recherche du

82

M.-L. CENEDESE

temps perdu, a novel he regarded as “chaotic, ill-constructed,” with “no external shape; and yet, it hangs together because it is stitched internally, because it contains rhythm” (146). Némirovsky was definitely à la recherche of the rhythm that would give a sense of unity to the expansive and still ungraspable material of her novel. The idea of the quest for a “rhythm,” rather than a “form,” that would “stitch” the novel is present in some of her comments: En attendant la forme … c’est plutôt le rythme que je devrais dire […] les relations entre différentes parties de l’œuvre. Si je connaissais mieux la musique, je suppose que cela pourrait m’aider […] Le rythme doit être ici dans les mouvements de masse, tous les endroits où l’on voit la foule dans le 1er volume, la fuite, les réfugiés, l’arrivée des allemands dans le village. (NMR 5.37) While waiting to see the shape … or rather I should say the rhythm […] the relationship between different parts of the work. If I had a better knowledge of music, I suppose that would help me […] The rhythm must be here in the movements of the masses, everywhere where the crowds appear in the first volume, the exodus, the refugees, the arrival of the Germans in the village. (SF: 357)

Alongside Bach, Beethoven has also been presented as a musical source of inspiration for Suite française.9 As a tentative proof of how Beethoven might have been in Némirovsky’s mind at the time, in the notebooks one can find excerpts from Forster’s discussions about rhythm in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (cf. NMR 5.37) and from Romain Rolland’s considerations on Bach and Beethoven in Le Voyage Intérieur (Philipponnat 2012: 85). It is also significant that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, composed between 1804 and 1808, offers a dialectic of major and minor keys expressing the alternation between disruption and quietude.10 This alternation recalls Némirovsky’s ambition to unravel her narrative by showing the opposing realities of people’s lives during the war. Délas and Castellani highlight how Némirovsky’s notes tend to reference descriptive music that opposes peaceful scenes to the violence of the elements. In their article, they also allude to the different tempos between “Tempête en juin” and “Dolce”: the first being the allegro, the fast-paced one; the second the andante moderato, as its name, “Dolce,” suggests (Délas and Castellani 94–95; cf. also Philipponnat 2012: 81). In sum, references in the manuscripts and recent scholarship converge in showing that

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

83

music was a very important element in the external structuring of Suite française. Némirovsky’s successful portrayal of the mayhem of people and elements as contrasting forces echoes Bach and Beethoven, who conveyed opposition and chaos without neglecting external unity and internal harmony.

Music as Internal Structure Next to giving its shape to Suite française’s external form, however, music also plays a significant role within the novel. In this section, I aim to bring to the fore how music is an intrinsic part of the fictional fabric of Suite française and, ultimately, to show how it manages to be a creative tool that harmonizes form and content. It is worth remembering that the creative process around the writing of Suite française is prompted by the need to overcome the apparent failings of its model, War and Peace. Eventually, music appears to be the agent that allowed Némirovsky to control the content of her novel while organizing its form. Philipponnat observes that Némirovsky’s novel is a solid example of the roman musical (musical novel), defined by Pierre Brunel as “un récit à sujet musical […], et tout aussi bien, et même mieux, celui qui essaie, d’une manière ou de l’autre, de se couler dans une forme musicale ou d’en inventer une” (qtd. in Philipponnat 2012: 85. A story about music […], and just as well, and even better, a story that tries, one way or another, to sink into a musical form or to invent one).11 Indeed, not only does Némirovsky’s use of music provide Suite française with its exterior foundations, but it goes as far as shaping the body of the novel itself, where individual characters are identified with solo instruments and collective scenes with the roar of the choir. In this respect, the following manuscript entry corroborates the musical analogy: En effet, c’est comme la musique où on entend parfois l’orchestre, parfois le violon seul. Du moins ça devrait être ainsi […] Le chœur, la foule : cela revient dans tous les arts, tragédie, musique, peinture et le mien. Les tableaux de foule chaque fois approfondissent l’aventure particulière, lui donnent sa signification. User (bien) du chœur, c’est avoir sense of proportions. (NMR 5.37. In English in the original) Indeed, it’s like the music in which you sometimes hear the orchestra, sometimes the violin on its own. At least, that’s the way it should be […]

84

M.-L. CENEDESE

The choir, the crowd: that happens in all arts, tragedy, music, painting and in mine. The crowd scenes always foreground a specific adventure and give it its meaning. To know how to use the choir (well) means having a sense of proportions.

The German officer Bruno von Falk, one of the main characters of “Dolce,” is a musician who has been drafted to the German army at the outbreak of the war. Once in the fictional village of Bussy, he lodges at the Angellier’s house, where Mme Angellier lives with Lucile, the neglected and deceived wife of Mme Angellier’s son Gaston who is now a prisoner of war in a German camp. In the house, officer von Falk is happy to play Lucile’s piano, to her contentment and to Mme Angellier’s distress. When the talented officer plays for her for the first time, Lucile—who was forced to relinquish playing herself because her mother-in-law deemed it an insult to her absent husband (Sf: 458)—repeatedly exclaims “Que c’est beau !” (Sf: 408. “It’s so beautiful!” [SF: 267]). On the contrary, Mme Angellier finds music physically painful: “Ce piano … Comment peut-on aimer la musique ? Chaque note semblait jouer sur ses nerfs mis à nu et lui arrachait un gémissement” (Sf: 474. “The piano … How could anyone like music? Every note seemed to grate on her exposed nerves and made her groan” [SF: 315]). Chapter 12 of “Dolce” is particularly important to understand how music is deeply intertwined within the fabric of Suite française. Olivier Philipponnat speaks of a mise en abyme, by which he alludes to the fact that Némirovsky’s aesthetic reflections were consciously put in the hands of the novel’s two artists: Bruno von Falk (in the second part) and Gabriel Corte (in the first part), a musician and a novelist. In this way, Philipponnat argues, Suite française operates a parallel between the art of the novel and the art of the symphony (Philipponnat 2012: 84). For the writer Gabriel Corte, “‘[un] roman doit ressembler à une rue pleine d’inconnus où passent deux ou trois êtres, pas davantage, que l’on connaît à fond” (Sf: 52. “A novel should be like a street full of strangers, where no more than two or three people are known to us in depth” [SF: 16]). This idea, expressed in “Tempête en juin,” anticipates the more comprehensive account given by Bruno about the “peuple en marche” (population on the move), “un chœur” (a choir), and the “lutte entre basses et sopranos” (struggle between the bass and the soprano) that will be at the core of his artwork (NMR 5.37).

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

85

The episode in question starts off when, on a rainy afternoon, Bruno is smoked out of his room by a malfunctioning chimney and thus joins Lucile in the warm dining room, where the two share an unexpected moment of intimate conversation. After an initial perfunctory exchange, Lucile invites Bruno to sit at the piano and tells him: “jouez tout ce qu’il vous plaira, monsieur …” (Sf: 406. “But you can play as much as you like, Monsieur” [SF: 266]). First Bruno plays Bach and Mozart; then he plays something else, something he composed himself. The passage in which he “explains” the music bears citing at length: « Écoutez ceci maintenant. » Il jouait, disait à mi-voix : « Voici le temps de paix, voici le rire des jeunes filles, les sons joyeux du printemps, la vue des premières hirondelles qui reviennent du sud … C’est dans une ville d’Allemagne, en mars, quand la neige commence seulement à fondre. Voici le bruit de source que fait la neige lorsqu’elle coule le long des vieilles rues. Et maintenant la paix est finie … Les tambours, les camions, les pas des soldats … Entendez-vous ? Entendez-vous ? Ce piétinement lent, sourd, inexorable … Un peuple en marche … Le soldat est perdu parmi eux … À cette place il doit y avoir un chœur, une espèce de chant religieux qui n’est pas terminé encore. Maintenant, écoutez ! C’est la bataille … » La musique était grave, profonde, terrible […] « Le soldat meurt, et, au moment de mourir, il entend de nouveau ce chœur qui n’est plus de la terre mais des milices divines … Comme ceci, écoutez … Cela doit être suave et éclatant à la fois. Entendez-vous les célestes trompettes ? Entendez-vous les sonorités de ces cuivres qui font crouler les murailles ? Mais tout s’éloigne, s’affaiblit, cesse, disparaît … Le soldat est mort. » (Sf: 408) “Listen to this now,” he said. He started playing and speaking softly: “This is the sound of peace, this is the laughter of young women, the joyful sound of spring, the first swallows coming back from the south … This is a German village, in March, when the snow first starts to melt. Here’s the sound of the stream the snow makes as it flows through the ancient streets. And now there is no more peace … Drums, trucks, soldiers marching … can you hear them? Can you? Their slow, faint, relentless footsteps … An entire population on the move … The soldiers are lost among them … Now there should be a choir, a kind of religious chant, unfinished. Now, listen! It’s the battle …” The music was solemn, intense, terrifying […] “The soldier is dying, and at that very moment he hears the choir again, but now it’s a divine chorus of soldiers … Like this, listen … it has to be both sweet and deafening at once. Can you hear the heavenly trumpets? Can you hear the brass instruments resonating, bringing down the walls?

86

M.-L. CENEDESE

But now everything is fading away, softening, it stops, disappears … The soldier is dead.” (SF: 267)

As it is described, Bruno’s symphony tells and performs a tale of war and peace, where one man struggles between his duty towards the community (the choir) and his own personal aspirations (the solo voice). The conversation between Bruno and Lucile that follows this private performance emphasizes the piece’s fundamental topic: “Ceci est le problème principal de notre temps, individu ou communauté” (Sf: 409. “What is more important, the individual or society?” [SF: 268]). Philipponnat’s analysis reminds us that Némirovsky had been fascinated by this internal struggle already for years prior to writing Suite française. In 1935 for instance, her review of Lev Nitoburg’s novel Le Quartier allemand (Nemeckaja Sloboda, 1933. The German Neighbourhood) for La Revue hebdomadaire underlines the protagonist’s internal conflict between his artistic and political inclinations: Il y a un conflit douloureux en lui entre ces deux aspirations, ces deux besoins de sa nature. […] Toute l’idéologie d’Aliocha lui enseigne que son art n’a de signification qu’en tant qu’il sert le bolchévisme, mais son désir de musicien, d’artiste est au contraire de se détourner du réel, d’être farouchement individualiste et de ne voir que son art au monde. (qtd. in Philipponnat 2012: 83)12 He is painfully conflicted between two aspirations, two human needs. […] Aliocha’s ideology teaches him that his art has no meaning unless it serves bolshevism, but his desire as a musician, as an artist, is instead to turn away from reality, to be savagely individualistic and to see nothing else but his art in the world.

With Suite française, Némirovsky is able to formally address the modalities with which music can represent this struggle, and most importantly, how such modalities can be reproduced within a literary narrative. Therefore, in von Falk’s composition the succession of solo and choir is emblematic of Suite française’s sequence of chapters—the flow of collectivities, small groups and individuals in both “Tempête en juin” and “Dolce”—and of the tensions summoned in the opposition of each group: the French and the Germans; the young and the old; the rich and the poor; the Parisians and the villagers; the landowners and the labourers;

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

87

and so on. Translated into literary form on a structural level, solo instruments become the individual characters while the choir turns into the community, that is, the collective voice of the group.13 Thus, we recognize the musical analogy acting as a vector of narratorial organization as well as of narrative meaning. Music shapes Suite française externally by carrying its broad material towards a structural unity given by “movements” and “rhythm”; at the same time, music also highlights the themes of the novel and differentiates its various players (see Délas and Castellani 2012: 94). The manuscript of Suite française offers further particulars on Bruno’s symphony. In addition, these details contribute to reinforcing our understanding of the great themes and movements that Némirovsky wanted to address: Pour l’œuvre musicale de l’allemand […] : cette fanfare de trois trompettes dont les hautbois, puis les flûtes répètent les motifs audacieux—le tumulte des instruments à corde, qui bourdonnent soudain au milieu des accords éclatants comme un essaim d’abeilles autour d’une armée en ordre de bataille—14 un premier chœur exprime que l’heure fixée par dieu est la meilleure, une fugue traduit la mobilité de la vie terrestre ; le ténor nous avertit selon le Psaume 90 que nos jours sont comptés, et la basse nous somme sans ménagements de mettre de l’ordre dans notre maison … le soprano répond par un cristallin appel au Seigneur Jésus—Enfin lutte entre … basses et soprano. (NMR 5.37) For the German’s musical work: the three-trumpet fanfare among which the oboes, then the flutes repeat the same bold patterns—the chaos of the strings that buzz suddenly amid the vibrant chords like a swarm of bees around an army ready for battle—a first choir sings that the optimal time is that appointed by god, a fugue expresses the transience of earthly life, the tenor warns us that our days are numbered, like in Psalm 90, and the bass bluntly summons us to put our house in order … the soprano answers with a tinkling call to the Lord Jesus—Finally, a struggle between … the bass and the soprano.

The annotations about the focus of Bruno’s masterpiece and, meta-narratively, about Suite française, provide added evidence that Némirovsky’s interest was mostly in individuals and communities rather than in history.15 Furthermore, once such meta-narrative convergence is established (Philipponnat’s mise en abyme), we are also able to infer

88

M.-L. CENEDESE

additional elements about Némirovsky’s writing process and practice: “Chaque fois qu’il [Bruno] corrige, c’est pour désencombrer le morceau de tous traits ou passages si brillants soient-ils qui ne font pas corps avec lui : c’est pour souligner un motif, l’ériger en thème … clarté, rigueur même dans l’agencement ” (NMR 5.37. Emphasis added. Whenever he makes a variation, he does so in order to declutter the piece of all features or passages that, as brilliant as they may be, are not at one with it: it is to underline a motif, to build it into a theme … clarity, rigour, even in the layout ). In a similar vein to the process that led to the framework of Le Vin de solitude, the abundant comments from Suite française’s writing journal show how the expansive material of the novel was broken down into segments manifesting a specific tempo: “La coupe en 4 mouvements : lent, suivi d’une fugue; allegro dans un ton autre mais voisin; adagio, et pour terminer une série de danses rapides” (NMR 5.37. “[The division in 4 movements:] slow, followed by a fugue; allegro in a different but similar tone; adagio, and to end a series of quick dances” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 367]). Némirovsky repeatedly used a musical lexicon in order to organize with utmost clarity the particulars of the narrative, as well as to keep its unfolding within a coherent structure. The multiple references in the manuscript underpin music’s importance in providing a structure that, despite the extensive scope of the material at hand, provided a sense of unity and coherence. After leaving Bussy with his regiment at the end of “Dolce,” Bruno von Falk was bound to find death on the Eastern front. His music, however, would not perish with him: as per Némirovsky’s notes for “Captivité”, Bruno’s music would have outlived his death and passed the test of time. The music would have been heard, at the end of the war, by Lucile and Jean-Marie Michaud, the wounded soldier of “Tempête en juin” and member of the FFL (Forces françaises libres ). Whereas for Lucile hearing Bruno’s music would trigger past memories (the “short-lived” yet chaste romance with the German enemy and what was left of it in her memory), Jean-Marie would be galvanized and feel expectant for the future: “Lucile et Jean-Marie entendaient l’œuvre de l’allemand devenu célèbre : pour Lucile c’est le passé qui se découvre, pour Jean-Marie l’avenir” (NMR 5.37. Lucile and Jean-Marie were listening to the work by the German [officer], who had by now become famous: for Lucile it is the uncovering of the past; for Jean-Marie—the future). More significantly, Némirovsky had decided that Bruno’s music would have inspired Jean-Marie to write

4

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

89

a great novel: “Si j’en fais un écrivain, c’est là que lui vient l’idée initiale de quelque grand livre” (NMR 5.37. If I make a writer of him, that’s when he has the initial idea for some great book). The parallel between Bruno’s piece and Suite française—that “quelque chose de grand” that was “pas pour maintenant” (NMR 2.1. Something great that is not for now)—is evident. And although Némirovsky’s novel can count more than one musical reference, the active role of music within the extant text, its structuring agency, and the multiple sources mentioned in the manuscripts, altogether contribute to foreground its essential role in the writing process of Suite française. The analysis in this chapter has shown that music had a double import in the creation of Suite française. On an external level, it helped Némirovsky to structure the material; internally, music provides an analogy of the novel. This twofold use of music helped Némirovsky to gain control of the presumed shortcomings of her literary model, War and Peace; for this reason, I have argued that Némirovsky’s use of music mediated between Tolstoy and herself. In this respect music acted as the creative tool that allowed her to receive Tolstoy’s work and to go beyond it with her own creative act, which she inscribed (and described) within the narrative itself. Thus, Suite française includes both the process of Némirovsky’s reflection on the form as well as its outcome. In the end, the effectiveness of music is also tangible when it comes to Némirovsky’s pursuit of “expansion” and her novel’s contribution to possible futures. Music “brings out the emotions” (SF: 268), by which it allows the reader to identify and empathize with, or dissociate and distance from, the novel’s characters, all the while appropriating by subsumption the particular circumstances narrated in Suite française—the war, the debacle, the exodus, the German Occupation, the relationships among French people and their interactions with the occupier. That is, music provides the reader with the possibility of individually engaging with the novel and its issues on a personal level: it fosters a way of transcending the events at stake and offers a mapping of human behaviour (private and collective) in the face of historical upheaval. After all, it is Mme Angellier, Lucile’s haughty and strict mother-in-law, who voices the truth of music’s power: “la musique seule abolit entre deux êtres les différences de langage, ou de mœurs et touche en eux quelque chose d’indestructible” (Sf: 474. “Music alone can abolish differences of language or culture between two people and evoke something indestructible within them” [SF: 309]).

90

M.-L. CENEDESE

Notes 1. Cf. Philipponnat (2012: 76–78) for a detailed analysis of the relationship between Le Vin de solitude and music, in which he underlines how Némirovsky carefully crafted the novel’s musical architecture. 2. Ernst Bloch’s Baal Shem was originally written for violin and piano in 1923, and for violin and orchestra in 1939. It was performed for the first time on 6 February 1924. Subtitled “Three Pictures of Hassidic Life” and divided into three movements (“Vidui” [Contrition; un poco lento]; “Nigun” [Improvisation; adagio non troppo]; “Simchas Torah” [Rejoicing; allegro giocoso]), the piece’s title refers to the founder of the Hassidic movement, Baal Shem Tov. 3. Olivier Philipponnat remarks that Némirovsky copied this passage from Romain Rolland’s Le Voyage Intérieur, published by Albin Michel in 1942 (Philipponnat 2012: 75–76). 4. According to composer Dmitri Shostakovich, Chekhov’s story “The Steppe” is “one of the most musical works of Russian literature, written almost in sonata form” (Bartlett 1998: 308). And indeed, earlier on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky “felt most acutely the musical nature of [Chekhov’s] prose in its rhythms and the sonata-like structure, where the end recapitulates the beginning after a central development” (Rayfield 1997: 156). 5. It is worth recalling here that Bakhtin uses the analogy of counterpoint to explain polyphony (cf. Bakhtin 1984: 21–22, 40, 42–43, and 67). 6. In her notebooks Némirovsky also calls these chapters “Prelude” (see Chapter 2, p. 49). Furthermore, the first chapters of “Tempête en juin” and “Dolce” are also the only ones that don a title: “La guerre” (“War”) and “Occupation,” respectively. 7. Furthermore, the idea of pairing contrasting images is characteristic of “carnival thinking” (Bakhtin 1984: 126. Bakhtin’s carnival has been briefly mentioned in Chapter 3, p. 69). 8. Chekhov also made use of a technique of contrasts: for instance, commenting on the parallel made by Shostakovich between his story “The Steppe” and the sonata form, Bartlett writes: “So the clash of opposing themes and their recapitulation is both something we can see physically on the page and something that operates at an entirely different level. Nothing is stated outright, but an elaborate thematic structure is created in the reader’s mind through the various associations” (Bartlett 1998: 309). 9. Cf. Philipponnat (2012), Weiss (2007: xiii). 10. In her lecture given at the Cambridge Russian Seminars on 3 December 2013, Dr. Rosamund Bartlett also suggested that the architecture of Anna Karenina partly follows the sonata form (as previously mentioned,

4

11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

BEYOND TOLSTOY: MUSIC

91

Némirovsky was reading Anna Karenina days before her arrest). In addition, Dr. Bartlett pointed out that the structure of Anna Karenina is comparable to Beethoven’s Great Fugue op. 133 and to Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, a point that weaves a compelling chain of connections between Beethoven, Tolstoy, British modernist writers and, shall we add, Némirovsky. Philipponnat refers to Pierre Brunel, Les Arpèges composés: musique et littérature (Paris: Klincksieck, 1997), p. 24. “Deux romans russes,” La Revue hebdomadaire, no. 8, 23 February 1935, pp. 491–498. The struggle of the soloist against the orchestra as a metaphor for the fight between the individual and the community is the subject of Aulis Sallinen’s Concerto de chambre, op. 87 (2005). The concerto, first performed in Espoo (Finland) on 2 March 2006, loosely follows the extant structure of Suite française, being divided into three movements: I. Tempête en juin. II. Dolce. III. Épitaphe fragile (cf. Philipponnat 2012: 84). According to Philipponnat, this is an excerpt from André Pirro’s L’Esthétique de Jean-Sébastian Bach (1907), quoted in Robert Pitrou’s Jean-Sébastien Bach published by Albin Michel in 1941 and which Némirovsky must have read at the time (cf. Philipponnat 2012: 82). Cf. Chapter 2, “History, Individuals, and Communities” (pp. 44–51).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Bartlett, Rosamund. 1998. “Tchaikovsky, Chekhov, and the Russian Elegy.” In Leslie Kearney (ed.), Tchaikovsky and His World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 300–318. Délas, Dominique and Castellani, Marie-Madeleine. 2012. “Une symphonie inachevée. Structure de Suite française d’Irène Némirovsky.” Roman 20–50, 54, 87–97. Forster, Edward M. 1990. Aspects of the Novel. London: Penguin. IMEC, NMR 2.1–Suite française, 1940–42. IMEC, NMR 5.37–Recueil de lettres d’IN, notes et autres correspondances réunies par les filles de l’auteur. IMEC, NMR 7.1–Carnet avec poèmes et notes. Lienhardt, Patrick and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2009. La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus.

92

M.-L. CENEDESE

Némirovsky, Irène. 2006. Suite française. Paris: Folio. ———. 2014. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage. Philipponnat, Olivier. 2012. “‘Un ordre différent, plus puissant et plus beau’. Irène Némirovsky et le modèle symphonique.” Roman 20–50, 54, 75–86. Rayfield, Donald. 1997. Anton Chekhov. A Life. London: HarperCollins. Weiss, Jonathan. 2007. Irène Némirovsky. Her Life and Works. Stanford: Stanford UP.

PART II

Dostoevsky: Unconscious Influence

CHAPTER 5

Dreams from Underground

Let us go back to the beginning of Chapter 2. There, we quoted an interview from 1933.1 In that interview, Némirovsky explicitly stated that she did not share the French readers’ predilection for Dostoevsky. In her opinion Dostoevsky was far more typically Russian than any other author (e.g. Tolstoy), his characters too peculiar to be inclusive, too exceptional to be universal. About a decade earlier, a similar take on the inherent difficulty in accessing Dostoevsky’s prose was also expressed by Proust: in La Prisonnière (1923. The Captive), Marcel tells Albertine that the Russian author’s extraordinary interest in crime is very alien to him (“très étranger”). Yet, while “tout cela me semble aussi loin de moi que possible” (“all that sort of thing seems to me as remote from myself as possible”), Marcel concedes how that particular Dostoevskian world—that “humanité plus fantastique” (“human types even more fantastic”)—is able to reveal the profound and unique truth of the human soul (Proust 1954: 457; 2000: 433). Still, although a decade (or so) apart, “se mettre dans l’esprit de Raskolnikov ou de l’idiot” (to put yourself in the mind of Raskolnikov or the Idiot), or Dostoevsky’s potential for conjuring empathy by identification, was problematic for both Proust and Némirovsky. In reviewing her works of the 1930s some critics made several allusions to Dostoevsky. These extend from general remarks that simply attempted to place Némirovsky in the lineage of Russian literature tout court —e.g. © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_5

95

96

M.-L. CENEDESE

“On suppose facilement que Dostoïevski, Tolstoï, Tchekhov et Sologoule [sic] l’ont nourrie” (IMEC, GRS 315 LAC. It is easy to assume that Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov and Sologoule [sic] nourished her)2 —to more specific comments that emphasized a shared affinity for the so-called dark sides of life: “Il [David Golder] a sa place, solide et bien vivant, auprès du noir cyprès que nous laissa Léon Tolstoï : La Mort d’Ivan Ilitch, et du saule funèbre de Dostoievski : Krotkaïa” (IMEC, GRS 315 DG. It [David Golder] has its place, solid and well alive, next to the black cypress left by Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Dostoevsky’s sorrowful willow: Krotkaya).3 When L’Affaire Courilof (The Courilof Affair, 2010) came out in 1933, the anonymous reviewer of La Presse Indochinoise linked what he perceived as Némirovsky’s substantial interest in psychology over causality/causation logics to a “Dostoevskian form”: Il s’agit bien plutôt des réactions psychologiques du héros autour d’un fait violent, que des mobiles poussant à l’action même. Je veux dire par exemple que l’ensemble de la vie de Golder le mène logiquement à sa fin; alors que le récit de l’assassinat de Courilof par un nihiliste dont nous ignorons même le nom permet à l’auteur de montrer combien les pauvres humains sont les jouets des événements qu’ils croient provoquer et qu’ils provoquent quelquefois ! (GRS 315 LAC ) It concerns the hero’s psychological reactions around a violent event, rather than the motives of the action itself. For example, the entirety of Golder’s life logically brings him to his end; whereas the story of Courilof’s murder by a nihilist whose name we do not even know allows the author to show to what degree humans are at the mercy of events they think they provoke, although they do so only sometimes!

Proust made a similar comment about Dostoevsky’s non-linear narrative development and its effects on the reader’s relation to the characters: “au lieu de présenter les choses dans l’ordre logique, c’est-à-dire en commençant par la cause, [il] nous montre d’abord l’effet, l’illusion qui nous frappe. C’est ainsi que Dostoïevsky présente ses personnages. […] Nous sommes tout étonnés après d’apprendre que cet homme sournois est au fond excellent, ou le contraire” (Proust 1954: 456. “Instead of presenting things in their logical sequence, that is to say beginning with the cause, [he] shows us first of all the effect, the illusion that strikes us. That is how Dostoievsky presents his characters. […] We’re quite

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

97

surprised to find later on that some sly-looking individual is really the best of men, or vice versa” [Proust 2000: 432]). For French readers, Dostoevsky was the emblem of Russianness, however, many Russian émigrés contested this vision, suggesting that other writers were more emblematic; to hail Dostoevsky’s prose as the most faithful representation of Russia was to them too simplistic and reductive (Peyre 1975: 23–24). A vehement critic of Dostoevsky was émigré writer Vladimir Nabokov, who bequeathed his opinion in very eloquent prose: “Dostoevski is not a great writer, but a rather mediocre one—with flashes of excellent humor, but alas, with wastelands of literary platitudes in between […]. I am very eager to debunk Dostoevski” (Nabokov 2002: 98). In Némirovsky’s case, however, the association with Dostoevsky emerges mainly from reviews than from her own work, interviews or journal notes. This is, then, more a testament to the critics’ enthusiasm for a mode russe and the widespread infatuation with Dostoevsky than to Némirovsky’s own acknowledgment of his influence. Yet, to a reader of the Russian classics, there is a perceptible presence of “something Dostoevskian” in Némirovsky’s prose. I contend that Dostoevsky left a trace on her literary imaginary, similar to an unconscious memory permeating it. Stéphane Chaudier first evoked such a relation under the phrasing “un effet oblique de ‘réception’” (Chaudier 2008: 71). By “oblique reception” Chaudier means an inevitable yet unwanted association (that is, the writer knows she cannot escape a confrontation that in no way she wants to provoke), unavoidable thematic similarities, but never a tangible, and open, claim of affiliation (71). I prefer to move from Chaudier’s use of the term “reception” and gravitate towards the word “influence” in order to recall the theoretical and methodological approach that this book advances. I would qualify this kind of influence as “unconscious”. By “unconscious” I do not imply that Némirovsky lacked awareness of her choices. Indeed, as others have pointed out, Némirovsky played with the stereotype as a way of both pleasing and gently scolding her audience.4 Yet, unlike for Suite française and Tolstoy’s War and Peace,5 nowhere does Némirovsky share the desire to write her own Brothers Karamazov-like novel and, as I remind at the beginning of this chapter, she seemed to find his work less to her taste. However, Dostoevsky’s literary aura remained, in my opinion, beyond her conscious desire and expectation. It is thus

98

M.-L. CENEDESE

I, as a reader-researcher, that mediate between Némirovsky and Dostoevsky to find “parallels, connections, affinities” (Bassnett 2007: 138). Hence, in the rest of this chapter and in the two that follow, I will explore the traces of Dostoevsky in Némirovsky’s novels Les Chiens et les loups (1940), La Proie (1938), Deux (1939), Jézabel (1936), Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934), and the short story “Fraternité” (1937). The discovery of these traces is also largely shaped by Julia Kristeva’s analyses of Dostoevsky and his work. Methodologically, then, by moving beyond a direct affiliation, the search for this “unconscious” influence enables literary encounters mediated by (the) reader(s)-researcher(s), which is at the heart of what it means to “do” creative influence.

« vous ne trouvez pas qu’elle a quelque chose de dosto¨ievskien ? » Némirovsky’s novel Les Chiens et le loups was initially serialized by the journal Candide (October 1939–January 1940) and later published as a book by Albin Michel in 1940 (Kershaw 2010: 35 and 121). Upon publication, Les Chiens et les loups received sparse attention in the press: the novel was appreciated but misunderstood by many, seen as a “novel of Jewish manners” exploring the depth of the “Jewish soul.” Despite selling about 17,000 copies, the publication coincided with the unpropitious moment of the defeat and the exodus. In a letter to her editor, Robert Esménard, who conjured poor sales as an excuse to cut down Albin Michel’s monthly payments, Némirovsky snapped and asked whether “If The Dogs and the Wolves was put on sale at the end of May, am I responsible?” (Letter dated 25 September 1940. Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 314). The novel tells the story of Ada, Ben and Harry Sinner, cousins who belong to two opposing branches of the same Jewish family—the rich and assimilated one, Harry’s, and the poor, Yiddish-speaking one, Ada and Ben’s—and describes their emigration journeys from a Kiev-like city to Paris. Ada and Ben grow up with Ben’s sister Lilla and mother Rhaïssa in the ghetto, “la ville basse” where “vivait la racaille, les Juifs infréquentables, les petits artisans, les locataires des boutiques sordides, les vagabonds, un peuple d’enfants qui se roulaient dans la boue, ne parlaient que le yiddisch, portaient des chemises en guenilles et des casquettes énormes sur des cous frêles et de longues boucles noires” (Cl: 9. “the lower part of town [where] lived the scum. These were the unsavoury

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

99

Jews, the self-employed craftsmen, the tenants of sordid little shops, the vagabonds, the people whose children rolled in the mud, spoke only Yiddish and wore ragged clothes with enormous caps perched above their frail necks and long dark curls” [DW: 1]). Harry, instead, grows up an only child, far from them in a beautiful villa in the higher part of town, “au sommet des collines couronnées de tilleuls, […] entre les maisons des hauts fonctionnaires russes et celles des seigneurs polonais” (Cl: 9. “Where the lime trees crowned the tops of the hills, and important Russian officials and members of the Polish nobility had their houses” [DW: 1]). The economic separation continues in Paris where Harry lives, with his French wife, in a hôtel particulier 6 in the 16th arrondissement, and Ben and Ada, now married, in an apartment in the Quartier des Ternes (17th arrondissement). About three years after his marriage to the wealthy Laurence Delarcher, on his way to his mother’s house, Harry stops by a little antique bookshop, where he is suddenly drawn in by two little artworks that give him a sense of confusion and vertigo, as “certainement il avait vu quelque part, en rêve ou dans son enfance, ces ciels sombres de mars d’où tombe en rafales la neige, et ces jardins désordonnés, étouffés par les fleurs d’un bref été brûlant” (Cl: 142. “Surely he had seen this somewhere before, in a dream or during his childhood: those dark March skies where gusts of snow fell, and those wild gardens, teeming with the flowers of a short, stiflingly hot summer” [DW: 118]). The bookshop’s owner tells Harry that the artist is Ada Sinner, “une fille brune, assez belle, l’air étranger” (145. “She has dark brown hair, rather beautiful; she looks foreign” [121]). Harry immediately understands that she must be a poor relative, and annoyed at such “insolence juive” (146. “Jewish arrogance” [121]),7 he buys the paintings with the precaution of not divulging the buyer’s identity. Still, he cannot help but talking about his purchases and showing them to his guests, who find them “realistic yet poetic in a strange, wild way” (147. “[…] une poésie sauvage et étrange, mais réelle” [122]). Then one day a group of friends suggests going to visit the artist’s atelier where there might be other paintings, and after some initial resistance, Harry agrees. Once there, while they look at her work, which is “tellement authentique, ingénu, barbare !” (150. “So sincere, ingenuous, barbaric!” [125]), a woman eyes Ada from head to toe and whispers: “Vous ne trouvez pas qu’elle a quelque chose de dostoïevskien ?” (150. “Don’t you find there’s something Dostoyevskian about her?” [125]).8

100

M.-L. CENEDESE

Why did Némirovsky, who did not mention Dostoevsky lightly, nor frequently, used this adjective to describe Ada? According to Stemberger, Dostoevsky is a stand-in for Eastern exoticism (Stemberger 2006: 216); she also propounds that Némirovsky used the clichés of Dostoevskian Russianness not only to comply with readers’ expectations but also with a pinch of irony, as a way to challenge such stereotype (2013: 71). Similarly, Angela Kershaw suggests that this is not “a serious commentary on Ada’s work” but rather a “shorthand for ‘Russian’” (Kershaw 2010: 90). Hence, by depicting her character along the stereotype of the mode russe, Némirovsky is adopting the indigenous French gaze and at the same time disrupting it (89). Surely, the group’s intentions for calling on Ada unexpectedly are only dictated by the capricious desire of these restless and featherbrained young bourgeois, and Némirovsky’s criticism here is very clear. Similarly, Stéphane Chaudier highlights the satirical turn of the episode and acknowledges how the use of the word “dostoïevskien” in that context exemplifies the superficial use of stereotypes and labels by a certain “educated” class (Chaudier 2008: 68). By playing with the horizon of expectations of contemporary readers, simultaneously assuming and rejecting their most predictable associations, Némirovsky is actively engaging with questions of both literary influence and reception. To “assume” and “reject” Dostoevsky all at once—telling readers “I know what you expect” and at the same time “your interpretation is wrong so I am entitled to mock you for it”—suggests that she is striving to change the horizon “through negation of familiar experiences or through raising newly articulated experiences” (Jauss 1982: 25), that is by being creative with such expectations. Kershaw reminds us that “it is important not to exaggerate the significance of literary allusions” nor to fetishize “the search for influences” (Kershaw 2010: 50). Yet, understanding the different horizons—the audience’s and Némirovsky’s (both a reader and a writer that complies with expectations but also defies them)—as they overlap and unfold in a fertile yet creatively competitive dialogue (Chaudier 2008: 72) allows us to operate a further mediation that, by building on these heterogenous horizons, fosters a new hermeneutic approach. Indeed, Chaudier also suggests a more complex interpretation of the value of the word “dostoïevskien”. For him the adjective defines the horizon of expectations within which the text’s reception is played out (68), thus indicating that Némirovsky is “teasing” her audience by implying her double affiliation as both French and foreigner—“étrangère

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

101

parce qu’étrange, de cette étrangeté que résume à lui seul le qualificatif de ‘dostoïevskien’” (69. Foreign because strange, of this strangeness that is wholly encapsulated in the qualifier “Dostoyevskian”. [The French original retains the echo of Proust’s “étranger”: the alien, foreigner]).9 Knowing the literary experience of her contemporary readers and therefore foretelling how that would mediate in the reception of Les Chiens et les loups , Némirovsky seems to be anticipating their response by assuming the Russian legacy and, at the same time, also dissociating from it. Irony, insinuates Chaudier, might be a mechanism to lessen the immediate association with Dostoevsky, to counteract the anxiety of an infelicitous influence, of a “paternity” that could conceal her specific gifts and in turn flatten her very own contribution (71). In Chaudier’s analysis, the significance of the word “dostoïevskien” becomes even clearer when compared to a moment from Suite française, in which the writer Gabriel Corte talks about Tolstoy. Whereas the passage there is concerned with narrative technique and the writer’s craft, in Les Chiens et les loups the narrator is instead indicating the very identity of the artist portrayed (70). Chaudier’s reference to the artist’s identity is an important annotation. In fact, Némirovsky’s use of the word Dostoevskian has been mainly understood as referring to Ada’s paintings and, in general, as a way to label her artworks. These are described as picturing men and women from the rue des Rosiers, “la peau comme du suif, l’œil noir, chaud, rusé, éclatant” (Cl: 136. “[…] skin like wax, dark eyes that were warm, sly, brilliant” [DW: 113]); eastern landscapes like “une rue en pente, couverte de neige fondue, bordée de quelques maisons basses,” “une lampe fumeuse,” “une lumière couleur de rubis,” “un étrange crépuscule désolé, qui semblait de cendre, d’ocre et de fer,” “un jardin à demi sauvage” (142. “[…] a sloping street lined with a few low houses was covered in melting snow,” “a smoking lamp,” “a reddish light the colour of rubies,” “the strange, desolate dusk that looked as if it were made of ashes, ochre and iron” [118]). Yet, when she alludes to “something Dostoyevskian”, Harry and Laurence’s friend is looking closely at Ada rather than at her paintings: “en toisant Ada à travers son face-à-main” (150. “[…] looking Ada up and down through her lorgnette” [125]). I would therefore suggest that Némirovsky is urging us to look more closely at Ada, instead of at her paintings, and to ask in all seriousness whether she could be a character out of a Dostoevskian novel.

102

M.-L. CENEDESE

Underground Dreamers and Artists The short novel White Nights (1848) marks the apex of Dostoevsky’s early romantic tendencies. In the novella, Dostoevsky reprised a theme he had previously attempted to explore in The Landlady (1847), which the critic Belinsky deprecated for its confused structure and affected language. Both novellas present a reclusive character, a solitary man who wanders through the empty streets of St. Petersburg; at the centre of White Nights there are two equally lonely characters, the unnamed hero and narrator, and a young woman, Nastenka, whom he meets on the first night. As a self-described “dreamer” whose grasp on reality is dubious, and who raises a few notable events to soaring dimensions (“I have so little actual life that I regard moments like this one as rare indeed and I can’t help repeating them in my dreams” [WN: 12]), the hero of Dostoevsky’s novella shares certain affinities with Némirovsky’s Ada. In particular, they both tend to escape reality by seeking refuge in an alternative dimension. Dostoevsky’s Dreamer “[revels] in the richness of his own inner life”;10 his existence is punctuated by a continuous fluctuation between the brutality of real life and the soothing realm of dream, where “‘[t]he Goddess of Imagination’ […] has woven her golden warp with capricious hand, unfolding before him patterns of fantastic chimerical life. […] He dreams about everything” (21–22). Another novel by Dostoevsky proves compelling in analysing Némirovsky’s Les Chiens et les loups , namely Notes from Underground (1864). Despite the sixteen years that separate them from one another, Dostoevsky’s two novellas are linked by the common disillusionment with dreams: the Dreamer’s tale ends on a tone of despair, carried fifteen years ahead in a “miserable and uninviting future” (WN: 56) that preludes the other unnamed and defeated dreamer that will be the Underground man. The man who has retired to the underground is cyclically plunged into both “a certain outlet which reconciled me to everything,” and an escape into the “sublime and beautiful” (NU: 50): dreams. Indeed, the Underground man would shrink into his corner and dream in bouts of three months, and during this time he would become someone else, “a hero” (51), and experience “moments of such positive ecstasy, of such happiness, that I swear I didn’t feel even the slightest stirring of derision within me. Yes, there was faith, hope, love” (51). On her side, Ada’s tenuous relationship to reality is described by Némirovsky as a trait that characterizes her throughout the novel’s

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

103

temporal and spatial progressions, from childhood to adulthood, from East to West. Ada is a quiet child, used to playing silently by herself or with her cousin Ben; together, they make up a game “semblable à un rêve,” by which they reach, through adventurous deeds, countries inaccessible to adults: “la vision était précise, mais baignée d’une lumière particulière, pâle et grise comme dans les premiers moments de l’aube, et les sons […], tout cela était distinct, mais paraissait affaibli par la distance” (Cl: 42. “The game transformed into a dream: the images were detailed, but bathed in a peculiar light, pale and grey, like the first breaking of dawn, and the sounds […], all the sounds were clear, yet somehow muffled, distant” [DW: 29]). Ada is “dans la lune” (48. “Her head always in the clouds” [34]), and finds in her grandfather’s books “tout un univers inconnu” where “les couleurs en étaient si éclatantes que le monde réel pâlissait, disparaissait” (49. “An entire universe, hitherto unknown […], a world whose colours were so dazzling that reality paled in comparison and faded away” [35]). Ada’s imagination allows her to create a vibrant parallel existence, of which Harry is an integral part, more real to her than her own family: “Ce Harry, […] elle le voyait mieux, il était plus vivant pour elle que Ben ou tante Rhaïssa. […] elle croyait presque à la présence du jeune garçon à ses côtés ; […]. Elle se jouait à elle-même tout un drame plein de surprises, d’événements heureux, de rencontres, de querelles, de raccommodements” (79. “He was more real to her than Ben or Aunt Raissa. […] she could almost sense the presence of the young boy beside her; […] Over and over in her mind, she played out a drama full of surprises and delights, encounters, quarrels, reconciliations” [62]). Later in the novel, looking at Harry from a distance, Ada “tout à coup ferma les yeux, en proie à une sorte de rêve, de phantasme, comme elle les appelait, où les scènes imaginées dans son esprit devenaient aussi précises et réelles que celles de la vie même” (105. “Suddenly, she closed her eyes, in the grip of a kind of dream, a fantasy, as she called it, in which scenes created in her mind became as clear and real as life itself” [85]). During his dreaming spells, Dostoevsky’s Underground-Dreamer believes himself to be a hero “on a white steed and crowned with laurels” (NU: 51) and, inebriated by this escape towards everything “sublime and beautiful,” he separates from the “secondary role” he has in reality: “And this was my undoing, since in the muck I consoled myself with the thought that at other times I was a hero, but a hero who was disguising himself in the muck” (51). Similarly, the White-Nights-Dreamer lives on the cusp of two worlds, so that when “his imagination is roused up […]

104

M.-L. CENEDESE

then, all of a sudden, a new enchanting world, with all its glittering vistas, once more shines before him. A new dream, new happiness!” (WN: 22). Precursor of Ada’s belief in the tangibility of the dream, the Petersburgian Dreamer believes that “this life is not a product of emotional excitement at all, no mirage, no delusion of the imagination, but the true reality, the genuine article, the actual!” (23). As a consequence, real life turns into a source of discontentment and weariness that holds nothing of importance compared to the imaginary life (“what did our real life hold for him? In his corrupted view, our lives, […] are so slow, so indolent, so sluggish; in his view we are all discontented with our lot, wearied-out by our lives” [22]). Némirovsky draws very much on the interplay between dream and reality, at times separating them and then blurring their respective borders. For instance, when the pogrom arrives—an eventuality met by Ada with a certain indifference as a result of her weak grasp of what that actually meant—finally “le monde réel fut plus fort que celui des rêves” (Cl: 52. “But the day finally came when the real world proved more powerful than their dreams” [DW: 38]). Moreover, as mentioned above, Ada’s paintings combine an imaginary that is “realistic yet poetic in a strange, wild way” (122). Two receptions at the Sinner’s Parisian house contribute to bridge the two dimensions, although they eventually reinforce their separatedness. Whereas during the first reception Ada is a passer-by that looks in from the outside, she is the guest of honour of the second, which Harry has organized to exhibit her artwork and introduce her to potential buyers. In the days preceding the soirée, Ada lived in a “jeux délicieux, poursuivi en une sorte de rêve éveillé,” where, “comme on tourne un film à rebours, de même elle était revenue au point exact où s’était interrompue autrefois sa vie réelle, la seule réelle malgré les apparences : […] elle confondait dans son esprit le passé et le présent, le songe et la réalité” (163–164. “[…] that delightful game she’d engaged in […], as if she were in some waking dream. Just as you rewind a film, so she had returned to the exact moment in time when her true life had been interrupted, her only true life in spite of appearances […]. But in her mind, she gladly confused the past and the present, dream and reality” [137–138]). However, at the end of the reception in her honour, where Ada can see from up close that “les femmes étaient belles, brillantes, les hommes élégants, les voix vives et légères,” she is obviously deceived by reality as she cannot help but remark how “il y avait entre cette réception chez les Sinner et la matinée dansante entrevue autrefois la distance de la

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

105

réalité au rêve” (168. “The women were beautiful and dazzling, the men elegant, with light, lively voices. Yet, in spite of that, this reception at the Sinners’ home and the afternoon tea dance she had once watched from a distance were as different from each other as reality is to a dream” [142]). It is evident that in the three novels the constant back-and-forth between reality and dream (although less so in Notes from Underground) is connected to a creative instance that identifies the dreamer with the artist. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s early Dreamer (that is, from White Nights ) speaks of himself as “the artist of his own life” (WN: 22); the Underground man’s dreaming phases “always ended extremely happily, in a lazy and intoxicating transition into art” (NU: 52), which eventually lead him, like the previous Dreamer, to become an amateur “man of letters” that stole “from poets and novelists and adapted to every possible kind of use and requirement” (52).11 As for Ada, from early childhood she shows promise with drawing and painting. Beginning in an unnamed Kiev-like city in Ukraine, painting becomes Ada’s passion and means to explore and interpret the world that surrounds her. In Paris: Ada se réfugiait de plus en plus dans une vie intérieure si profonde et étrange que rien ne pouvait réellement l’offenser ou la meurtrir. Lorsque tante Rhaïssa l’invectivait, elle parvenait, à force de volonté, à regarder ce visage aigre, intelligent et dur non en fille maltraitée, mais en peintre, et elle reproduisait ensuite sur une page arrachée d’un cahier chaque trait qui s’était fixé dans sa mémoire. (Cl: 99) Ada took refuge within herself; her imagination was so fertile and strange that nothing could really offend her or hurt her. When Aunt Raissa began swearing at her, Ada managed, through sheer force of will, to look at her aunt’s harsh, intelligent, bitter face, not as an ill-treated young girl would, but with the eye of a painter. Afterwards, she would take a page from her sketchbook and reproduce the features etched in her memory. (DW: 80)

Thus, reality in all its duress and pettiness is sublimated through Ada’s creativity and becomes interwoven with the imaginary.12 Unlike in White Nights and Notes from Underground, where dream and reality mark two contrasting and clearly separated entities—for instance, the White Nights Dreamer’s four exhilarating nights precipitate on the final morning that rudely takes him back to reality—Ada’s active gaze allows the two dimensions to be permeable to each other. Throughout the novel she goes from retreating in her own dream world to avidly interacting with a reality

106

M.-L. CENEDESE

perceived as even more fleeting. It is her artistic vocation that connects the two dimensions, allowing them to be superposed through imagination and to feed one another. This can be noticed early on in the novel: “Le monde visible était empli tout entier de formes et de couleurs que l’on ne pouvait retenir à jamais, qui, sans cesse, vous échappaient, mais cette recherche, cette poursuite, voici ce qu’il y avait de plus précieux sur la terre” (Cl: 100. “The outside world was full of shapes and colours that were impossible to remember for ever, constantly lost, but seeking them out, pursuing them, was the most precious thing on earth” [DW: 80]). A brief consideration must be made at this point. The insistence on the hero’s existence between two dimensions—dream and reality—produces the impression of a splitting of the persona that recalls the phenomenon of the double. From his second novel The Double (1866), Dostoevsky provided notorious examples on this theme and has thus entered canonical studies on the topic, like Otto Rank’s The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study (1914) or Sigmund Freud’s “The Uncanny” (1919). Similarly, the use of a binary model pervades Némirovsky’s novel: France/Russia; rich/poor; Jewish/Catholic; etc.13 In Les Chiens et les loups , the title of the novel is already an indication of a double nature, as it introduces the “wolf-dog dichotomy that structures the novel” and that is exemplified by Ben (the wolf) and Harry (the dog) (Suleiman 2016: 194). Secondly, oftentimes Ada’s portrayal not only underscores her allegiance to an existence lived at the cusp between dream and reality, but also suggests a dual identity: “Ainsi que cela lui arrivait parfois, elle était habitée en même temps par deux pensées différentes : l’une naïve, enfantine, et l’autre plus mûre, indulgente et sage ; elle sentait en elle deux Ada, et l’une des deux comprenait […]” (Cl: 73. “However, as sometimes happened, she was filled with two different feelings both at once: one was naïve, childlike, and the other more mature, understanding and wise. She felt that two Adas lived within her, and one of them understood […]” [DW: 55]). According to Kershaw, Némirovsky’s exploration of the binary nature of (Jewish) identity in Les Chiens et les loups is typical of French Jewish writers of the period. Such dualism, she affirms, should be read not as a negative opposition but rather as a complex exploration of the multiple cultural allegiances that make up the individual’s identity as something relative, conflictual, and non-fixed (Kershaw 2010: 83 and 123). Finally, Ada’s physical appearance is also a marker of duplicity: neither young nor old; neither child nor woman. I will explore this issue further in the following section.

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

107

Gendered Representations: Oppositions, Reversals, Breakages At the beginning of Les Chiens et les loups , we first meet Ada when she is barely five years old. From the onset, her physical description is that of a frail, solitary child, with big black eyes and thick black hair: “On ne voyait d’elle qu’une petite masse carrée sur de maigres jambes […] et deux grands yeux noirs, encore agrandis par un cerne brun” (Cl: 12. “All you could see of her was a small square bundle on top of thin legs, and, from close up, two large black eyes […]; her eyes looked even bigger because of the dark circles beneath them” [DW: 3]); “cette frange épaisse sur le front, jusqu’aux sourcils, et ces boucles noires, inégalement coupées dans le cou. Pauvre petit cou mince” (20. “[…] that thick fringe on her forehead that came right down to cover her eyebrows, and the uneven dark ringlets around her neck. Her poor little thin neck” [9]). At such a young age, Ada’s “expression was as intense and fearful as a wild young animal’s” (3. “[…] le regard […] farouche et attentif comme celui d’une petite bête sauvage” [12]). When she reaches the age of twenty, Ada’s appearance and childlike amazement have not changed much: her distinctive physical description, with tangled hair, pale and yellowish complexion, recalls the unnamed Underground man’s “agitated face […] pale, vicious, mean, [his] hair dishevelled” (NU: 78). Besides, she also rejects the customary performative acts of womanhood, exemplified here by make-up:14 C’était une fille de vingt ans, aux mouvements brusques, au visage pâle et mobile. Dès qu’elle s’animait, le feu montait à ses joues minces qui devenaient d’un rouge sombre, mais ordinairement sa pâleur lui donnait un aspect bilieux et maladif, d’autant plus qu’elle haïssait le fard et ne l’appliquait que d’une façon maladroite. Elle était de petite taille, bien faite, quoique trop maigre encore ; le mariage avait à peine développé ses formes qui étaient restées grêles comme celles d’une fillette, et ses gestes étaient rapides et ardents comme autrefois. Elle coiffait maintenant ses cheveux en arrière, mais, quand elle travaillait, ils reprenaient le pli qu’ils avaient eu dans l’enfance et retombaient en frange sombre jusqu’à ses sourcils. (Cl: 135–136) She was twenty years old, with brusque gestures and a pale, expressive face. When she was interested in something, fire rushed to her thin cheeks, turning them a deep red, but normally her paleness made her skin look yellowish and sickly, especially since she hated make-up and never knew

108

M.-L. CENEDESE

how to put it on properly. She was petite, with a good figure, though she was still too thin. Marriage had barely filled her out: she had remained lanky, like a young girl, and her gestures were rapid and passionate, as in the past. She now wore her hair pulled back, but when she was working, it fell forward over her eyebrows in a thick, dark fringe, just as it had when she was a child. (DW: 112)

Even as a grown up woman Ada seems to linger at the edge between childhood and womanhood, and her physical appearance consistently makes her stand out among the other female characters of the novel. Her cousin Lilla, for instance, “brune, au teint blanc, au joli visage tendre et sérieux, les cheveux attachés sur la nuque par un nœud plat de satin noir” (Cl: 28. “Lilla was a brunette with pale skin, an innocent, serious, pretty face […] and hair tied back with a black satin ribbon at the base of her neck” [17]), though having the same dark hair and pale complexion as Ada’s, is foolish and frivolous in her prettiness: “une douce petite dinde” (136. “A silly little goose” [113]). Instead, Harry’s wife Laurence is a blond woman depicted as “the incarnation of Europe and francité” (Stemberger 2006: 361) and the epitome of Cartesian Frenchness: “elle ne pouvait respirer et vivre que dans un univers où tout était net, clair, défini, sans brumes, sans troubles jouissances” (130. “She could only live and breathe in a world where everything was precise, clear and well-defined, with no grey areas and no guilty pleasures” [108]) (cf. Stemberger 2006: 45 and 361). Laurence and Ada embody two contrasting aesthetics: on one side there is the classical French clarity with its rigour, measure, civility and decorum; on the other there is the Slavic disorder and “savagery” (Cf. Stemberger 2006: 45 and 215– 228). Their behaviours and respective ways of engaging with the outside world are described in the same opposing terms of chaos and exactness. For instance, as an artist, instead of reproducing pleasant scenes enveloped in hues of delicate colours, Ada cannot help but feel the urge to seek out “avec acharnement, cruauté, […] inlassablement les secrets que recélaient de tristes visages et des cieux sombres” (138. “Cruelly, tirelessly, the secrets concealed in sad faces, beneath dark skies” [115]). When it comes to her feelings for Harry, Laurence is suspicious of such troubling emotions. In the description, the narrator contributes to widen the dichotomy between the two women, who incarnate the French way and the Russian (“oriental”) way of loving—the first with rationality and reserve (pudeur), the second with passion and no hesitations:

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

109

Elle [Laurence] avait longtemps redouté cet amour. Il n’était pas dans sa nature de se laisser envahir le cœur sans méfiance par un sentiment aussi désordonné et aussi brûlant. Pour tout dire, le côté excessif , romanesque, théâtral d’une passion de ce genre […] lui parassait risible, du moins étrange. […] Non, elle n’avait pas accueilli cet amour comme Ada eût pu le faire, comme une terre altérée boit la pluie, mais avec perspicacité, discernement et réserve. (Cl: 130. Emphasis added) For a long time, she [Laurence] had feared this love. It was not in her nature to allow her heart to be filled by an emotion that was so overwhelming and so passionate without mistrusting it. The excessive, romantic, dramatic side of such passion […] seemed to her, if not actually ridiculous, at least strange. […] No, she didn’t welcome this love, the way Ada would have done, as the dried-up land soaks in the rain, but rather with insight, discernment and reserve. (DW: 108)

Despite the insistence on her enduring passionate nature and her intense love affair with Harry (though, as Suleiman notices, their bond is fuelled “not so much by erotic passion as by ‘the obscure call of blood’” [Suleiman 2016: 197]), Ada is somewhat atypical in Némirovsky’s production, which largely features women (oftentimes Jewish) conscious of, or in the process of discovering, their “femininity” and sexuality— usually femmes fatales relishing in their seductive power (e.g. Gloria and Joyce Golder, Hélène Karol, Gladys Eysenach).15 Instead, Ada comes across as a desexualized character, eternally trapped between childhood and adulthood. Stemberger remarks this aspect too, when noticing that Ada’s gender identity is often strangely androgynous and infantilized (Stemberger 2006: 45–46). For instance, Harry’s friends see her as “excessivement jeune, presque une enfant” (Cl: 148–149. “She seemed extremely young, almost a child” [DW: 123]). Harry and Laurence themselves, too, hesitate: “Il est difficile de parler d’elle comme d’une femme … […] elle n’a absolument rien de féminin … On dirait une enfant” (158. “It’s difficult to speak of her as a woman … […] there’s absolutely nothing feminine about her … She looks like a child” [132]). And Ada herself recognizes that her actions often follow the impetus of a child. However, rather than identifying as either child or adult, she considers herself as an ageless creature: “Elle, qui était une femme de vingt ans, elle avait agi comme une petite fille de douze. ‘Mais je ne suis pas une femme, pensa-t-elle ; il y a des gens qui sont sans âge, et je suis ainsi. J’étais une vieille femme à douze ans et j’aurai des cheveux blancs que, dans mon

110

M.-L. CENEDESE

cœur, je serai encore exactement la même qu’aujourd’hui’” (141. “She, a woman of twenty, had behaved like a little twelve-year-old child. ‘But I’m not a woman,’ she thought. ‘There are people who are ageless, and I’m one of them. I was an old woman at twelve, and even when I have white hair I’ll be exactly the same in my heart as I am today’” [117]). Thinking of Ada as a desexualized and ageless creature brings to mind the Dreamer’s statement that “the dreamer—if a precise definition is required—is not a person, but a sort of genderless creature” (WN: 17. Emphasis added). Gender is a productive lens to consider “unconscious” analogies between the two novels. Building on Gary Rosenshield’s argument that Dostoevsky’s hero is “the sentimental heroine,” Joe Andrew explores how Dostoevsky represents gender in White Nights (Andrew 2002; Rosenshield 1977). Although he disagrees with Rosenshield’s claim that the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity are radically problematized, Andrew raises two relevant considerations. First, he points out the ambivalence of the male image, where alongside the typical predatory behaviour and male gaze Dostoevsky introduces aspects of the typical female iconography—trembling, crying and anxiety (Andrew 2002: 31). Secondly, Andrew also mentions the undermining of the usual male– female power-structures (33). A similar deconstructive pattern recurs in Notes from Underground where in the second part, “Apropos of the Wet Snow,” the hero breaks into tears in front of Liza, “like some old crone who’s been put to shame” (NU: 111). Here too, the conventional male– female power-structure is upturned: “[a]nd the thought also entered my overwrought brain that our roles had now been completely reversed, that she was the heroine and that I was just such a humiliated and crushed creature as she had appeared to me that night—four days before …” (112). In Les Chiens et les loups , of the two main male characters it is Harry Sinner who embodies both the male seductor and the feminine iconographies noticed in the description of the Dreamer.16 Indeed, initially rejected by Laurence Delarcher, Harry’s courtship becomes more insistent, his desire openly visible yet also stereotypically “feminine”: “—Elle consentira, dit doucement Harry […] : je la prierai, encore et encore ; je me ferai importun, humble, pressant, suppliant, songea-t-il” (Cl: 123. Emphasis added. “‘She’ll say yes,’ said Harry softly […]. ‘I’ll ask her over and over again,’ he thought, ‘and I’ll wear her down. I’ll make myself humble, insistent, imploring ’” [DW: 102. Emphasis added]). Furthermore, Harry often displays the traits that, according to Andrew and

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

111

Rosenshield, make up the iconography of female characters: shortly before the passage cited above, Harry’s mother remembers how vis-à-vis strong emotions Harry may turn pale, blush and tremble, and his eyes may fill with tears (122). Occasions where he displays this range of “physical emotions” are, for instance, at the appearance of Ben and Ada during the pogrom (Cl: 70–71/DW: 53–54); during his meeting with Ada at the Alliance française (89–90/70–71); and during an argument with his wife (160–162/133–136).17 Although Andrew argues that the treatment of masculinity and femininity in Dostoevsky’s White Nights is not as radical as some critics would have claimed and that the representation of Nastenka is “broadly in line with the stereotype of ‘woman—emotion’,” he points out “Nastenka’s greater strength vis-à-vis the Dreamer” (Andrew 2002: 33). We may argue that same “greater strength” underscores the representation of Liza in Notes from Underground as well as Ada. While a dreamer-figure, Ada also exhibits a more self-assured resilience than her male counterparts, even if within socio-economic hierarchies she is placed at the weaker echelons (given that she comes from the ghetto; in Paris she belongs to the disadvantaged Eastern-European émigré community; and, once expelled from France, she joins the number of Jewish refugees in Eastern Europe in the late 1930s). However, within the “family structure”—by which I mean her relationships with, respectively, Ben and Harry—she holds the dominant position. A couple of examples will clarify this point. Having gained independence in her marriage with Ben, Ada reiterates that she does not love him, starts a liaison with Harry, and finally refuses to follow her husband overseas; while involved with Harry, she refuses to vacate her apartment (“ce logement qui semblait à Harry un taudis” [Cl: 200]. “Her lodgings, which Harry considered a hovel” [DW: 169]), and eventually gives Harry up in order to save him from a scandal and sure deprivation. Her departure for the East, where her child is born and she is able to “find a community” (Suleiman 2016: 206), breaks the ties with both Ben and Harry, enhancing Ada’s autonomy with regard to the two men. To recapitulate, this chapter begins to explore the different dimensions of the “quelque chose de Dostoïevskien” that appears in print in Les Chiens et les loups . I have suggested that Ada, and to a certain extent also Ben and Harry, are characters of Dostoevskian inspiration, and therefore, through close textual analysis I have attempted to expose where and how it is possible to detect Dostoevsky’s reverberations. Reflecting the horizon of expectations of her readers, Némirovsky played with the

112

M.-L. CENEDESE

articulation of such expectations by engaging with Dostoevskian tropes in what becomes, perhaps unconsciously, a revisitation of the figures of the Man from the Underground and the Dreamer. Years later, the researcher operates a reading in pairs that, mediated by her expand-ed (and expanding) horizon, in turn amplifies the reading potential. In the following two chapters this creative reading, where horizons collide and intersect, will be enhanced by the meaningful possibilities implied in that “quelque chose de Dostoïevskien.”

Notes 1. Cf. Chapter 2, p. 29, reference from GRS 315 LAC. 2. J. Anthelme dans La Presse, 24 June 1933. The reviewer probably meant the Symbolist writer Fyodor Sologub (1863–1927), born Fyodor Kuzmich Teternikov. 3. G. de Pawlowski, “David Golder d’Irène Némirovsky,” in Gringoire (31 January 1931). 4. See discussion below. Cf. Chaudier (2008: 68), Kershaw (2010: 90), Stemberger (2006: 216 and 2013: 71). 5. Cf. Part I of this book. 6. A specifically French townhouse or mansion. 7. Laurence’s father, M. Delarcher, accuses Harry and all foreigners of the same “insolence” (Cl: 124). Cf. Chapter 6, p. 125. For an analysis of such “insolence Juive”, see Stemberger (2006: 113). 8. Némirovsky uses approximately the same phrasing in the short stories “Ida” (1934) and “Espoirs” (1938). In the first, Ida’s colleague uses the adjective to describe Ida’s lover: “Alors, il vous aime, et supporte tout ?… Comme c’est curieux, ces mentalités étrangères … Je voudrais le connaître … Ce serait très Dostoiévskien … ” (Némirovsky 2006: 38. So he loves you, and he bears everything? … These foreign mindsets are so strange … I would like to know him … It would be very Dostoevskian … ). In “Espoirs”, the protagonist, Sophie Savine, sells hand-made hats in a boutique in Paris, where customers are attracted to her Dostoevskian character: “Vous ne trouvez pas que cette petite femme a quelque chose de dostoïevskien ? Sonia, vous appelez ça du ‘nietchevo’ n’est-ce pas ?” (Némirovsky 2004: 143. Don’t you find that this little woman has something Dostoevskian? Sonia, don’t you call this ‘nechevo’?). Cf. Stemberger 2006: 216; 2013: 71. 9. Introducing her translation of The Dogs and the Wolves, Sandra Smith warns her readers that the French word “étrange” “has several connotations: ‘strange’, ‘foreign’, ‘different’, and, as a noun, ‘outsider’ as well”, and it is therefore important to “keep in mind the many implications when

5

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

113

these words arise” (DW: v). Similarly, Suleiman underscores the implications of the translation of étranger: “The word for ‘foreigner’ in French, étranger, is also the word for ‘stranger.’ The two meanings overlap but are not synonymous, for one can be a stranger to a community or group without being a foreigner; conversely, some foreigners are not strangers to a particular individual or group—many people have foreign friends. But both words carry connotations of difference, and possibly exclusion, from the majority group or the nation. […] In all their varieties, foreigners and strangers are outsiders—perceived as such by others, and in most instances by themselves as well” (Suleiman 2017: 55). Emphasis in original. On this point see also Pevear (2004: ix). To a certain extent, a similar connection is established by Ben in his business dealings, which rely as much, if not more, on his imagination and creativity than on the real course of the market: “Oui, je bluffe, j’invente, mais on commence par imaginer tout ce qu’on ne peut pas posséder, et on finit, si on le désire avec assez de force, par posséder plus qu’on n’a imaginé” (Cl: 113. “Sure, I show off, I make things up, but when you start out by dreaming of all the things you can’t have, you end up getting more than you ever imagined, if you want it badly enough” [DW: 92]). Stemberger (2006) analyses at length the theme of the Doppelgänger in several of Némirovsky’s works, including the novel Les Chiens et les loups and the short story “Fraternité” hereafter also discussed. Cf. Stemberger (2006: 120, 124, 173, 180–189). Make-up is a significant trope in Némirovsky’s fiction. It is a recurring feature of her female characters, and in particular it connotes the refusal of ageing as well as a grotesque masquerade of established gender roles (cf. Cenedese 2016; Stemberger 2006: 358–371; 2008: 605). In Némirovsky gender relations are organized around money; femininity is often a staged construct (a masquerade), and sex/seduction is used to advance one’s own interests. See, for instance, analyses of Némirovsky’s David Golder (1929) in Stemberger (2008) and Cenedese (2016). Stemberger makes a similar remark about “effeminate men” in her discussion of Jewish characters. She points out that the association of Jewishness and Womanliness is a stereotype with a long tradition and a widespread topos at the turn of the twentieth century (Stemberger 2006: 44–45). Stemberger analyses the destabilization of traditional gender roles in Némirovsky’s novel David Golder, and affirms that “the ‘citational practices’ (Butler 1993, p. 108) of gender identity, the complex codes of ‘femininity’ and ‘masculinity’ become particularly visible. ‘Women’ act like ‘men’—sexually and economically; while ‘men’ assume traditional ‘female’ positions” (Stemberger 2008: 605).

114

M.-L. CENEDESE

References Andrew, Joe. 2002. “‘Same Time, Same Place’: Some Reflections on the Chronotope and Gender in Dostoevsky’s White Nights.” New Zealand Slavonic Journal, Festschrift in honour of Arnold McMillin, 25–38. Bassnett, Susan. 2007. “Influence and Intertextuality: A Reappraisal.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 43:2, 134–146. Cenedese, Marta Laura. 2016. “Performing the Feminine: Mimicry and Masquerade in Irène Némirovsky’s David Golder.” In J. Koehn and P. Wojcik (eds.), Schwellenräume–Schwellenzeiten. In den Werken von Irène Némirovsky, Leo Perutz und Bruno Schulz. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 143– 155. Chaudier, Stéphane. 2008. “«Une humanité fantastique»: Némirovsky et Dostoïevski.” Tangence, 86, 67–88. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. 2009. Notes from Underground. In Notes from Underground and The Double. Trans. Ronald Wilks. London: Penguin, 1–118. ———. 2009. White Nights. In A Gentle Creature and Other Stories. Trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1–57. IMEC, GRS 315 DG–Dossier de presse David Golder. IMEC, GRS 315 LAC –Dossier de presse L’Affaire Couriloff . Jauss, Hans-Robert. 1982. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York: Routledge. Lienhardt, Patrick, and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus. Nabokov, Vladimir. 2002. Lectures on Russian Literature. New York: Harcourt. Némirovsky, Irène. 2004. “Espoirs.” In I. Némirovsky, Destinées et autres nouvelles. Pin-Balma: Sables, 137–166. ———. 2006. “Ida.” In I. Némirovsky, Ida, suivi de la Comédie bourgeoise. Paris: Denoël. ———. 2008. Les Chiens et les loups. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2009. The Dogs and the Wolves. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto & Windus. Pevear, Richard. 2004. “Introduction.” In F. Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground. Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Everyman’s Library. Peyre, Henri. 1975. French Literary Imagination and Dostoevsky and Other Essays. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Proust, Marcel. 1954. À la recherche du temps perdu, vol. V: La Prisonnière (1923). Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2000. In Search of Lost Time, vol. V: The Captive. The Fugitive. Trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin. London: Vintage.

5

DREAMS FROM UNDERGROUND

115

Rosenshield, Gary. 1977. “Point of View and the Imagination in Dosotevskij’s White Nights.” The Slavic and East European Journal 21:2, 191–203. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2008. “Selling Gender. An Alternative View of ‘Prostitution’ in Three French Novels of the entre-deux-guerres.” Neophilologus 92:4, 601–615. ———. 2013. “«… vous appelez ça du ‘Nietchevo’ n’est-ce pas?» Mises en scène de la langue «étrangère» chez Irène Némirovsky.” In Évelyne Enderlein and Lidiya Mihova (eds.), Écrire ailleurs au féminin dans le monde slave au XX e siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 55–84. ———. 2016. The Némirovsky Question: The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France. New Haven and London: Yale UP. ———. 2017. “Irène Némirovsky’s Jewish Protagonists.” South Central Review 34:2, 54–64.

CHAPTER 6

The Abject

For a Phenomenology of the Abject In Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection (1980. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection) Julia Kristeva outlines a phenomenology of the abject, the origins and developments of which she explores within the history of religions (mainly Judaism and Christianity), psychoanalytic theory and contemporary literature—in particular in the works of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. From the Latin abjectus, past participle of the verb abjicere = to reject (from ab- away, and jacere to throw) the term “abject” literally defines what has been “cast aside,” which Kristeva correlates to elements that are excluded, separated and rejected from and by the self. A constituent of the process of subject formation, abjection produces an ambiguous space—non-homogenous, fluid and divisible—that both separates and unites subject and object, and where the emerging self attempts to discard what is repulsive, namely “a ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” (Kristeva 1982: 2). In her theoretical account of the psychic origins of the repulsive aspects of bodily experience, Kristeva locates the fundamental abjection in the corporeal link between mother and child—birth being the primary abject event insofar as it is the first separation: a primary matricide. While investigating the roots of abjection in the biblical tradition, and therefore foregrounding its relation to the religious sacred, she also points out its close relation to art. In fact, in the religious tradition abjection appears as a desecration that needs © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_6

117

118

M.-L. CENEDESE

to be ritually purified; and indeed, according to Kristeva the apogee of the various means of purification is art, which is the essential component of religiosity (17). Among aesthetic efforts, the writing act is productive of abject encounters: like the sacred rites that purified the abject taboos within religions, modern literature offers a sublimation of abjection, albeit devoid of its sacred core. Thus, for Kristeva, literature becomes “the substitute for the role formerly played by the sacred, at the limits of social and subjective identity” (26) and provides various articulations of abjection. Next to Céline, on whom the fourth part of her essay is centred, Kristeva mentions Proust, Lautréamont, Artaud, Kafka, Joyce, Borges and Dostoevsky (18–26). Indeed, Kristeva contends that abjection is a constant issue in Dostoevsky’s writing and, for instance, that it is the “object” of The Possessed where it is “the aim and motive of an existence whose meaning is lost in absolute degradation” (18). According to her, the novel represents “the collapse of paternal laws”: by staging a world of absent fathers where “matriarchs lusting for power” hold authority instead, Dostoevsky “symboliz[es] the abject” and thus “deliver[s] himself of that ruthless maternal burden” (20), which means finding release, or catharsis, by re-enacting the primary separation. Before Kristeva, other scholars had pointed out the presence of abjection in Dostoevsky’s work, although in their accounts “abjection” did not have the dense phenomenological meaning that her theory will later concretize. Nevertheless, we can cite André Gide, who spoke of “abjection” several times in his Dostoïevsky. Articles et causeries (1923). For instance, Gide writes that “Dostoïevski nous présente, d’une part, des humbles (et certains d’entre eux pousseront l’humilité jusqu’à l’abjection, jusqu’à se complaire dans l’abjection), d’autre part des orgueilleux (et certains de ceux-ci pousseront l’orgueil jusqu’au crime)” (Gide 1923: 142. Emphasis added. Dostoevsky portrays, on the one side, the humble [some of whom will push humility to the point of abjection, to the point of indulging in abjection] and, on the other side, the proud [some of whom will push pride as far as crime]).1 We can also cite Italian intellectual Leone Ginzburg, who wrote in his foreword to the Italian translation of Notes from Underground (1942) that “These confessions are at the same time both true and false: surely, abjection is continuously met with the consciousness of abjection” (Ginzburg 2002: vii. Emphasis added).2 In sum, “abjection” is a significant trope in Dostoevsky’s production, as highlighted by critics

6

THE ABJECT

119

and commentators alike. Is it possible to argue that the theme of abjection recurs in Némirovsky’s prose by way of an “unconscious” influence? Indeed, the “Dostoevsky line” in Les Chiens et les loups not only suggests that we might read Ada as a Dostoevskian character, but also urges us to understand the whole novel—even Némirovsky’s whole production—as being under the creative influence of Dostoevsky. Here Kristeva’s discussion of abjection provides a useful means of interpretation. As we shall see, the manifold embodiments of abjection permeate Les Chiens et les loups as well as other works.3

Attraction and Repulsion: The Foreigner From the very beginning of her essay, Kristeva calls attention to abjection’s power to disturb by virtue of its inherent coexistence of contradictory impulses. Indeed, she posits the abject as that which is troublesome by being both fascinating and repulsive, both attracting and repelling: It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects. […] But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. (Kristeva 1982: 1)

This tension between fascination and repulsion is expressed in Ada’s sense of her own work, which “l’attirait et lui déplaisait à la fois” (Cl: 138. “simultaneously attractive and unpleasant” [DW: 115]). The opposing drives that govern the abject are also the same ones that control relationships between the main characters of Les Chiens et les loups . This is most obviously evident in Harry’s second meeting with Ada, a few years after the pogrom, at a party at the Alliance française where, although at a young age, both children experience the conflicting feelings of an abject state: En cet instant, dans le cœur d’Ada, l’extrême haine et l’extrême amour se confondaient et formaient un sentiment si violent, si contradictoire, si trouble, qu’elle fut comme déchirée en deux, mais les pensées de Harry, elles aussi, n’étaient pas simples : il avait peur d’Ada et il était en même temps attiré par elle ; il la regarda avec une curiosité douloureuse et

120

M.-L. CENEDESE

passionnée ; une seconde, l’attrait devint si fort qu’il dit : “Je regrette bien.” (Cl: 90) At that instant extreme hatred and extreme love merged in Ada’s heart, creating a feeling so violent, so contradictory, so upsetting, that she felt as if she had been wrenched in two. But Harry’s emotions weren’t simple either: he was afraid of Ada and attracted to her at the same time. He looked at her with passionate, sad curiosity. For a second, his attraction to her was so strong that he said, “I’m very sorry …” (DW: 71)

As a force that disrupts at the same time the self and the social order, abjection unsettles the “I” both from within and from without. Therefore, we can see abjection rising when a subject meets with an Other that perturbs their identity and the order this identity ascribes to. Némirovsky showcases the appearance of such loathsome uncanniness in several of her works; the short story “Fraternité” (1937) is particularly poignant in this case, as it exemplifies the violence with which abjection turns the familiar into ambiguity and precariousness. The short story represents the accidental meeting of two men at a train station: one is a rich Frenchman, an assimilated Jew of long-lost Eastern-European descent; the second is a recently immigrated Eastern-European Jew. First of all, we must point out that the locus of the encounter, the train station, is an abject space:4 an area of transit among those that Foucault named “heterotopias”—“spaces of otherness” that prove unsettling for they contradict and upturn “all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture” (Foucault 2000: 178). Set in a space that connects other spaces but never becomes a destination, a place “outside all places” (178), the story projects from the very beginning an aura of ambiguity, unpredictability and danger— “[…] for the space that engrosses the deject, the excluded, is never one, nor homogeneous, nor totalizable, but essentially divisible, foldable, and catastrophic” (Kristeva 1982: 8).5 The turning point of the short story, however, and the moment abjection becomes its dominant feature, is when the two men realize that they share the same surname, Rabinovitch:6 “« […] Tous les Rabinovitch sont forts … » Christian fit un mouvement. « Comment vous appelezvous ? » « Rabinovitch, monsieur ». Christian dit à voix basse, malgré lui : « Je m’appelle comme vous … » « Ah ! … Kid ? » dit lentement l’homme. Il ajouta d’autres mots en Yiddish” (Némirovsky 2011a: 92. “All Rabinovitches are strong.’ Christian started. ‘What’s your name?’

6

THE ABJECT

121

“Rabinovitch, monsieur.’ In spite of himself, Christian replied in a low voice, ‘My name’s the same as yours …’ ‘Ah! Jid?’ the man said slowly. He said a few more words in Yiddish” [Némirovsky 2010: 133]). The ostensible appearance of an alliance between the two is short-lived, as a moment later the rich Rabinovitch refuses to recognize the man standing in front of him as a kin: “la brève émotion qu’il avait ressentie en entendant son nom prononcé par cet homme s’était effacée. Il éprouvait un sentiment pénible. Qu’y avait-il de commun entre ce pauvre Juif et lui ?” (93. “The short-lived emotion he had experienced on hearing his name spoken by this man had now evaporated. He felt awkward. What did he have in common with this poor Jew?” [134]). This moment marks the inception of abjection for the wealthy Frenchman: first, the order (and borders) within which French Rabinovitch had established his identity have now been perturbed by the poor immigrant’s presence and his use of Yiddish—an “abject idiom” because of its nature as an “in-between,” “composite” language (Kristeva 1982: 4). In addition, Yiddish seems to constantly threaten the assimilated Jew by secretly undermining their belonging to French, the language of culture and native language. Indeed, Stemberger remarks that, among the many languages that Némirovsky interjects into her work, Yiddish is the most problematic of them, always stigmatized as the language of “unculture,” the linguistic equivalent of the ghetto, misery and dirt. According to her, this stigmatization might not be a personal idiosyncrasy only, but also the trace of 1930s antisemitism, for which Jewish alterity and foreignness revealed themselves in the language of the Jew (Stemberger 2013: 73–74). Second, Rabinovitch promptly disavows the familiarity inscribed in the shared name by actively separating himself from the “poor Jew”. In this way, the short story proves how abjection is, like Kristeva says, “elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin” (5). And indeed, as the narrative unfolds, Némirovsky showcases the internal struggle of Monsieur Rabinovitch to erase any possible impression of contact between him and his foreign homonym: Il pensa au vieux Juif, debout, tenant l’enfant par la main sur ce quai de gare glacial. Misérable créature ! Était-il possible qu’il fût, lui, du même sang que cet homme ? De nouveau, il pensa: « Qu’y a-t-il de commun entre lui et moi ? Il n’y a pas plus de ressemblance entre ce Juif et moi qu’entre Sestres7 et les laquais qui le servent ! Le contraire est impossible, grotesque ! Un abîme, un gouffre ! Il me touche parce qu’il est

122

M.-L. CENEDESE

pittoresque, un témoin des âges disparus. Oui, voilà comment, pourquoi, il me touche, parce qu’il est loin, si loin de moi … Aucun point de contact, rien. » Il répéta à mi-voix, comme s’il voulait persuader un interlocuteur invisible : « Rien, n’est-ce pas ? Rien … » Il ressentait un étonnement indigné, à présent. Certes, il n’y avait rien de commun entre lui et ce … ce Rabinovitch (malgré lui, il fit un geste irrité). (97–98) He thought of the old Jew, standing on that icy station platform, holding the child’s hand. What a wretched creature! Was it possible that he was of the same flesh and blood as that man? Once more he thought, “What do we have in common? There is no more resemblance between that Jew and me than there is between Sestres and the lackeys who serve him! The contrast is impossible, grotesque! There’s an abyss, a gulf between us! He touched me because he was quaint, a relic of a bygone age. Yes, that’s how, that’s why he affected me, because he’s so far removed from me, so very far … There’s nothing to connect us, nothing.” As if trying to convince an invisible companion, he repeated in a low murmur, “Nothing, there’s nothing. Is there?” Now he felt outraged and resentful. There was certainly no common ground between him and that … that other Rabinovitch (in spite of himself, he made an irritable gesture). (138–139)

The encounter of the assimilated Jew with his uprooted counterpart is narrated as the coming together of the subject with his double, which is made clear by Némirovsky in her marked choice of homonymy. Neither subject nor object, he is the abject spurring the identity (and narcissistic) crisis that brings to the surface the unavoidably elusive nature of “assimilation.” For while French Rabinovitch enumerates all the reasons that separate him from his homologous, his body betrays their atavistic connection: « Par mon éducation, par ma culture, je suis plus près d’un homme comme Sestres ; par mes habitudes, mes goûts, ma vie, je suis plus éloigné de ce Juif que d’un marchand de lunettes oriental. Trois, quatre générations ont passé. Je suis un autre homme. Non seulement moralement, mais physiquement. Mon nez, ma bouche, cela n’est rien. L’âme seule importe ! » Il ne le savait pas, mais, d’un mouvement lent et étrange, enfoncé dans sa rêverie, il se balançait doucement sur la banquette, d’avant en arrière, au rythme du wagon ; son corps retrouvait ainsi, dans les moments de fatigue ou de malaise, le dandinement qui avait bercé avant lui des générations de rabbis courbés sur le Livre saint, de changeurs sur des piles de pièces d’or, de tailleurs sur leurs établis. (98)

6

THE ABJECT

123

“By education and by culture I’m closer to a man like Sestres; in my habits, my tastes, my way of life, I’m much further away from that Jew than I am from an oriental peddler. Three, or even four, generations have elapsed. I’m a different man, not just spiritually, but physically as well. My nose and mouth don’t matter, they are nothing. Only the soul matters!” He did not realize it but, carried away by his thoughts, he was swaying forward and backward on the seat in a slow, strange rhythm, in time with the motion of the train; and so it was that, in moments of fatigue or stress, his body found itself repeating the rocking movement that had soothed earlier generations of rabbis bent over the holy book, money changers over their gold coins, and tailors over their workbenches. (139)

By presenting how tenuous Rabinovitch’s position is in his presumption of “separation” from the poor immigrant, exemplified by his very strong reaction and need to rationalize his place within society, Némirovsky shows the ambiguity of “assimilation.” The abjection of the inadvertent rhythmic cadence of his body testifies to the preservation of something akin to “what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out” (Kristeva and 1982: 10). A similar moment recurs in Les Chiens et les loups when Harry Sinner “se balançait doucement dans l’ombre comme l’avaient fait avant lui tant de changeurs à leurs comptoirs, tant de rabbins courbés sur leurs livres, tant d’émigrants sur le pont des bateaux” (Cl: 227. “He swayed gently in the darkness, just as so many moneychangers standing behind their counters, just as countless rabbis bent over their books, just as a multitude of immigrants standing on the bridges of innumerable boats had done before him” [DW: 192–193]). Both descriptions suggest that the protagonist is himself abject because of his social in-betweeness, for his position is neither completely inside nor completely outside the realm of “Frenchness,” and conversely that of “Jewishness”—as Ada’s comment about Harry openly articulates: “Pauvre Harry … Malheureux avec elle [sa femme], malheureux avec moi, entre deux feux, entre deux races, que deviendra-t-il ?” (234. “Poor Harry … […]. Unhappy with her [his wife], unhappy with me, caught between two burning fires, between two races, what will become of him?” [199]). Thus, Jewish assimilation is presented as an abject space for “it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it,” and instead it reiterates the assimilated Jew’s “perpetual danger” (Kristeva 1982: 9) that, in

124

M.-L. CENEDESE

“Fraternité,” is triggered by the foreign Rabinovitch, a reminder of that “exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated” (1). Here and in other of her “emigration stories,” Némirovsky reflects on the foreigner’s sense of identity and belonging; in all of them she seems to reach the desolate conclusion that assimilation is a chimera: the émigré, as assimilated as she might think to be, will always be separated, and abjection is the space through which this perpetual foreignness materializes. The novel Les Chiens et les loups provides several cases that sustain this reading; Chapter 16 is, in particular, a strong example of how the relationship with the foreigner is tainted by an unintelligible repulsion. The chapter is also mentioned in Philipponnat’s introduction as an example of the impossibility of assimilation: [u]ne fois encore Irène Némirovsky met en scène « l’inassimilabilité » fondamentale des Juifs dans la société française, testés par l’ « obscur appel du sang », mais aussi soudés par la « solidarité des larmes versées », ici symbolisée par l’antisémitisme viscéral du banquier Delarcher—dont la fille Laurence, soumise à la loi universelle de l’hérédité, ne peut davantage s’affranchir qu’Harry des caractères de sa race : orgueil, « sang inquiet » et mémoire longue. (OCII: 512–513)8 Once again, Némirovsky portrays the fundamental “inassimilability” of Jews into French society, tempted by the “obscure call of blood,” but also welded by “the solidarity of shed tears,” here symbolized by the visceral anti-Semitism of the banker Delarcher, whose daughter Laurence, subjected to the universal law of heredity, cannot free herself any more than Harry of his racialized characteristics: pride, “anxious blood,” and a long memory.

Chapter 16 presents Mr. Delarcher’s free indirect discourse at the news that his daughter Laurence wants to marry Harry Sinner. As seen in “Fraternité,” one of the causes of the rise of abjection is “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite” (Kristeva 1982: 4). By asking for Laurence Delarcher’s hand, Harry Sinner transgresses such borders, positions and rules, thus disturbing the pre-constituted, established order by which Mr. Delarcher has lived his life, in the comfort of knowing that “[c]ertes, il la marierait. Mais plus tard. […] Un mariage

6

THE ABJECT

125

arrangé par lui, et tous les détails du contrat et de la dot discutés en famille” (Cl: 124–125. “Of course he would see her married, but later on,” in “[a] marriage arranged by him, with all the details of the contract and the dowry discussed by the family” [DW: 103–104]). Delarcher assimilates Harry’s proposal to “cette insolence9 des étrangers venus d’on ne sait où, à qui on offre l’hospitalité et qui se conduisent chez nous comme des conquérants” (124. “These foreigners who came from goodness knows where were so arrogant: you offered them hospitality and they marched into your house like conquerors” [103]). The trouble provoked by the proposal is first explained as a physical repulsion towards Harry and his family. I will cite the passage at length: Cette hostilité avait peut-être à sa base une impression physique. Les oncles de Harry étaient des hommes de petite taille, au teint huileux, aux traits aigus, aux yeux inquiets. Delarcher était un colosse, au visage fortement coloré, aux épais sourcils, à la voix claironnante. Il avait dîné souvent chez les Sinner et il méprisait de tout son cœur ces malheureux qui se plaignaient de maux d’estomac, suivaient un régime et se faisaient servir “un doigt de vin du Rhin” à la fin des repas. […] Et leur démarche silencieuse et glissante comme celle des chats. […] Ils surgissaient brusquement à vos côtés, avec ce petit sourire ironique et angoissé particulier à ceux de leur race. Tout lui déplaisait dans la maison des Sinner. Un luxe de mauvais goût. […] Ces femmes … Ah ! mon Dieu, cette mère, cette grosse Juive couverte de bijoux ! […] Cette tribu ! … Slave, Allemand, Juif, tout cela se valait. La même brume, la même atmosphère trouble, ambiguë, incompréhensible … Enfin, le garçon lui-même lui déplaisait. C’était cela le plus grave. Il lui déplaisait physiquement d’abord : il était frêle, nerveux, de petite taille. Ses cheveux … On voyait, pensait le vieux Delarcher à la rude chevelure grise, on voyait que ce garçon devait chaque matin aplatir sans pitié des cheveux qui naturellement bouclaient. Ses yeux avaient un éclat liquide, fiévreux, comme s’ils brûlaient dans l’huile. Et ce teint bilieux, pâle … À son âge, un teint sans jeunesse, sans fraîcheur. « Il a l’air vieux, pensait Delarcher avec mépris. Était-il possible qu’il plût à Laurence ? Les femmes sont inconcevables. » (Cl: 127–128. Emphasis added) His hostility was perhaps based on physical impressions. Harry’s uncles were short men, with greasy skin, sharp features, anxious eyes. Delarcher was a giant with a very ruddy face, thick eyebrows and a booming voice. He had often dined at the Sinners’ house and he felt deeply condescending towards those miserable people who complained about their upset stomachs, kept to a diet and would only allow themselves “the tiniest bit of

126

M.-L. CENEDESE

Rhine wine” at the end of a meal. […] And the way they moved, as silently and stealthily as a cat. […] They would suddenly appear at your side, with that little ironic, anguished smile so unique to their race. He disliked everything about the Sinners’ house. Luxurious, but in bad taste. […] And those women … Oh my God, the mother, that fat Jewess covered in jewellery! […] What a family! Slavs, Germans, Jews, they were as bad as each other. The same guardedness, the same sense of mistrust. Ambiguous, incomprehensible …. And he disliked the boy. That was the most serious thing. First of all, he didn’t like his looks: he was delicate, nervous, short. And his hair … You could tell, thought Delarcher with his thick grey hair, you could tell that the boy had to do everything in his power to straighten his hair every morning just to hide his natural curls. His eyes shone with a bright, passionate expression, as if they were burning in hot oil. And his pale, yellowish complexion … He was young, but his skin showed no signs of youth or freshness. “He looks old,” thought Delarcher, scornfully. “Was it possible that Laurence really cared for him? Women are a mystery.” (DW: 106–107)

This long excerpt from the novel illustrates the physical repulsion felt by Delarcher towards Harry and his whole family—but also towards what they represent: the foreigner (from the East). Indeed, his first thought is that “[o]n n’épouse pas, on n’admet pas dans sa famille un étranger” (126. “One does not marry, one does not allow a foreigner into the family” [105]). The Sinners are foreigners, and therefore “jettisoned object[s],” “radically excluded” (Kristeva 1982: 2), that awake mistrust and repulsion: “Il n’était donc pas xénophobe, non, mais … tout ce qui venait de l’Orient lui inspirait une insurmontable méfiance. Slave, Levantin, Juif, il ne savait lequel de ces termes lui répugnait davantage. Rien de clair là, rien de sûr” (Cl: 127. Emphasis added. “He wasn’t actually xenophobic, no … yet everything that came from the East aroused insurmountable mistrust within him. Slavonic, Levantine, Jewish—he didn’t know which of these terms disgusted him the most” [DW: 105]). Delarcher’s monologue is very clear in his rejection of Harry and his lot precisely because they are foreigners and Jewish, even despite their wealth, which is, in addition, another ambiguous—hence abject—element with its “frontières mal délimitées, mouvantes” (127. “Precarious, unstable” [105–106]). Overall, the chapter detailing his interior monologue fluctuates between rage, disgust and tenderness (but only towards his daughter). His attempt at rationalizing his revulsion towards his future son-in-law falls short of a reasonable argument, and instead concretizes

6

THE ABJECT

127

the feelings of abjection that surround Harry, his family, and all those Slavs, Levantines and Jews.

Abjection as Disruption and Subversion of a Pre-existing Order Episodes that narrate the subversion of a pre-existing order recur frequently in Némirovsky’s prose, and in Les Chiens et les loups this abject disruption appears on many occasions, for instance in Harry’s marriage proposal to Laurence Delarcher, which was discussed just above. Another such instance happens when Ben and Ada arrive at the Sinner’s residence after the pogrom. In the novel, Chapters 7 and 8 describe with vivid details the horror of the massacre that the children experience. Initially hidden in the house, they hear the “rugissements de bêtes furieuses. L’élan de la foule semblait jeté comme un bélier contre les murs, les frappant, reculant, revenant en désordre pour mieux les ébranler, les frappant de nouveau en vain” (Cl: 54. “The crowds roared like wild animals. They seemed to hurl themselves like rams against the walls, hitting them, backing off, furiously battering them again to try to knock them down, striking them again and again, in vain” [DW: 39–40]). The day after, as they run the streets trying to reach safety, ils entendaient les cris des cosaques, les hennissements des chevaux, le bruit de leurs sabots sur le sol gelé. Les enfants étaient fous de terreur. Ils couraient en avant, haletants, sans rien voir, se tenant par la main, absolument sûrs que la horde de soldats était lancée à leur poursuite et qu’ils auraient le sort de la femme écrasée quelques instants auparavant. […] D’instinct, les enfants couraient toujours plus haut, vers les collines, tournant le dos au Ghetto. (63–64) They could hear the Cossacks shouting, the horses whinnying, their hooves beating the frozen ground. The children were delirious with fear. Blindly they kept running, panting, holding each other’s hand, absolutely convinced that the horde of soldiers was after them and that they would meet the same fate as the woman who had been crushed to death a few moments before. […] It was daylight now. Instinctively, the children ran ever higher, up towards the hills, leaving the ghetto far behind them. (47–48)

128

M.-L. CENEDESE

And so they reach the Sinner’s house. Their arrival at the residence of their wealthy distant relatives is emblematic of the novel’s representation of abjection; the episode portrays how the tranquil daily life of the household is interrupted by the appearance of the two children. Chaos ensues, literally, particularly in the conscience of all people involved. The passage bears citing at length: Dans la salle à manger aux longs rideaux de damas rouge, aux meubles massifs et chers, où la famille Sinner prenait son petit déjeuner du matin, surgirent, aux côtés de la femme de chambre, deux pâles petits vagabonds, pleins de hargne, d’insolence, de peur, et tremblants du désir d’être nourris, réchauffés, rassurés. […] À l’apparition de Ben et d’Ada, tous s’arrêtèrent de manger. Les faces-à-main se levèrent et retombèrent. Des voix s’exclamèrent : « Qu’est-ce que c’est que ça ? » Tandis que Ben parlait, Harry pâlissait, cessait de manger. Avec un air d’incrédulité et d’horreur, il regardait ce gamin ébouriffé, aux genoux déchirés, et cette fillette pâle, décoiffée, dont les cheveux collés par la poussière et la sueur retombaient en franges épaisses et désordonnées sur ses sourcils. […] Alors Harry repoussa tout à fait son assiette et demeura blanc et tremblant sur sa chaise. (Cl: 68–71) In the dining room, where the Sinner family ate breakfast every morning, with its long red damask drape, its expensive, impressive furniture, there suddenly appeared two pale little urchins with torn clothes and dishevelled hair. They were full of daring, arrogance and fear. Yet yearned to be fed, warm, reassured. […] At the sight of Ben and Ada, everyone stopped eating. Lorgnettes were raised and dropped again. Voices cried out: “What on earth is going on?” As Ben started speaking, Harry grew pale and stopped eating. He looked at the messy little boy with his bleeding knees, and the pale little girl whose dishevelled hair was so matted with dust and sweat that it fell in a thick tangle over her eyebrows. […] Harry pushed his plate away and stood, white and trembling, behind his seat. (DW: 52–54)

As the excerpt above illustrates, the appearance of Ada and Ben causes havoc in the house, first by interfering with the routine of everyday life, and secondly by bringing and displaying the life of the “low city” from which Harry has been sheltered. The irruption of this “other” shocks Harry and provokes a reaction that is described as physical repulsion— he grows pale, trembles and stops eating. Furthermore, the two children remind the old Sinners of a time when the family still counted among the members of the ghetto, and how tenuous their current position outside

6

THE ABJECT

129

of it really is: “[c]es enfants affamés surgissaient devant les riches Juifs comme un rappel éternel, un souvenir atroce et honteux de ce qu’ils avaient été ou de ce qu’ils auraient pu être. Personne n’osait penser : ‘ce qu’ils pourraient redevenir un jour’” (73. “The famished children stood before these wealthy Jews as an eternal reminder, a shameful and atrocious memory of what they themselves had once been or might have been. No one dared to add: ‘what they could become again some day’” [55]). While Harry’s abjection is of the kind that is built on the failure to recognize one’s kin (as it was for Christian Rabinovitch in “Fraternité”), the older Sinners’ abjection is rooted in the knowledge of a menacing sense of kinship better left in the past and in the reminder that their present situation might only be temporary.10 For instance, when later in the novel Harry’s mother expresses her considerations on her son’s liaison with Ada, it is not on moral grounds that she is averse to his conjugal infidelity. Rather, Madame Sinner is repulsed at the idea that her son might be brought back among that dreaded mass they had left behind, as their ancestors moved up the social ladder and out of the ghetto: Une simple fille de la ville basse ! Mais c’est pire que tout ce qui pouvait arriver ! Mais c’est cela que j’ai redouté toute ma vie ! En vain, j’ai voulu le sauver de cette misère, de ce malheur, de cette malédiction ! … Et maintenant, il est retombé parmi eux … […] Ces gens, ces aventuriers. Ils portent malheur, je vous le dis, mais on ne peut pas leur échapper. Ils nous entraînent avec eux. (198) A simple girl from the slums! It’s the worst thing that could possibly happen. It’s what I’ve feared all my life. I wanted to save him from that poverty, that misery, that curse! But it was all in vain! And now, he’s sunk down to their level […] Those people, those opportunists. They’re bad luck, I’m telling you, but you can’t get away from them. They’re going to drag us down with them. (168)

Therefore, for both Harry and his family the abject embodied by Ada and Ben is that which threatens to throw in disarray the status quo, oftentimes successfully so. Ada and Ben arrive at the Sinner’s house not only in torn clothes, hungry, tired and miserable, but most frighteningly they carry the stories of what they have witnessed in their escape: the “savage, unearthly clamour,” “the drunken Cossacks,” the woman trampled by horses, the chaos and unrecognizable wreckage left after the massacre (DW 38 and

130

M.-L. CENEDESE

46). Indeed, even for the escapees, well-known streets and houses become unfamiliar and scary: Était-ce là leur rue familière ? Ils ne la reconnaissaient plus. Elle était autre, effrayante et étrange. Les maisons à trois ou quatre étages avaient peu souffert—quelques vitres étaient brisées, mais les bicoques, nombreuses dans le quartier pauvre, les échoppes, les boucheries rituelles, les boutiques formées d’une pièce, d’une mansarde et d’un misérable toit, semblaient avoir été arrachées de terre et jetées l’une sur l’autre, comme après un cyclone ou une inondation ; d’autres, sans portes ni fenêtres, noircies par la fumée, éventrées, avaient un air aveugle et hagard. Sur le sol était amoncelé un extraordinaire mélange de ferraille, de carreaux, de morceaux de fonte, de planches, de briques, d’innommables débris où on reconnaissait tantôt une botte, tantôt les éclats d’un pot de terre, le manche d’une casserole, un peu plus loin un soulier de femme au talon tordu, puis des chaises cassées, une écumoire presque neuve, ce qui avait été une théière de faïence presque neuve, des bouteilles vides au goulot brisé. On avait jeté tout cela dehors, pour le pillage, mais certains objets avaient échappé, on ne savait pourquoi, comme dans l’incendie, parfois, un meuble fragile est épargné. Tous les magasins étaient vides, les vitrines béantes et noires. […] Les enfants et Nastasia espéraient confusément laisser derrière eux le spectacle terrifiant des rues mises au pillage […]. (Cl: 60–61. Emphasis added) They looked around them aghast. Was this really their own street? They didn’t recognize it. It seemed entirely different, frightening and strange. The buildings that had three or four floors hadn’t been damaged much— a few windows were broken—but the run-down houses, so numerous in the poor neighbourhood, the street stalls, the kosher butchers, the shops with only one room, an attic and a worn-out roof looked as if they’d been ripped out of the ground and thrown on top of each other, as if there had been a cyclone or a flood. Other houses were missing their doors and windows: burnt out and charred by the smoke, they looked dark and menacing. On the ground, bits of metal, tiles, cast iron, wooden planks, bricks lay in chaos—endless debris in which they could make out a boot here, a shattered clay pot there, the handle from a saucepan, and further along, the twisted high heel from a woman’s shoe, broken chairs, a nearly new ladle, what used to be a blue earthenware teapot, empty bottles whose necks had been shattered. It had all been left for the looters, but inexplicably certain things had been spared, just as in a fire a fragile piece of furniture sometimes escapes unscathed. All the shops were empty, their windows dark and gaping. […] The children and Nastasia vaguely hoped they were leaving the terrifying sight of the pillaged street behind them,

6

THE ABJECT

131

that everything would once again be back to normal as soon as they set foot in the upper town [… ]. (DW: 45–46)

The long passage shows the transformation of the once safe and wonted street into an abject space; houses and shops are anthropomorphized; the use of synecdoche (“une botte,” “une manche,” “un soulier de femme”) suggests the presence of human bodies and remains underneath the ruins. This space of abjection enters the dining room alongside Ben and Ada, who bring back into the Sinners’ horizon the excluded and menacing existence of the ghetto. The failed detachment between subject and object that Kristeva speaks of in relation to abjection, and that reveals the constant threat one is subjected to, is evident here in the menace that Ben and Ada bring to the members of the house, which is for the wealthy Jew one of regression back to the ghetto. A reminder that their social mobility is of the utmost precariousness and that the physical space that separates their villa from the slum is ephemeral and therefore unable to erase their roots. In fact, the ghetto is another place of abjection in itself: neither inside nor outside, it is located in a disturbing, ambiguous position. Like the train station in the short story “Fraternité,” the ghetto of Les Chiens et les loups adheres to the principles of Foucault’s “heterotopology” (Foucault 2000: 179). First, the ghetto can be added to what Foucault call “heterotopias of deviation” (180), which house individuals whose behaviour deviates from the norm. Indeed, for its role the ghetto is equivalent to the prison, insofar as it kept in one place those individuals, the Jews, that were considered by society to be different, dangerous (and in its nationalsocialist reincarnation: expendable). Second, for the reasons just stated, the ghetto “has a precise and determined function within the society” (180).11 Third, if the ghetto is a city within a city, within its limits it also juxtaposes heterogeneous spaces, the coexistence of which may be conflicting—houses, places of worship, etc. Fourth, for its inhabitants’ daily life, and in consideration of its long history, the ghetto can be linked to a time that is both of accumulation (time moves but space keeps immobile) and “futile,” “transitory,” and “precarious” (182). Fifth, the ghetto is a place that presupposes “a system of opening and closing that isolates [it] and makes [it] penetrable at the same time” (183). Indeed, by its very nature the ghetto isolates the Jew from the Gentile (and vice versa) and makes the group a much more vulnerable target; but it also means that being outside of it does not eradicate the possibility of going back

132

M.-L. CENEDESE

in—hence the menace it represents to the wealthy Jew. Finally, the ghetto is a space that functions in relation to the space that remains outside of it; in his text, Foucault cites as examples the colonies founded by Jesuits in South America, or the Puritan Societies created in North America by British colonizers: these are “spaces of otherness” that were ordered with the aim of reaching human and religious perfection (184–185). Built with the purpose of segregation, exclusion and eventually liquidation, so that what is outside of the ghetto can aspire to perfection (such as the Nazi ideal of the pure Aryan race), the ghetto is a “space of otherness” regulated upon wealth and racial grounds, a space whose existence and memory brings abjection. Thus far in this chapter I have analysed Némirovsky’s representation of abjection in the short story “Fraternité” and the novel Les Chiens et les loups, which were written in the last years of her life when her return to Jewish themes was accompanied by a profound reflection on the meaning of Jewish identity, Frenchness and assimilation. Jewish characters of the early years were not the outcome of this later investigation: on the contrary, at the time Némirovsky relied quite heavily on stereotypes. However, these novels also display Némirovsky’s engagement with abjection; one representative example is her first novel David Golder (1929) where the reader is confronted by Jewish characters that, like the Sinners, have long ago escaped the poverty of the ghetto.12 They are ambiguous, narcissist characters of dubious morality; their in-betweenness is exemplified by Golder’s presence both in Monte Carlo and at the Rue des Rosiers, or his return to Yiddish at the end of the novel.13 Lastly, it cannot go unacknowledged that in David Golder Némirovsky frequently stages heterotopic spaces: the train, the cemetery, the port, and the ship, which is the “heterotopia par excellence” (Foucault 2000: 185) and, quite significantly, also the place where Golder finds his death and the novel its end. To conclude this exploration of abjection, one final observation must be made. All the works considered in this chapter propose Jewish characters as paradigms of abjection. Kristeva’s insistence on the Jew as the menacing and repulsive object of desire and identification is due to her extensive attention, in Powers of Horror, to the works of Céline for whom, in her opinion, the Jew is the embodiment of abjection. As she explains: The Jew: a conjunction of waste and object of desire, of corpse and life, fecality and pleasure, murderous aggressivity and the most neutralizing

6

THE ABJECT

133

power. […] The Jew becomes the feminine exalted to the point of mastery, the impaired master, the ambivalent, the border where exact limits between same and other, subject and object, and even beyond these, between inside and outside, and disappearing—hence an Object of fear and fascination. Abjection itself. He is abject: dirty, rotten. And I who identify with him, who desire to share with him a brotherly, mortal embrace in which I lose my own limits, I find myself reduced to the same abjection, a fecalized, feminized, passivated rot. (Kristeva 1982: 185)

Nonetheless, the presence of abjection in Némirovsky cannot be reduced to her Jewish characters. For instance, in the short story “La Confidente” (1941), the narrator explains her relationship with a childhood friend as governed by impulses of attraction and repulsion typical of abjection: “C’est bizarre … je lui inspirais à la fois de l’attrait et de la haine. Elle me fuyait, puis me revenait” (Némirovsky 2011b: 290. It is bizarre … I awoke in her both attraction and hatred. She would run away from me, then come back). Several more examples involving non-Jewish characters (from both early and late novels and short stories) may be gathered to demonstrate the widespread presence of abjection in Némirovsky’s work. For instance, in her analysis Stemberger includes, among others, the novels Le Pion sur l’échiquier and Deux, or short stories such as “Ida” and “Le Spectateur” (Stemberger 2006: 340–349). Indeed, abjection saturates and permeates Némirovsky’s work in ways that underline its inherent shaping of the work from within. As the following chapter will argue, in a similar way to abjection, there is another intrinsic element of Dostoevskian imprint in Némirovsky’s work. Continuing the creative dialogue with Kristeva, Chapter 7 will analyse suffering, its overbearing presence in Némirovsky’s production and its connection to love and death.

Notes 1. English translation is my own. 2. “Sono confessioni vere e false ad un tempo: certo, all’abiezione si accompagna di continuo la coscienza dell’abiezione […].” My translation from the original Italian. 3. In her analysis of imaginations of the “Jewish” and the “female” in Némirovsky’s work, Stemberger also recurs to the Kristevan concept of abjection (2006: 122 sqq. and 339–349). 4. Stemberger links the meeting at the train station (and in general, Némirovsky’s recurring representation of “spaces of travel”) in this and

134

M.-L. CENEDESE

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13.

other narratives to the 1920s topos of problematic Jewish identity, exemplified by Jewish characters’ constant movement and lack of immobility until death (Stemberger 2006: 129–130). I would like to acknowledge Xiaofan Amy Li’s article “The Abject Heterotopia: Le Città Invisibili and ‘Junkspace’” (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52:1 [2016], 70–80) for first directing my attention to the connections between abjection and heterotopia. The sharing of surnames is another instance of the Doppelgänger. Other examples are Harry and Ben Sinner or the two sons François and Franz in the short story “L’Inconnu” (1941). French businessman who is soon going to be his in-law via the marriage of their respective son and daughter. Here Philipponnat is citing from Némirovsky’s Journal de travail, 19 July 1938. Later Harry will also accuse Ada, the poor Jewish relative, of arrogance (“insolence” [Cl: 146]). Cf. Chapter 5, p. 99. Similarly, Stemberger cites this same passage to indicate the fear of a “unheimlich Doppelgänger” that is a reminder of the past and a warning for a possible future (2006: 124). Translation modified. The edition used throughout reads as “a precise and specific operation within the society.” In the Russian Empire, from 1791 until 1917, Jews were allowed to reside only in a western region denominated the Pale of Settlement (which covered approximately present-day Belarus, Lithuania, eastern Latvia and Poland, Moldova, and parts of Ukraine and western Russia), outside of which residency was forbidden or subjected to strict quotas. Even within the Pale of Settlement, residency in cities was permitted only to a few wealthy Jews. Indeed, Stemberger writes that Némirovsky’s assimilated Jewish characters return to Yiddish in cases of extreme anguish, in traumatic, transgressive situations, during moments of uncontrollable anxiety or rage, illness or at their deathbeds (Stemberger 2013: 73).

References Foucault, Michel. 2000. “Different Spaces” (1967). In Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984, Vol. 2. Trans. Robert Hurley, edited by James Faubion. London: Penguin, 175–86. Gide, André. 1923. Dostoïevsky, Articles et causeries. Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie . Ginzburg, Leone. 2002. “Nota Introduttiva.” In Fëdor Dostoevskij (ed.), Memorie del sottosuolo. Trans. Alfredo Polledro. Torino: Einaudi.

6

THE ABJECT

135

Kristeva, Julia. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Li, Xiaofan Amy. 2016. “The Abject Heterotopia: Le Città Invisibili and ‘Junkspace’.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 52:1, 70–80. Némirovsky, Irène. 2007. David Golder. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2008. Les Chiens et les loups. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2009. The Dogs and the Wolves. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Chatto & Windus. ———. 2010. Dimanche and Other Stories. Trans. Bridget Patterson. London: Persephone Books. ———. 2011a. “Fraternité.” In Dimanche et autres nouvelles. Paris: Albin Michel, 84–100. ———. 2011b. “La Confidente.” In Dimanche et autres nouvelles. Paris: Albin Michel, 268–292. Philipponnat, Olivier. 2011. “Notice à Les Chiens et les loups.” In Irène Némirovsky, Œuvres complètes, tome II. Introduction, présentation et annotations des textes par Olivier Philipponnat. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 511–514. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2013. “« … vous appelez ça du ‘Nietchevo’ n’est-ce pas? » Mises en scène de la langue « étrangère » chez Irène Némirovsky.” In Évelyne Enderlein and Lidiya Mihova (eds.), Écrire ailleurs au féminin dans le monde slave au XX e siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 55–84.

CHAPTER 7

An Anthropology of Suffering

Abjection---Love---Suffering As seen in Chapter 6, the concept of abjection is linked to a process of subject formation whereby the self separates from the other; in Kristeva’s account this separation is symbolic of the primary separation, that is, birth, and therefore it is embedded in both theological and psychoanalytic traditions. The analysis of abjection in Némirovsky’s work showed the ways in which abject spaces are created when the social order is disrupted and/or threatened by what is ambiguous and borderless—in sum, by a menacing Other. Several themes touched upon by Kristeva in her essay on abjection return in a later study, Soleil Noir. Dépression et mélancolie (1987a. Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia). In this essay, Kristeva explores phenomena of depression and melancholia in relation to Freud’s work on the doctor–patient relationship, on Kristeva’s own case studies, as well as in relation to semiotic, religion, art and literature. Kristeva provides detailed analyses of depression and melancholia’s bearing in the works of Nerval, Duras, Dostoevsky and Holbein, whose painting The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb (1522) made such a tremendous impression on Dostoevsky that he wrote about it at length in The Idiot. Whereas Powers of Horror consecrates a few pages only to Dostoevsky, in Black Sun Kristeva devotes to him an entire chapter under the heading “Dostoyevsky, The Writing of Suffering, and Forgiveness.” Here, as the title

© The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_7

137

138

M.-L. CENEDESE

anticipates, Kristeva is concerned with Dostoevsky’s “religion de la souffrance,” the formula used by Melchior de Vogüé when he introduced Dostoevsky to the French public in the early twentieth century (qtd. in Gide 1923: 52).1 The strong parallel between abjection and suffering is visible in Kristeva’s definition of “Dostoevsky’s brand of suffering” as “neither inside nor outside, in between, on the threshold of the selfother separation and before the latter is even possible” (Kristeva 1992: 176). Earlier in the study, Kristeva writes that “the depressed narcissist mourns not an Object but the Thing. Let me posit the ‘Thing’ as the real that does not lend itself to signification, the center of attraction and repulsion […]” (13. Emphasis added). These descriptions of suffering and of the suffering subject hark back to Kristeva’s description of abjection— “the in-between,” “the ambiguous,” “the ambiguous position I/Other, Inside/Outside,” the “vortex of summons and repulsion.”2 These allow us to see how, in her account, both abjection and suffering are linked to (pre-objectal) affects and the trauma of the primary separation. For example, in Powers of Horror she wrote that abjection “preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body in order to be—maintaining that night in which the outline of the signified thing vanishes and where only the imponderable affect is carried out” (Kristeva 1982: 10). In Black Sun, on a continuum with the Freudian presence of an “impossible mourning for the maternal object ” (Kristeva 1992: 9),3 she will write that the child is inconsolably sad before they can even utter their first words because “he has been irrevocably, desperately separated from the mother, a loss that causes him to try and find her again, along with other objects of love, first in the imagination, then in words” (6). Turning to Dostoevsky, Kristeva affirms that the Russian author “views suffering as a precocious, primary affect, reacting to a definite but somehow preobject traumatism” (Kristeva 1992: 176). It is precisely by virtue of “such an intimacy with affect” that “Dostoevsky was led to a vision according to which man’s humanity lies less in the quest for pleasure or profit […] than in a longing for voluptuous suffering ” (179. Emphasis added). Furthermore, Kristeva also connects Dostoevsky’s representation of suffering to the expression of affects on the intersubjective and intralinguistic level, hence to his “breathtaking polyphony” (177), on the grounds that suffering, or else the expression of passions,

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

139

“carries away the placid signs and soothed compositions of ‘monological’ literature” (177). The association of abjection with suffering, and of suffering with polyphony, allows us to link the current analysis to Chapter 3 of this book, where the polyphonic quality of Suite française was under scrutiny, and to grasp, overall, how intricate the constellation of resonances of Némirovsky’s oeuvre that this book seeks to bring forward is.4 We have seen that, for Kristeva, there is an inherent connection between abjection and suffering, and that she foregrounds both as important leitmotifs of Dostoevsky’s production. Just as Chapter 6 unveiled the presence of abjection in Némirovsky’s work, in this chapter I will pause on the theme of suffering and attempt to establish whether, in her work, it is as much an overwhelming presence as in Dostoevsky’s. I adduce here the same reason that brought me in the first place to think of abjection as a significant trope in Némirovsky’s work: Dostoevsky’s creative influence on Némirovsky, which manifests as an interactive process that includes the researcher, and whereby the production of meaning is not fixed but instead created over and over within evolving cultural horizons.5 In fact, similarly to the previous chapter, Kristeva’s discussion of suffering in relation to the Russian author provides once more a useful point of departure for reading Némirovsky. How does suffering manifest in Némirovsky’s oeuvre? Does she espouse it the Dostoevskian way, or can we speak of a proper Némirovskian ontology? As we shall see, despite similar elements, suffering in Dostoevsky and Némirovsky leads to different outcomes. In “Dostoyevsky: The Writing of Suffering, and Forgiveness” Kristeva identifies the question of suffering starting from the “tormented world” the writer created on the basis of his own experience with epilepsy: Kristeva urges her readers to “take note of the hypostasis of suffering, which, without having any explicit, immediate relation to epilepsy, compels recognition throughout [Dostoevsky’s] work as the essential feature of his outlook on humanity” (Kristeva 1992: 175). In the French original Kristeva writes that suffering “s’impose tout au long de son œuvre comme le trait essentiel de l’anthropologie dostoïevskienne” (Kristeva 1987a: 185. Emphasis added), which may translate as what “prevails throughout his work as the essential trait of the Dostoevskian anthropology.” To call it “anthropology” suggests that the recurring theme of suffering in Dostoevsky foregrounds, more than a simple “outlook,” an ontological conception of humanity rooted in “a longing for voluptuous suffering” (179).6 In practice, to formulate an anthropology of suffering means that

140

M.-L. CENEDESE

suffering is not simply construed as a motif but as an intrinsic component of the work, an unavoidable feature, an essential element that shapes the work from within. In order to argue that suffering is a fundamental drive of human existence, and therefore constitutive of a Dostoevskian anthropology, Kristeva cites the unnamed man from Notes from Underground, who says: “After all, perhaps man likes something besides prosperity? Perhaps he likes suffering just as much? Perhaps suffering is just as great an advantage to him as prosperity? Man is sometimes fearfully, passionately in love with suffering and that is a fact” (qtd. in Kristeva 1992: 179–180). The juxtaposition of suffering and “prosperity” is also present in Némirovsky, whose characters strive for (material) wealth that is attained at the price of high sacrifices. David Golder, for instance, protagonist of the eponymous novel, suffers to attain, increase, keep and re-acquire his wealth; throughout the novel this suffering is manifested both physically (a heart attack) and psychologically (discouragement and depression) as his wealth thrives and dwindles. Similarly, in later novels the protagonists’ suffering intertwines with their quest for material riches in a form of existential malaise that is never assuaged by either money or position. Perhaps the words of the underground man should be reiterated when considering Némirovsky’s characters: perhaps they enjoy suffering just as much as they enjoy their wealth and their passions? Perhaps they are pulled towards suffering with as much the same insistence as they seem to be attracted to prosperous lives? Reading Némirovsky’s oeuvre with our minds attuned to suffering, we quickly notice that her work is strewn with an overwhelming abundance of it. Like Dostoevsky, Némirovsky depicts a world where humankind is ultimately drawn to and led by suffering as its raison d’être. The language of suffering used by Némirovsky in her novels repeatedly harmonizes with Kristeva’s phrasing of sensuous, or voluptuous, suffering. For instance, in the novel Deux (1939) desperation is qualified as “voluptuous” (“désespoir voluptueux” [OCII: 20]), and for young Marianne “aux moments de désespoir un aiguillon de volupté paraissait-il naître de la souffrance” (OCII: 59. In moments of despair, a sting of pleasure appeared to be born out of that suffering).7 The fusion of Eros and Thanatos (understood as both “suffering” and “death”), without being new in the literary panorama, recurs frequently in novels by Némirovsky, who writes that passionate love is inseparable from suffering: “l’amour, qui peut être heureux, mais la passion dont le nom même signifie: souffrance” (OCII:

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

141

130. Love can be happy, but passion’s very name is—suffering). As we notice the entanglement of love/passion and suffering, and the connection between abjection and suffering, we are reminded that Kristeva’s work preceding Black Sun and following Powers of Horror, Histoires d’amour (1983. Tales of Love), describes love with a terminology similar to the one used for abjection and suffering. Love “is that sudden revelation, that irremediable cataclysm,” a “state of crisis, collapse, madness capable of sweeping away all the dams of reason […] a state of instability in which the individual is no longer indivisible and allows himself to become lost in the other, for the other” (Kristeva 1987b: 3–4). Thus, Kristeva herself insinuates an overarching link between the three.8 Indeed, just like abjection, melancholia and suffering, Kristeva theorizes love as a condition at the limits of subjectivity (“I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity” [5]) where pleasure and fear coexist (6), where the subject and object of love escape their limits and merge into “a ‘we’ resulting from the alchemy of identifications” (Kristeva 1987b: 3). Becker-Leckrone reads Kristevan love as the “subjective crisis in which a discernible, stable object evanesces, and in which, thus, an unstable relationship between subject and object comes into play” (2005: 122). In fact, Kristeva reminds us, in psychoanalytic theory depression is connected to the mourning of a lost object of love that, because lost, becomes hateful: “I love that object, […] but even more so I hate it” (Kristeva 1992: 11). The love–hate dichotomy marks the pair subject/object and self/other, and at the same time reiterates the twofold solution to suffering: (a) the identification between the two (subject = object/self = Other), whereby “my identification with the loved-hated other, through incorporation-introjection-projection,” leads to the “desire to rid myself” (11); or (b) murder, which is emblematic of the transfer of self-hatred towards the Other. Abjection, love and suffering are thus connected and intertwine in the space of the tensions between self and Other, subject and object. Observing that suffering is a major feature of Némirovsky’s work suggests that, similarly to what Kristeva brings out in Dostoevsky, suffering might be the quintessential trait of a Némirovskian anthropology. Indeed, Némirovsky seems to embrace, too, an ontological conception of suffering. Indeed, as Suleiman remarks, “[s]uicide, or at least a desire for the restfulness of death, is a recurrent motif in Némirovsky’s fiction” (Suleiman 2017: 56). However, unlike in Dostoevsky where, according to Kristeva, the desired solution to suffering is

142

M.-L. CENEDESE

forgiveness (199), the high incidence of suicides and deaths that pervade Némirovsky’s narratives foregrounds the eloquence of the death drive against the possibility of forgiveness, expiation and resurrection, which fully occupy Dostoevsky’s novels.

“A Plunge into Death”: Forgiveness, Murder, Suicide In Black Sun Kristeva argues that for Dostoevsky suffering indicates a break that “immediately precedes the subject’s and the Other’s becoming autonomous,” which means that suffering marks an attempt “on the part of the subject to assert his ‘own and proper’” (182). Similarly, in Némirovsky’s oeuvre the suffering process comes before the subject’s potential autonomization, however impossible such potential to grow autonomous is. Therefore, rather than emerging before the Self/Other division, in Némirovsky suffering is an underlying presence that materializes in the moment the subject becomes aware of the failing of such division, when they are confronted with the impossibility to establish their “own and proper.” Whereas, according to Kristeva, Dostoevsky’s symbolic break is caused by “an abandonment, a punishment, a banishment,” in Némirovsky there is no such radical rejection. On the contrary, the constrictions of marriage and work, as well as the suffocating realities of gender and class—that is, not abandonment, punishment and banishment—symbolize the bonds from which it is impossible to break free. Indeed, the detachment from these yokes allows the end of suffering, even if such a scenario rarely occurs. On the successful achievement of freedom scholars have remarked the possibility of a gendered reading in Némirovsky, whereby young women9 eventually triumph while young men “often succumb to failure and despair” (Kershaw 2010: 94; see also Stemberger 2006: 197–198). It is towards these young men and their deaths that we shall now turn to in order to understand the Némirovskian anthropology of suffering. In La Proie (1938. The Prey), Némirovsky narrates the life of Jean-Luc Daguerne, beginning from his deprived youth, through the tribulations of social advancement, an unhappy marriage, friendships, politics and business, an unrequited love, until his untimely death. Suffering is continuously downplayed throughout his quest for social mobility, in the certainty that wealth will allow him to achieve happiness and freedom. However, as he heedlessly carves out his own cage (“je suis la proie du

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

143

plus lâche amour. Non pas de l’amour mais de moi-même” [Némirovsky 2006: 198]. I am the victim of the most despicable love. Not even of love, but of myself),10 suffering becomes embodied in the malaise he continuously experiences. The sense of anguish he confides to his friend Serge Dourdan shortly after his own wedding ceremony is indicative of the way in which social constraints (even when self-imposed) impinge on one’s own freedom and agency: “Ce mariage, maintenant qu’il était accompli, ne lui donnait pas de joie, mais une inquiétude qu’il ne parvenait pas à comprendre, ni à maîtriser” (69. Now celebrated, this marriage did not give him any joy, only a malaise that he could neither understand nor master). A similar sentiment seizes Antoine (Deux, 1939) shortly after his nuptials and the birth of his daughter: crushed by the weight of these newly-imposed responsibilities, he feels “une éternelle inquiétude, ce tremblement qui saisit l’homme lorsqu’il se voit, lui, faible être humain, chargé de procurer le pain, la sécurité, le bonheur à d’autres, plus faibles encore que lui-même …” (OCII: 114. An eternal anxiety, this shiver that goes through a man who finds himself, a weak human being, responsible for providing bread, safety and happiness for others, even weaker than himself). In the novel Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934. The Pawn on the Chessboard), Christophe Bohun is another of these Némirovskian characters who feel captive of a boring home, a boring job and ultimately of a boring life that is so crowded with repetitive deadlines and chores to instill such despairing feelings as the following: La vie, devant Christophe, s’étendait longue et monotone. Si longue et si ennuyeuse semblait-elle qu’il s’efforçait de fermer les yeux, de ne rien prévoir, au-delà de chaque journée brève, bornée par le sommeil. Mais, par moments, le désespoir s’éveillait au fond de son âme et la tenaillait d’une douleur sourde et profonde, la rongeait comme une plaie. Chaque être vivant cherche la joie ; il n’y en aurait plus pour lui sur la terre. Besogner, trimer, sans cesse, sans espoir ! Le terme, les impôts, la note du gaz, celle de l’électricité jalonneraient seuls sa vie de leurs insupportables et sordides échéances ! (Némirovsky 2005: 178–179) Life stretched out in front of Christophe, long and monotonous. So long and so depressing did it seem, that he forced himself to close his eyes and not think of the future, beyond each short day bounded by sleep. Even so, from time to time, the despair at the bottom of his soul was awakened and gripped him with a deep, dull ache, gnawed at him like a wound. Every living being looks for happiness; there wouldn’t be any more for

144

M.-L. CENEDESE

him on this earth. To work, to slave away incessantly, without hope! Only the rent, taxes, gas and electricity bill marked his life with their unbearable and sordid deadlines! (Némirovsky 2013b: 127)

The passage underlines the suffering of an unliveable life cornered by the suffocating sensation of responsibilities,11 a life that Kristeva describes as “heavy with daily sorrows, tears held back or shed, a total despair, scorching at times, then wan and empty. In short, a devitalized existence that, although occasionally fired by the effort I make to prolong it, is ready at any moment for a plunge into death” (Kristeva 1992: 4. Emphasis added). The examples above indicate a conception of suffering that initiates and dictates the collapse of the subject. Indeed, in Némirovsky’s novels escape from suffering requires that the collapsed suffering subject let go of his agency (the “fired effort” that can prolong life) in favour of death—either by murder or suicide. The active roles of suffering and death are at the core of the Némirovskian anthropology of suffering, where “[s]uffering ceases so that death might assert itself; was suffering a dam against suicide and against death?” (Kristeva 1992: 186). We can suggest that suffering, rather than a simple emotion passing through a character’s life (and over which said character has the agency to either indulge in or overcome), overpowers the subject by gaining agency in lieu of the subject. Such reading reinforces the idea that suffering is an agent that, rather than being a recurring motif proposed by the author in the novels, is in fact integral to the novel’s fabric and that, from within it, leads the narrative forward. As I have mentioned before, initially Kristeva posits the possibility of only two solutions to suffering, both of them linked to death: one is to commit suicide (like Kirillov in The Possessed), the other is to redirect hatred to the Other (hence to eliminate such Other, like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, who kills the old pawnbroker and her sister). However, later in the chapter Kristeva offers a third solution to suffering: forgiveness, which “appears as the only solution, the third way between dejection and murder” (199).12 “Between suffering and acting out” (190), forgiveness is meant as that which allows a new beginning, a new start—a symbolic rebirth like Raskolnikov’s final acknowledgment of gratitude. In this kind of forgiveness that emerges as the Christian solution of a release from suffering, which repudiates death to embrace the possibility of a new life, one can see Dostoevsky’s faith: in his work “the supreme expression of forgiveness” (192) is a symbolic resurrection.

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

145

Reading it as entrenched in suffering, the whole of Dostoevsky’s work can only be preoccupied with forgiveness as an alternative to such suffering: although its impossibility implicitly implicates death, Dostoevsky “implacably condemns […] the death that the human being is capable of inflicting” (194). In sum, the suffering at the core of the Dostoevskian anthropology, while at the heart of multiple deaths by murder or suicide (such as in the aforementioned Crime and Punishment, but also in The Possessed, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov), is fully turned towards the achievement of forgiveness (that is, resurrection and rebirth). This is the point that marks the difference between Dostoevsky and Némirovsky, and where their respective anthropologies, while both based on suffering, separate on the epistemological, as well as creative, level. Doubtlessly, in Némirovsky we also find resonance with Kristeva’s first assertion that murder and suicide are solutions to suffering. In Le Pion sur l’échiquier, for instance, Christophe Bohun finds himself desiring his own death: “Il s’aperçut tout à coup qu’il rêvait à sa mort” (Némirovsky 2005: 204. Suddenly, he realized he was dreaming about his own death [Némirovsky 2013b: 147]). The desire is then put into motion and attempted. The description of this performed act bears citing at length: Stupidement, il regarda la lame du rasoir, qui brillait au soleil, passa l’extrémité de ses doigts sur le métal acéré […] « Sentir la vie fuir, comme le sang qui coule des veines ouvertes dans une baignoire pleine d’eau chaude », récita-t-il à mi-voix […] Il rit, souleva des deux mains, délicatement, le menton lourd qui était couvert encore de la barbe courte et dure de la nuit ; machinalement, il effleura des doigts la peau, le cou, tâta les veines bleuâtres, regardant, en même temps, son image dans la glace, avec une sorte d’intérêt railleur. « Essayons », dit-il. Il prit d’une main le rasoir, le passa sur sa gorge extrêmement doucement, sans appuyer, jouissant de voir un fil léger, écarlate, marquer la peau. « Couper, appuyer profondément, sentir ma tête se détacher de moi, comme un fruit mûr … » Brusquement, à un mouvement presque involontaire, le sang coula, poissant ses doigts […] Christophe, avec rage, frappa de la lame du rasoir son cou tendu, mais sa main avait tremblé. Une douleur violente le traversa. Il se laissa tomber à terre, vit autour de lui les reflets roses, verts du vitrail dont une moitié seulement était repoussée, et, sur ses mains, sa poitrine nue, le pantalon blanc du pyjama, du sang qui coulait. (213–215) Stupidly, he looked at the razor-blade shining in the sun, ran the tips of his fingers across the keen metal […] “To feel life ebb away, like blood running

146

M.-L. CENEDESE

from open veins in a bath full of hot water,” he said in an undertone […] He laughed, delicately raised both hands, and his chin, covered with a heavy growth of stubble from the previous night; he spread out his fingers on the skin mechanically, the neck, felt the blue veins, while at the same time looking at his image in the mirror with a kind of scornful interest. “Let’s try,” he said. He took the razor in one hand and drew it across his throat extremely gently, without applying pressure, joyfully saw a thin trickle of scarlet on the skin. “To cut, to press harder, to feel my head come off, like a ripe fruit …” Suddenly, a nearly involuntary movement, blood ran, stickily through his fingers […] Christophe, in a rage, hit his extended neck with the razor blade, but his hand was trembling. A violent pain went through him. He let himself fall to the ground, saw the pink and green reflections of the stained glass window around him, which was only half open, and on his hands, his naked chest, his white pyjama bottoms, blood was running. (154–156)

The description revels in the voluptuousness of the gesture, where the softness of touch is heightened and the chromatism highlights the vibrancy of reddish-pink hues against cold colours (blue and green). In the end, Christophe is not serious about taking his life; but somewhat ironically, blood poisoning caused by the wound at the neck will kill him a few days later. The moment is narrated from Christophe’s viewpoint, in a subjective and self-reflexive depiction of death from “the very consciousness of the dying person” (Bakhtin 1984: 289): “Ma vie brève et unique. Je m’en fous. Il y a longtemps qu’elle est, tout entière, écoulée. On meurt à vingt ans. On meurt lorsque la joie est partie. Damnée vie … Incompréhensible … Je n’ai pas su vivre, peut-être, peut-être … mais de tout mon cœur, je consens à mourir … Cela a aussi son importance” (240. My short, my only life. I couldn’t give a damn. It was a long time ago, the whole lot’s gone. One dies at the age of twenty. One dies when there’s no more joy. Damned life … Incomprehensible … I didn’t know how to live, perhaps, perhaps … but with all my heart, I consent to dying … That’s also important [174]). The acknowledgment of “a life not fully lived” recalls the earlier David Golder whose eponymous character, in the final pages of the novel, confesses that his life, spent running after money and without the comfort of love and affection, was not a full life (“[a]près on crève, dit Golder, seul comme un chien, comme on a vécu … ” [Némirovsky 2007: 184]; “‘after that,’ replied Golder, ‘you die, alone, like a dog, the same way you lived … ’” [Némirovsky 2013a: 152]).13 This is also a nod to Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich.14

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

147

The most incisive apology of suffering and rejection of any kind of forgiveness is evident in the following passage from La Proie, where all the elements that distinguish the Némirovskian anthropology come together. Jean-Luc Daguerne is resentful and unable to forgive either himself or the woman whom at that moment he blames for his suffering, Edith. His agony is underlined by the insistent repetition of the word souffrir and its derivatives; the sentiment of pity (for oneself and for the other) is forcefully rejected for the sake of death-driving vengeance: Il s’était accordé la nuit pour souffrir. Il se jeta sur son lit ; il saisit l’oreiller des deux bras, l’étreignit, le serra contre sa poitrine comme aux pires nuits de l’enfance. Comme elle s’était moquée de lui ! Comme il souffrait … Il serrait les dents : il répétait avec rage : « Non, non, je ne veux pas souffrir ! » De toutes ses jeunes forces, avec fureur, avec honte, avec mépris, il repoussait, il haïssait sa souffrance. « Je ne souffrirai pas pour une femme ! … Je refuse de souffrir pour une femme ! Je ne veux pas être vaincu par ce qu’il y a de plus bas, de plus lâche au monde, le besoin d’être aimé, la pitié de soi-même ! Ah ! Elle veut être mon ennemie … Eh bien ! Nous verrons, nous verrons qui sera le plus fort, dit-il à voix haute ; nous verrons, ma belle ! … Je te ferai pleurer. Attends un peu … Tu verras … Je serai le plus fort ! Moi ! Moi ! Moi ! » [… ] Il n’y avait que soi, ses propres forces, sa volonté. Il fallait tendre cette volonté, impitoyablement. Il répéta doucement : « Im-pi-toya-blement » [… ] Pitié ! … Il n’inspirerait de la pitié à personne, lui ! … Jamais ! (Némirovsky 2006: 35–36. Emphasis added) He had allowed himself the night to suffer. He threw himself on the bed, seized the pillow with both arms, clasped it, hugged it to his chest like a child does on his worst nights. How had she teased him! How was he suffering … he clenched his teeth: enraged, he repeated: “no, no, I don’t want to suffer!” He rejected his suffering with all his young strength, with fury, shame, contempt; he hated it. “I will not suffer for a woman! … I refuse to suffer for a woman! I don’t want to be defeated by what is the lowest, the weakest in the world, the need to be loved, self-pity! Ah! She wants to be my enemy … Well! We will see, we will see who will be the strongest, he said out loud; we will see, my dear! I will make you cry. Just wait … You’ll see … I will be the strongest! Me! Me! Me!” [… ] There was only oneself, one’s own strength and will. You had to stretch this will, pitilessly. Softly, he repeated: “Pi-ti-less-ly” [… ] Pity! No one would pity him. Never!

148

M.-L. CENEDESE

Such inflexible refusal to redeem suffering with forgiveness, here expressed by the negation of any pitié, is in striking contrast to what Kristeva observes in Dostoevsky’s novels. Némirovsky negates the redemptive (and assertive) potential of forgiveness (and pity), proposing instead death as the better (and only) option to obviate a life of suffering; for this reason death is always welcomed with peaceful docility, as, for example, does Christophe Bohun with his deep and peaceful sigh: “un profond et paisible soupir” (Némirovsky 2005: 241). Another instance of the freeing powers of death is exemplified in the novel Jézabel (1936), the life of Gladys Eysenach, a récit emboîté ending on the momentous murder of her secret grandson, Bernard. The episode is punctuated by a rapid yet dramatic rhythm: Il fit un mouvement pour prendre le récepteur. Elle, alors, saisît le revolver, dont elle avait vu l’image, en esprit, chaque nuit, depuis un mois. Il la regarda avec un petit frémissement étrange et méprisant des lèvres. Elle tira. Il laissa échapper le téléphone ; son visage était brusquement devenu différent, doux et étonné. Il tomba, entraînant l’appareil dans sa chute. Le téléphone continuait à sonner à terre. Elle vit l’égarement, l’hébétude de la mort s’étendre sur ses traits. Avant de crier, d’appeler au secours, de sentir en elle le remords et le désespoir, la paix emplit son cœur. Le téléphone s’était tu. (Némirovsky 2010a: 218) He started to reach for the receiver. Then she pulled out the gun, the gun she had thought of every night for the past month. He looked at her with a strange, scornful twitching of his lips. She fired. He dropped the telephone; his face had suddenly changed: it was soft and surprised. He fell to the floor, dragging the insistent telephone with him. She saw the bewildered, silent look of death spread over his features. Before crying out, before calling for help, before feeling any remorse or despair, a sensation of utter peace filled her heart. The telephone had stopped ringing. (Némirovsky 2010b: 199)

In this finale the ringing of the telephone emphasizes the dramatic quality of the scene; symbol of Bernard’s beating heart, Gladys can only feel free when the ringing is silenced and, therefore, Bernard is dead. Gladys had to kill her grandson because his life was a menace to her own: symbolically, since by learning the truth about her real age and her status as grandmother she would have been socially dead; and literally, because the only release from social chastisement would have been to end her own

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

149

life. Similarly, earlier in the novel Gladys had to face the unexpected news of her daughter’s pregnancy at the moment she went into labour; her daughter’s fatal death, by delivering Gladys of “her own,” allows her the freedom to keep enjoying her life as a desirable young woman.15 The transfer of one’s own downfall onto the other, so that the subject can keep their freedom, is similar to what Kristeva notices about Dostoevsky’s anthropology: that any form of self-hatred is projected onto the other as a “self-saving” mechanism. In this perspective, she argues, “crime is a defense reaction” so that “murdering the other protects against suicide” (196). In Jézabel such a mechanism appears twice: first with the involuntary death of Gladys’s daughter, and then with the murder of her long-lost grandson. In either case the death of the other protects Gladys against her own (social) death. However, when this self-protective mechanism does not work, then the only possible issue against suffering is suicide, as the following cases will exemplify. In La Proie, Jean-Luc Daguerne commits suicide when he realizes that his earlier desire for political power and wealth has become meaningless in the face of an unrequited love and the unbearable weight of endless struggles. Unexpectedly, what he originally thought would be the antidote to his toxic suffering, love turns from a potential source of release and salvation into the ultimate cause of suffering. Némirovsky calls it a poison, thus suggesting its deadly consequences: “Comme il eût souhaité ressentir l’ambition déçue, la haine, le désir du pouvoir … Cela l’eût sauvé de lui-même … Mais non, rien … L’amour seul restait dans son sang, comme un venin, un si lâche amour” (210. How he wished to feel disappointed ambition, hatred, desire for power … It would have saved him from himself … But no, nothing … Love alone remained in his blood, like a poison, such a despicable love). Instead of murdering the other that is at the root of his suffering (in this case: Marie and/or her lover, and his own friend, Serge), the only solution to cease suffering is to turn the hatred back towards oneself and to commit suicide. Similarly, in Deux Antoine desires the death of Évelyne, his mistress, “pour [me] délivrer d’elle, pour respirer enfin … ” (OCII: 138. To deliver myself of her, to breath finally …). This unavowed yearning is answered by Évelyne herself who, before committing suicide, sends him a letter, in which she writes: “Je voulais te quitter. Mais ce n’est pas cela que tu veux, mon amour. Ce que tu veux, c’est d’être délivré du désir de moi, et moi, je veux être délivrée de tout désir, et de la vie par surcroît […]” (141. I wanted to leave you. But that’s not what you want, my love. What you want, is to

150

M.-L. CENEDESE

be delivered from the desire of me, and I, I want to be delivered from all desires and from life, too). In these examples suffering is directly related to love—the abundance of, or the lack thereof—and to the deaths that ensue. The desires that Évelyne refers to are “la contrainte, l’avilissant mensonge, la peur” (141. Constraints, degrading lies, fear), which suggest fear rather than delight, suffering rather than happiness, weariness rather than “starry eyes” and a “throbbing heart” (Kristeva 1987b: 6). Indeed, Némirovsky’s triangulation of love, suffering and death brings us back to Kristeva, for which love is an “affliction” (6), a violent act towards the self whom it drains of desires and aspirations. Kristeva writes that love is “[a] hymn to total giving to the other, such love is also, and almost as explicitly, a hymn to the narcissistic power to which I may even sacrifice it, sacrifice myself ” (Kristeva 1987b: 1–2). Therefore, love contributes to the annihilation of the suffering subject, for whom deliverance can only come with death. Ultimately, Némirovsky posits death as the only possible outcome of suffering, so much so that the dichotomy suffering/death vs. suffering/forgiveness that battles through Dostoevsky’s novels does not emerge in hers. The anthropology of suffering underlining her work brings together the relationship between subject and object (self/Other) that is at the heart of abjection, love and suffering and that challenges any other outcome but death. I have argued here, and in the two chapters that precede, that although Némirovsky did not explicitly mention Dostoevsky as a direct model, it is possible to uncover his presence as “oblique reception” (Chaudier 2008: 71) or, as I put it, “unconscious” influence, in several of her novels, first and foremost in Les Chiens et les loups, where the main character is identified by others as having “quelque chose de Dostoïevskien” (Cl 150. “something Dostoyevskian” [DW 125]). I have explored several ways in which this “something Dostoevskian” may come to the fore of her production. First, I analysed how the protagonists of Les Chiens et les loups embody several traits of two Dostoevskian characters: the Dreamer and the Underground Man. Then, I approached other novels and short stories through the mediation of Kristeva’s work: her concept of abjection as well as her analysis of Dostoevsky’s insistence on suffering fuel an alternative way to think about Némirovsky’s work. Overall, by fostering a productive and creative dialogue between different agents, I welcomed the possibility for their heterogenous horizons to interlace and, thus, I was able to foreground the Dostoevskian elements of Némirovsky’s oeuvre.

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

151

Notes 1. Gide was far from enthusiastic about de Vogüé’s formulation, which he sees as “clicher ainsi en une formule portative la doctrine qu’il trouvait incluse dans les derniers chapitres de Crime et châtiment ” (thus fixing in a portable formula the theory that he found included in the last chapters of Crime and Punishment ). According to Gide the formulation is not completely out of context; however, it is highly reductive: “par malheur, elle ne contenait pas son homme” (unfortunately, it did not include its subject. Gide 1923: 52). 2. The English translation is not literal, the French original being “un pôle d’appel et répulsion” (Kristeva 1980: 9), which could be alternatively translated as “a centre of attraction and repulsion.” 3. Emphasis Kristeva’s. 4. Cf. Chapter 3, pp. 55–75. 5. Cf. Introduction of this book, pp. 1–26. 6. Kristeva writes of “volupté de la souffrance” (187)—of a “sensual pleasure in suffering” (Kristeva 1992: 177). 7. Translations from the novel Deux are my own. 8. Becker-Leckrone underlines the connection between the three volumes by describing them as “the trilogy of major works Kristeva produced in the 1980s, highly psychoanalytic explorations of the ‘borderline discourses’ of abjection, love, and melancholia” (2005: 121–122). 9. E.g. Hélène Karol in Le Vin de solitude and Ada Sinner in Les Chiens et les loups. 10. Translations from the novel La Proie are my own. 11. Suleiman remarks that it is the sense of total estrangement from his wife and son that, “in a moment of depression,” pushes Christophe to slit his own throat. She links the suicide attempt with Durkheim’s study of suicide (Le Suicide: Etude de sociologie, 1987), associated with the notion of anomie, “an absence of stabilizing social norms that are traditionally found first of all in the family” (Suleiman 2017: 56). Indeed, estrangement from the family can heighten the sense of life’s constraints. 12. The agency needed to overcome suffering is also gained in becoming an artist. In fact, Kristeva also argues that aesthetic activity is a form of sublimation of affects equal to forgiveness (“writing is forgiveness” [217]). Therefore, in the overcoming of suffering the act of writing (or any other kind of creative activity), being an element of forgiveness, is an alternative to death. This interpretation can be made for Némirovsky on the basis of the gendered reading previously mentioned, where the freedom achieved by these young women at the end of the novels preludes to, or is realized through, a “female apprenticeship [that] must be creative” (Kershaw 2010: 93). The importance of the artistic act in her exploration

152

M.-L. CENEDESE

of suffering indicates another correspondence with abjection, since the aesthetic act offers sublimation in both instances. 13. Némirovsky uses the same phrasing, “alone like a dog” (whether “to be” or “to die”) multiple times in the novel (e.g. “he was there, alone like a dog, abandoned, dying” [24]; “[m]uch later Soifer would die all alone, like a dog, without a friend” [117]). 14. “And in his imagination he started to run through the best times of his happy life. But what was strange was that all the best times of his life no longer seemed anything like what they had been before” (Tolstoy 2008: 209). The tension between the conscious recognition of the emptiness of life in front of death and the impossibility to seize the resolute character of the “suprême dénuement de la mort” (OCII: 179; the supreme deprivation of death) also recalls Bakhtin’s Tolstoy–Dostoevsky polemic. Although at times told from the point of view of the dying person, however, in Némirovsky death is not a central event for the subject (such as in Tolstoy), but is more likely a memento mori (or a memento to live life fully) for those staying behind (such as in Dostoevsky): e.g. the young Jew that sits next to Golder during his final agony (Némirovsky 2007: 182–192. Cf. Bakhtin 1984: 289–292; see also Emerson 1985: 73–74). 15. In this sense, her provisional achievement of freedom can be seen through the gendered reading acknowledged earlier, whereby Gladys can be counted among the number of Némirovsky’s female characters that manage to achieve freedom (even though through her daughter’s death, and only temporarily).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Becker-Leckrone, Megan. 2005. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Chaudier, Stéphane. 2008. “« Une humanité fantastique » : Némirovsky et Dostoïevski.” Tangence, 86, 67–88. Emerson, Caryl. 1985. “The Tolstoy Connection in Bakhtin.” PMLA 100:1, 68–80. Gide, André. 1923. Dostoïevsky, Articles et causeries. Paris: Plon-Nourrit et Cie . Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York: Routledge. Kristeva, Julia. 1980. Pouvoirs de l’horreur: essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. ———. 1982. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP.

7

AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF SUFFERING

153

———. 1983. Histoires d’amour. Paris: Denoël. ———. 1987a. Soleil Noir. Dépression et mélancolie. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 1987b. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. ———. 1992. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP. Némirovsky, Irène. 2005. Le Pion sur l’échiquier. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2006. La Proie. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2007. David Golder. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010a. Jézabel. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010b. Jezebel. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage. ———. 2011. Deux. In Œuvres complètes, tome II. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 11–200. ———. 2013a. David Golder. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage. ———. 2013b. The Pawn on the Chessboard. Trans. Stephen Wilson. Oxford: Lamad Vav Press. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2017. “Irène Némirovsky’s Jewish Protagonists.” South Central Review 34:2, 54–64. Tolstoy, Leo. 2008. The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories. London: Penguin Classics.

PART III

Chekhov: Reading in Context

CHAPTER 8

La Vie de Tchekhov: A Romanced Biography

In September 1940 Irène Némirovsky was retouching the manuscript of La Vie de Tchekhov at her home in Issy-l’Évêque. The previous year she had asked the director of La nouvelle revue française (NRF ), Jean Paulhan, to read an initial portion of the manuscript, “L’enfance” (Childhood), for a possible publication (letter dated 10 September 1939. IMEC, PLH 173.19). The excerpt was eventually published in Les Œuvres libres in May 1940 under the title “La jeunesse de Tchekhov”. The proofs were ready in February 1941, and the book was scheduled to appear in 1942, illustrated by rare documents and pictures1 from the Turgenev Library (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 462; 2010: 331).2 Unfortunately, Némirovsky never saw it published. She was deported in July 1942 and died at Auschwitz only a month later. Finally, in 1946 two excerpts appeared in La Nef (“La mort de Tchekhov”) and Les Œuvres libres (“Le mariage de Tchekhov”), followed by the publication of the book by Albin Michel in 1946 (539; 387). The response to the posthumous publication was positive. Critics repeatedly identified Némirovsky’s Russian origins as a privileged position to portray Chekhov in a way that made him more relatable to Frenchspeaking readers, and they commended the emotion with which she had presented him. According to Pierre Palet:

© The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_8

157

158

M.-L. CENEDESE

En 200 pages, Irène brosse un portrait vivant, dépouillé, presque brutal, ne s’encombrant jamais de considérations superflues. Elle dessine, sans bavure ni repentir, la silhouette du personnage, elle le fouille aussi, non pour déceler quelque détail croustillant, mais pour mettre en évidence sa douloureuse humanité. Son style bref, clair, pointilliste convient paradoxalement au sujet, et cette réussite témoigne, s’il en était besoin, de l’immense talent d’Irène. (78NMR 16) In 200 pages, Irène sketches a portrait that is raw and lively, almost brutal, uncluttered by superfluous considerations. She draws a clear and steady silhouette of his character; she also explores him, not in order to find some juicy detail but to highlight his painful humanity. Paradoxically, her brief, clear, pointillist style is suited to the subject, and this success testifies, if it were necessary, to Irène’s immense talent.

La Pensée russe pointed out her intelligent analysis of Chekhov’s work: “Quant à son œuvre, elle a rarement été analysée avec autant d’intelligence et de précision. La profonde sensibilité de l’auteur, son aptitude à comprendre et à aimer ‘l’âme russe’ lui ont permis de réduire la distance qui séparait encore le lecteur français de l’homme Tchekhov” (78NMR 16. As for his oeuvre, it has rarely been analysed with as much intelligence and precision. The author’s profound sensitivity, her ability to understand and love “the Russian soul,” allowed her to reduce the distance that was still separating the French reader from Chekhov the man). After a new edition by Albin Michel in 1989 (“Perestroïka oblige”3 but perhaps also following the appearance of Henri Troyat’s biography of Tchekhov at Flammarion in 1984), Christian Signol of Le Populaire du centre emphasized Némirovsky’s acute sense of portraiture: Née russe mais élevée dans la langue française, elle était profondément intégrée à notre pays tout en ayant gardé la sensibilité de ses origines et Tchekhov, plus que d’autres, était proche d’elle […] Par-delà sa sagesse, son talent, et cette sorte de mélancolie qui l’habite, on perçoit surtout le tragique de l’âme russe. Ce n’est pas le moindre mérite d’Irène Némirovsky que de lui avoir fait traverser le temps et de nous le montrer dans sa simplicité et son génie avec des mots justes qui gardent tout leur poids d’émotion. (IMEC, NMR 11. [4–6]) Born Russian but raised in French, she was fully integrated into our country while she also kept the sensitivity proper to her origins; Chekhov,

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

159

more than others, was close to her […] Beyond his wisdom, his talent and his innate melancholy, one can perceive above all the tragedy of the Russian soul. It is not the least of Irène Némirovsky’s merits to have made him cross time, and to show him in his simplicity and genius, with words that are exact but keep all of their emotional force.

Jean-Jacques Bernard’s foreword praised Némirovsky’s simple narration of Chekhov’s difficult life and concludes his warm-hearted commemoration with the following: “grâce soit rendue à sa biographe. Elle inscrit un chapitre émouvant dans l’histoire de la littérature universelle” (VT: 10. Thanks be given to his biographer. She writes a moving chapter into the history of universal literature). Numerous critics pointed out that Némirovsky’s early life in Russia gave her the advantage of a proper understanding of her fellow countrymen’s soul, while her assimilation within French society constituted a privileged place from where she could introduce him to readers in a relatable way. Maria Rubins summarizes the debate by stating that her foreign origins give her the advantage of superposing two points of view: that of someone who is placed at the same time both inside and outside of the society and culture of her adopted country (Rubins 2012: 382). It appears that Némirovsky herself believed in a “special understanding” offered by common roots. In the review of André Maurois’s biography of Turgenev (Tourguénev, 1931) that she wrote for the main journal of the Russian emigration, Chisla (Numbers),4 Némirovsky offers a clear corroboration of such an “essentialised notion of national identity” (Kershaw 2010: 79). The review was written in Russian and signed under her Russian name, Irina Nemirovskaya. In the article—written in elegant Russian (Rubins 2012: 380)5 —Némirovsky identifies in Maurois’s superficial assessment of Russian life a visible shortcoming for Russian readers, for the simple reason that “sans doute, y a-t-il une difficulté presque insurmontable à parler avec justesse d’un écrivain dont on ignore la langue et le pays, surtout lorsque le pays est aussi archaïque et bizarre pour un Français que la Russie de 1840” (NMR 7.3. Without a doubt, there is an insurmountable difficulty in speaking with precision of a writer whose language and country are unknown, especially when the country is as archaic and bizarre for a Frenchman as 1840 Russia). Némirovsky laments Maurois’s weakness in the descriptions of settings and characters, which lack “cette grâce spéciale, faite de pureté, de mélancolie, de mollesse et de douceur, qu’un russe [sic] comprend, quand il dit: to qto-to typgenevckoe6 ”

160

M.-L. CENEDESE

(that special gracefulness, made of purity, melancholy, softness and sweetness, that a Russian understands when he says: something Turgenevian). Furthermore, she adds that “Maurois manque d’une certaine divination” (Maurois lacks a certain divination), and that “lorsqu’il veut pénétrer plus avant dans les âmes on sent une gêne, une sorte de crainte de l’inconnu. De même, il y a quelque chose de malhabile et de froid dans ces brefs paysages. […] Cela est naturel, mais cela nuit à la compréhension parfaite d’un écrivain tel que Tourgenev” (when he wishes to go deeper into a soul, one feels an embarrassment, a sort of fear of the unknown. Likewise, there is something awkward and cold in these passing landscapes. […] This is normal, but it is detrimental to the perfect understanding of a writer like Turgenev).7 On the other hand, Némirovsky praises Maurois’s clear evocation of “le régime politique, la société, le peuple de l’époque et certains de ses types” (the politics, the society, the people of the time and some of its types). According to her review, being a Frenchman allows him the distance needed to judge the political situation with lucidity: “Tout ce qu’il dit de l’extérieur du pays semble très exact. Pour les Russes il est difficile de juger le régime politique de notre pays avec le détachement qu’il montre […]. Slavophiles, Occidentaux sont décrits très justement” (Everything he says as an outsider seems very accurate. For us Russians it is difficult to judge our country’s political regime with the detachment he shows […]. Slavophiles, occidentalists are described very well). Similarly to Maurois, distance (or detachment) will eventually offer Némirovsky a vantage point of view for describing French people and society, which she accomplished with a particular sharp lucidity in Suite française and the later short stories.

The Research: The Carnet pour Tchekhov and Other Archival Material Despite Némirovsky’s belief in that chaotic and elusive force that was called “Russian soul”—a major concept and stereotype of the mode russe that influenced the literary field in the 1930s (Kershaw 2010: 68)—8 the “intimate relationship” with the biographical subject acknowledged by reviewers does not explain alone the success of La Vie de Tchekhov. Archival research shows that Némirovsky worked intensely on Chekhov, analysing his production, researching Russian publications (his correspondence and journals, still unknown to the French public), and studying

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

161

the historical and social context of his upbringing. Accurate research of the context is a recurring feature of Némirovsky’s work praxis: for David Golder she had consulted old issues of the Revue petrolifère (GRS 315 DG); for Suite française she read newspaper articles, she noted down the advancing and retreating moves of both the German and French armies, sketching them on maps of France, and also researched types and styles of porcelain (NMR 2. [1–14]); for the posthumously published Les Feux de l’automne (1957. The Fires of Autumn) she transcribed a bibliography of works on World War I (NMR 7.2 and ALM 3000.2); finally, for L’Affaire Courilof she read many biographies, memoirs and letters (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 284). It is also important to point out that Némirovsky had already tried her hand at writing biographies, including those of her novels’ characters,9 a method she confessed learning from Turgenev10 (though variants abound).11 For instance, around the time she concluded her Tchekhov, Némirovsky had also returned to a project about a biography of Pushkin, for which she had already done preliminary research on the poet’s juvenilia and private journals (NMR 7.3). Indeed, in 1936 she had published a brief biographical portrait in Marianne (25 March 1936): “Le mariage de Pouchkine et sa mort” (OCII: 703). While she wrote La Vie de Tchekhov, Némirovsky operated in the same exact manner, researching her subject as thoroughly as possible in order to give authority to her work: such a robust research basis would legitimize her romanced biography, if need be, as being both scholarly meticulous as well as heartfelt. Several papers kept at the IMEC contain Némirovsky’s transcriptions and translations of diary entries and letters to and from Chekhov; there are also research notes on Chekhov’s epoch and hometown.12 The IMEC archive classified as ALM 3000.7 contains a journal filled with notes in Russian. The typescript drafts (NMR 1.5–1.9) reveal spelling corrections (e.g., “Anton” instead of “Antoine”), alongside her own or her husband’s edits and comments on the margins. In ALM 3000.8 we find the transcriptions of Suvorin’s journal entries dated 17 and 21 October 1896, 15 May 1900 and 10 February 1902, copied from a 1923 Russian publication.13 The first two entries report Suvorin’s account after the first two performances of The Seagull in St Petersburg, on 17 and 21 October 1896. In the first one he describes: (1) the public’s negative reaction (“Cegodn Qaka v Alekcandpinckom teatpe. Peca ne imela ycpexa. Pyblika nevnimatelna, pazgovapivawa, ckyqawa.  davno ne vidal

162

M.-L. CENEDESE

takogo ppedctavleni. Qexov byl ydpyqn.” Today The Seagull at the Aleksandrinsky Theatre. The play was not successful. The audience was inattentive, chatty, bored. It has been a long time since I have seen such a show. Chekhov was dispirited)14 ; (2) Chekhov’s momentary disappearance and his desire to leave the city immediately (“Zavtpa v 3 q. xoqet exat. ‘Poaly cta, ne octanavliva te men,  ne mogy clyxat ti pazgovopy’.” Tomorrow at 3 o’clock he wants to leave. “Please, don’t try to stop me, I can’t stand these conversations”); and (3) Suvorin’s own doubts about his review—details that Némirovsky will summarize and include in Chapter 27. The performance was a fiasco15 : La salle semblait composée d’ennemis personnels de Tchekhov […] Souvorine, furieux songeait qu’il avait écrit son article à l’avance et escompté le succès. Maintenant, tout était à refaire. Qui aurait pu s’attendre à un tel échec ? […] D’ailleurs, à la réflexion, le public n’avait pas tout à fait tort. La pièce était étrange. À la lecture, elle lui avait plu, mais il n’y avait pas d’action. Tchekhov n’écoutait jamais personne. Il s’en mordait les doigts, maintenant. (VT: 154) The room seemed to be made up of Chekhov’s personal enemies […] A furious Suvorin was thinking that he had written his article in advance counting on its success. Now, everything had to be done again. Who could have anticipated such a failure? […] Incidentally, thinking about it, the public was not entirely wrong. The play was strange. He did like it upon first reading, but there was no action. Chekhov never listened to anyone. He was kicking himself for it now.

The second entry reiterates some of his previous positions: “peca ppoxla lyqxe, no vce-taki, kak peca, ona claba. B ne pazbpocano mnogo ppitnyx vewe , mnogo ppekpacnyx namepeni , no vce to ne cgpyppipovano. De ctvi bolxe za cceno , qem na ccene […]  dovolen cegodnxnim ycpexom i dovolen cobo , qto napical o Qake taky zametky” (The play went better, but still, as a play, it’s weak. It features many pleasant things, many good intentions, but it is not mature enough. There’s more action going on behind the scenes than on stage […] I am pleased with today’s success and I am pleased with myself to have written that review about The Seagull ). The final two entries are about a day Suvorin spent with Chekhov in Moscow and the play Three Sisters (1901). The meeting took place on a Saturday, on 13 May, and is remembered as an incredibly pleasant outing: “13-ogo, v cybboty,

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

163

ppovel c Qexovym. […] Cely den c nim […] Bctpetilic xopoxo i xopoxo, zadyxevno ppoveli den.  emy mnogo pacckazyval. On cmelc. […]  c Qexovym qyvctvy ceb ppevocxodno” (The 13th, a Saturday, spent with Chekhov. […] I was with him all day long. […] we met in good spirits and spent an amiable day together. I told him many stories. He laughed. […] In Chekhov’s company, I feel simply wonderful). A year and a half later, Three Sisters is received with as much misfortune as The Seagull : Suvorin stresses the boredom and the lack of sympathy on the part of the public (“Tpi cectpy Qexova. Ckyqno […].  ppigldyvalc k pyblike. Hikto i ne dymaet plakat. Tpi cectpy na ccene plaqyt, no pyblika nemalo.” Chekhov’s Three Sisters . Boring […]. I was checking the audience closely. No one even thought about crying. The three sisters on stage, they cry, but the audience not in the least). Némirovsky also copied and translated two letters that Chekhov wrote to Suvorin, part of ALM 3000.9 (from Pisma A. P. Chekhova, 1888–1889, Moscow, 1912). A mistake in Némirovsky’s transcription allows us to speculate that she was probably consulting this material in 1939: the date of the letters is reported as 30 December 1939 instead of 30 December 1888, like in their original Russian version. The first one is about the play Ivanov, while the second one describes the soothing nature of Louka, a village in (today’s) North-East Ukraine where Chekhov often sojourned between 1888 and 1894. The French translations are typewritten and show signs of editing, probably by Michel Epstein. Yet, the main part of Némirovsky’s research for La Vie de Tchekhov is included in the “Carnet pour Tchekhov,” ALM 3000.7: the notebook is covered with notes and transcriptions, mainly from Russian sources. In the carnet one can find more excerpts from letters that Chekhov wrote to his wife Olga Knipper, his brothers Mikhail and Alexander, to Suvorin, and to the writer Grigorovich—all sourced from the aforementioned 1912 Russian edition. Némirovsky recorded lists and chronologies of important trips Chekhov made in his lifetime; titles and dates of short stories he submitted; deaths and births; his plays’ premières and other performance dates; and the physical features and temperaments of Suvorin and Grigorovich. Aiming to recreate the settings with historical accuracy, Némirovsky conscientiously read books on Chekhov’s hometown, Taganrog, on the Russo-Turkish wars, and on life during Peter the Great (cf. VT: 17 and 39). Adding to the fascinating reading of this little notebook are the brief comments and quick reminders that Némirovsky jotted

164

M.-L. CENEDESE

down, little islands of French and English among the sea of Cyrillic calligraphy: “Ne pas oublier que son frère Alexandre écrivait aussi” (Do not forget that his brother Alexander was a writer, too); “Lettres à Grigorovitch, très important!” (Letters to Grigorovich, very important!) (cf. VT: 61–64 and 89–91). Here and there, one can find quick annotations in French, such as the entry “Bixnvy cad 1904 … Il n’aimait pas les mises en scène compliquées” (The Cherry Orchard 1904 … He did not like complicated stage designs), which elegantly integrates Chapter 30: “Et Stanislavsky accordait trop d’importance à la mise en scène … On entendait les grenouilles coasser, des chiens aboyer, des grelots sonner … À quoi bon tout cela ?” (VT: 172. Stanislavsky gave too much importance to the mise en scène … One could hear frogs croaking, dogs barking, bells ringing … What for?). In notes such as the following, we can notice Némirovsky’s own emotional reaction to the material: “N.B. Quand il décrit sa première entrevue avec Souv. c’est sur un ton de plaisanterie […] (Cette lettre est délicieuse et devra être citée en entier. Elle est dans le tome I)” (N.B. When he describes his first meeting with Suvorin, he is poking fun […] [This letter is delightful and should be quoted in full. It is in volume I]”). All these entries reveal the process of selection and creation of the final product, as well as Némirovsky’s intimate connection with the material, shown by remarks written in French, English and Russian. Finding such a vast amount of material written in Russian by Némirovsky herself is not surprising. Némirovsky had comprehensive critical knowledge of nineteenth-century Russian literature thanks to her successful studies at the Sorbonne.16 The unparalleled access to original sources that were not yet available in French placed her expertise on Chekhov above that of any non-russophone writer. Furthermore, the evident interlacing of French and Russian—to this extent otherwise unprecedented in Némirovsky’s manuscripts—demonstrates the importance of such double belonging, yet also shows their indissoluble nature.17 Denise Epstein, Némirovsky’s eldest daughter, confirmed that, though they did not speak Russian with their children, since the beginning of the war Irène and Michel spoke it often between them, surely to protect their daughters from hearing fearful news (Epstein 2014: 47). The typewritten manuscript of La Vie de Tchekhov is stored in the folders NMR 1.5 to 1.9,18 and includes drafts peppered with Némirovsky’s and her husband’s editing suggestions. In these papers we find more spelling corrections: for example, “Tchekof” becomes

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

165

“Tchekhov,” “Azof” turns into “Azov,” “ikônes” into “icônes,” which signal Némirovsky’s change from the use of a phonetic transcription to transliteration. Some glosses show her meticulous search for the right word, particularly when translating from Russian: “la traduction du mot stukat’ [frapper] par clouer est une trahison, mais ça ne fait rien !” (The translation of the word stukat’ [to knock] with to nail is a betrayal, but it doesn’t matter!). The corresponding manuscript excerpt from Chapter 27 reads: “cependant, sur le fleuve ‘rampaient des blocs de glace … L’eau était trouble … Elle courait avec un bruit étrange, comme si, au fond, quelqu’un frappait clouait des cercueils’” (however, on the river blocks of ice were crawling … The water was murky … It ran with a strange noise, as if, deep down, someone was knocking nailing coffins).19 With the outbreak of the war, Michel Epstein, who always played the role of first reader and editor of his wife’s novels, started typing and editing her drafts as his main activity, since “il n’avait plus grand-chose à faire sinon le soir taper à la machine ce qui avait été écrit dans la journée, relire les textes, les corriger, y mettre sa griffe à savoir quelques appréciations ou critiques” (Epstein 2014: 61–62. He did not have much else to do except, in the evening, typing what had been written during the day, rereading the texts, correcting them, marking them with either his positive appraisal or critical remarks). For instance, next to the passage: “orthodoxes, tartares, Juifs, Polonais, toutes les races, toutes les religions se retrouvaient là” (Orthodox, Tartar, Jews, Poles, all races, all religions could be found there), he observes that “orthodoxes ne doivent pas être opposés aux tartares: religion n’est pas race” (Orthodox should not be opposed to Tartars: religion is not race) (NMR 1.8). As Denise Epstein remembers: “Il a toujours soutenu ma mère et participé à son œuvre à sa manière, en corrigeant les fautes de grammaire, en tapant ses textes à la machine, en lui faisant des réflexions pas toujours aimables d’ailleurs … J’ai retrouvé certaines de ses annotations en marge de manuscrits, parfois il avait écrit ‘stupide’” (Epstein 2014: 45. He always supported my mother and participated in her work in his own way, by correcting grammar mistakes, typing her texts on the typewriter, leaving some annotations—not always kind ones … I found some of his comments on the margins of the manuscripts, sometimes he had written “stupid”). Besides the sparse but harsh criticism and abundant technical guidance (“À la ligne ?”—New paragraph?), in the Tchekhov manuscript one can also find amusing exchanges between spouses, like the following: “Parfois, des Lapons, sur leurs attelages de rennes, la [la Taïga] traversaient pour

166

M.-L. CENEDESE

venir acheter du pain dans les villages” (Sometimes the Lapps, on their reindeers and carriages, crossed it [the Taiga] to come buy bread in the villages); M. Epstein’s remark: “Pain ? Faire des centaines de verstes pour rapporter non plus du pain, mais certainement de la pierre ?” (Bread? To cross hundreds of versts to bring back not bread, but certainly stones?), to which Némirovsky replied: “Autant que je puisse en juger, cher époux et secrétaire, le mot xleb (khleb)20 a toujours signifié du pain !” (As far as I can tell, my dear husband and secretary, the word khleb has always meant bread!).

Birth and Evolution of the Genre La Vie de Tchekhov marks the culmination of Némirovsky’s interest in biographical writing, a genre that took centre stage in methodological debates in the early decades of the twentieth century. How does the book relate to the dynamics of the genre and its interwar developments? How was “biography” born in the French literary world, and how did “romanced biography” come to be? I will now sketch an overview of the history of the genre, albeit in a brief summary that does not give justice to its complexity; nonetheless, this overview should provide a framework for my analysis of La Vie de Tchekhov. The long process that led to the proliferation of biography as a literary genre saw its beginnings in the multiple forms of life writing that appeared at the end of the seventeenth century. Indirectly, these manifestations led to the later introduction of two neologisms: “biographe,” probably coined at the end of the seventeenth century but included in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux only in 1721 as “author who writes lives, either of Saints, or of others”; and “biographie,” which, although it entered French common usage only from the mid-nineteenth century, first appeared in a dictionary of rare words edited by Abbé Prevost in 1750 as “[m]ot grec composé, qui signifie l’Histoire de la vie des particuliers, comme Biographe signifie l’Historien qui l’écrit” (Compound Greek word, which means the History of the life of individuals, just as Biographer means the Historian who writes it [qtd. in Jefferson 2007: 18 and 29]). In the nineteenth century biography came into its own as a cultural phenomenon: in France, such a move was exemplified by the emergence of the collective format of the biographical dictionary, the biographical essay as a journalistic subgenre, and the biographical recueil (83–86). It was also the century of SaintBeuve, trailblazer of biographical criticism, who put biography “at the

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

167

centre of a new vision of literature” (113). Furthermore, from the second half of the nineteenth century writers began to publish their memoirs (for instance Stendhal, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Dumas and George Sand, to cite just a few), and poets such as Baudelaire and Hugo started to include in their work references to “the life of the Poet” (137–138). Fast-forward to the beginning of the twentieth century and biography had become the site for an engagement with literature that was bound to bring about a new conception of the literary. By the 1920s, biographical writing was finally acquiring the status of established literary genre on a par with the novel. Within this process, the vie romancée played an important part, as it “was seen as placing the narrative techniques of the novel at the service of biography; read negatively, however, it was regarded as a disreputable manufacturing of imaginative fiction out of the lives of real people” (221). The two major consequences of biography’s achievement of literary standing were an unrelenting reflection on the forms and practices of biographical writing and the newfound importance of the “creative experience” (221–222). The biographer’s aim was to “recapture the likeness of a vanished figure on the basis of inactive materials, into which he must breath the air of life” (Pachmuss 1990: 31). Therefore, after the Great War the style of biographical writing known as biographie romancée evolved to include descriptions of imagined scenes, dialogues and the presentation of “thought-processes and inward responses of their protagonists” (Jefferson 2007: 223). The difficulty of biographical writing then lay in how to strike a balance between the presentation of historical facts and the recreation of the subject’s psychology and emotional life: the writer seeks to provide a factually correct presentation of a man’s existence while deploying all the techniques proper to fiction. In interwar France, among the sheer number of articles discussing biography, one important volume was Maurois’s Aspects de la biographie (1928), whose chief concern was the structure and the value of biography. The book gathered in one publication the Clark Lectures he had delivered at Trinity College Cambridge in the same year. However, Maurois speaks not only as a critic and theoretician of biography, but also as a practitioner: in 1923, in fact, he had published a biography of Shelley (Ariel, ou la vie de Shelley). In 1926 his review of Liszt’s biography by Guy de Pourtalès appeared in the NRF , in which he lamented how the inaccuracy of many biographies romancées was damaging to the genre, to the

168

M.-L. CENEDESE

point that he preferred “traditional historical novels like The Three Musketeers, which at least acknowledged that it was a novel” (qtd. in Jefferson 2007: 224).21 According to Jefferson, it is this association with the novel that, while discrediting the genre, also elevates it to the status of literature (225). I have already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter (cf. above, pp. 159–160) that in 1931 Némirovsky wrote a review of André Maurois’s Tourguénev for the journal of the Russian emigration, Chisla. A member of the journal’s editing and writing staff was Nina Berberova, a fellow Russian émigré, who also authored a biography of Tchaikovsky in 1936. In the foreword to a 1987 publication she explained the circumstances that urged her to write the biography in the first place and the challenges posed by the genre at the time. Berberova confirms the trend of biographical writing that swept the 1920s and 1930s in both France and the United Kingdom, but she also concedes that new “rules” had been put into place in order to overcome the lack of factual accuracy that accompanied the widespread use of clichés and fictional embellishments: La vogue des grandes biographies, en France et en Angleterre, date des années vingt et trente. Les auteurs avaient alors fixé des lois strictes et précises à ce genre littéraire où, jusque-là, on ne s’était laissé guider que par l’imagination : rencontres plausibles mais inventées, dialogues imaginaires, mots d’amour chuchotés dans l’intimité, sentiments secrets pudiquement dévoilés … Dans ces œuvres romanesques les documents jouaient un rôle minime, on les jugeait trop sérieux. Il allait de soi qu’une rencontre heureuse ne pouvait se passer que par beau temps, et qu’à la rupture avec la bien-aimée il fallait en arrière-plan un temps pluvieux—comme dans les films des années dix. (Berberova 1987: 7. Emphasis in original) The trend of the great biographies, in France and England, dates back to the 1920s and 1930s. By then, authors had set strict and exact rules for this literary genre which, until then, had only been guided by the imagination: plausible but invented encounters, imaginary dialogues, words of love whispered in intimacy, secret feelings bashfully revealed … In these novelistic works, documents played a minimal role, they were considered too serious. It was self-evident that a happy encounter could only happen in good weather and that breaking up with one’s beloved needed rainy weather in the background—like in the movies of the 1910s.

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

169

Berberova confesses to having initially hesitated between writing Tchaikovsky’s biography as a critical edition of the composer’s letters and journals, which had just appeared in the Soviet Union, or using this material to write a serialized biography for the Sunday edition of Chisla. At the time, many of Tchaikovsky’s family members and friends were living in Paris, so she went to meet and interview them, establishing friendly correspondences that provided her with an abundance of additional research material. Berberova reminds her readers that her motivations are tightly linked with the development of the genre in those years: from the question of its merit, to the debates on its value, and as an engagement with the different positions held within the literary world. Tchaikovsky’s biography was Berberova’s way to fine-tune her positions on literature, biography and authorial identity: “le soudain renouveau du genre est apparu telle une renaissance. J’ai suivi le mouvement par goût pour les problèmes ainsi posés” (Berberova 1987: 7. The sudden renewal of the genre appeared like a renaissance. I followed this trend because of a penchant for the problems it was addressing). A more cautious response to the biographie romancée was later espoused by fellow Russian émigré Elsa Triolet, who said: “Il n’y a qu’à lire les biographies de nos contemporains, de ceux que nous nous sommes trouvés avoir connus pour nous apercevoir de ce que la fantaisie artistique, les renseignements faux et la mauvaise foi peuvent faire d’un homme et de sa vie ! Toute biographie, dès qu’elle sort du strict domaine des faits matériels, est nécessairement romancée” (Triolet 1954: 7. One needs only to read the biographies of our contemporaries, those we have known, in order to recognize what artistic fantasy, false information, and bad faith can make of a man and his life! Every biography, as soon as it goes beyond the strict domain of material facts, is necessarily fictionalized). Triolet warned against the tendency of imagination to prevail over facts and instead proposed a method rooted in the evidence given by the work: “Tout est sujet à caution, sauf l’œuvre qui est là, et qui témoigne pour son créateur” (8. Everything is subject to caution, except for the work that is here and that is a testament to its creator). Triolet, in fact, seems to contend that the work, despite its fictionality, contains the presence of the author’s biographical self more than anything else. As mentioned above (p. 167), in the early years of the twentieth century the debate about biography and its literary merits found a renewed argument in the question of the “creative experience,” which implies not only the creative experience of the biographical subject but

170

M.-L. CENEDESE

also that of the author himself. Attention to the creative process in the twentieth century was inspired by the work of Henri Bergson and in particular by the concept of élan vital (in L’évolution créatrice, 1907). Bergson believed the evolutionary process to be creative and saw in the élan vital its temporal element: a creative force that allows (human and non-human) development along multiple pathways, leading to the creation of new forms/species. The vital impulse is neither predetermined nor determinist; it is open and unpredictable (hence non-teleological); it is contingent, insofar as it implies choice (Bergson 2012: 91–100). A method to understand a literary work in a Bergsonian perspective was theorized by Pierre Audiat in La Biographie de l’œuvre littéraire (1924). Audiat argues that a work of art is the result of the author’s “happy” mental activity in the precise moment of its genesis, which is also a response to the evolution of the author’s inner life—a continuous process interspersed by these privileged creative moments. Therefore, it is the “unfolding present” of the creative process within the author’s inner life, rather than the deterministic evolution rooted in the past, that informs the work of art. By arguing for hermeneutic practices based on the creative impulse, Audiat shifted the focus to the centrality of the multiple experiences of the author for the literary; at the same time, he also suggested that a distinctive creative experience is itself an essential part of the author’s life (Jefferson 2007: 229–231). The issue of the importance of the creative experience as a process pertinent to both the artistic subject and the author of the biography was also raised by André Maurois, as he attempted to legitimize the literary status of biographical writing in Aspects de la biographie (228–229). Explored by others, the preoccupation with the creative experience, hence the relation between biography and creativity, is a topic that will continue to absorb writers throughout the twentieth century. Némirovsky herself was an advocate of the import of experience and its significance for the creative work. As this book argues, acknowledging the creative experience as a temporal process punctured by acts of reading, critical elaboration and writing, is vital for a more inclusive analysis of Némirovsky’s work. Biography being part of the creative process preparatory to her fictional characters, it is also inescapably linked to the literary. When she started drafting La Vie de Tchekhov in the late 1930s, Némirovsky had already tried her pen at biographical writing, but Chekhov’s is the first biography of a fellow writer that she wrote in full. What kind of biography did she write? What are La Vie de Tchekhov’s

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

171

characteristics and what place does it have within the literary field of the time?

Inner Life and Authorship The section above provided an overview of the newly developing genre of romanced biography; it highlighted how its practitioners felt the need for specific rules, or requirements, that would allow these works to be read as “proper” works of literature, namely to give life to scholarly facts; to depict the subject’s inner life; and to imbue a strong authorship. It is by analysing Némirovsky’s engagement with these categories and the final outcome that we can seek to assess the place of La Vie de Tchekhov within the genre, and Némirovsky’s role in the evolution and debate that took place in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The first element of a biography should be its ability to infuse life to scholarly facts so as to create a convincingly human biographical subject. The aim of the biography is not only to document the life but to recreate it through the novelist’s skills. Némirovsky succeeded in associating the scholarly work at the basis of her biography with her talent as a novelist. Indeed, Maurois himself recognized her ability to instill the essence of life into fiction in a review of her debut novel, David Golder, of which he said: “Mme Irène Némirovsky a le plus précieux de tous les dons : celui de la vie. Dès les premières pages, on est saisi par le ton de vérité de son livre ; on ne le quitte plus” (IMEC, GRS 315 DG. Ms. Irène Némirovsky has the most precious of gifts: that of life. From the very first pages, we are seized by her book’s truthful tone; it is impossible to put it down).22 In La Vie de Tchekhov, Chekhov comes alive from the very first pages: Un petit garçon était assis sur une malle et pleurait parce que son frère aîné refusait d’être son ami. Pourquoi ? Ils ne s’étaient pas battus. Il répétait d’une voix tremblante : « Sois mon ami, Sacha ». Mais Sacha le regardait avec dédain et froideur. Il était de cinq ans plus âgé que son frère, Anton. Il allait à l’école et il était amoureux. Anton pensait tristement : « C’est lui-même qui m’a proposé son amitié. » (VT: 13) A little boy was sitting on a trunk and was crying because his older brother was refusing to be his friend. Why? There had been no fight. He repeated in a trembling voice: “Be my friend, Sasha.” But Sasha looked down at him with disdain and coldness. He was five years older than his brother

172

M.-L. CENEDESE

Anton. He was going to school and was in love. Anton thought, sadly: “It was him who offered his friendship.”

Were it not for the title of the book, it would be impossible to identify the “petit garçon.” The presence of the two unnamed children plunges the reader in medias res and thus creates from the beginning an indefinable narrative that waives any attempt at chronology or genealogy (ancestors, birth, etc.). It is a choice that invites the separation of the Name from the Person, that is, to upend the predominance of cultural capital (hence of value, consumption and memorialization) in favour of the acknowledgment of the subject and their multiplicity (Bourdieu 1986: 71; Pollock 2018: 27).23 In order to better appreciate Némirovsky’s choice and its impact on the reader, we need to turn to Elsa Triolet’s biography of Anton Chekhov, L’histoire d’Anton Tchekhov : sa vie, son œuvre. Published in 1954, Triolet’s biography of Chekhov is told in plain style by a heterodiegetic narrator. Her research into Chekhov’s life seems to have been as thorough as Némirovsky’s, with excerpts from letters, memoires and historical and social details entering the narrative in order to give context to the subject’s actions. Triolet describes in detail Chekhov’s works, giving as much information about them as possible, trying to understand the author through his production.24 She voices her awareness of the importance of translation in order to grasp a foreign writer and laments the difficulty when these are lacking or are imperfect: “Parler d’un auteur étranger, dont le nom est célèbre, mais l’œuvre mal connue d’après des traductions souvent imparfaites, est comme parler couleurs à un aveugle de naissance” (Triolet 1954: 7. To talk about a foreign author, whose name is famous but the work poorly known because of imperfect translations, is like talking about colours to a person who is blind from birth). The incipit of her biography is very different from that of Némirovsky. Triolet quickly reaches for the facts and highlights the twofold role of experience as a creative source and of creative work as a testimony of the experience: Il y a du martyr dans la figure d’Anton Tchekhov, et tout ce qu’il a stoïquement enduré tout au long de sa vie semble avoir été mis sur son chemin pour en faire l’écrivain qu’il devint. Tchekhov n’est pas « né dans une chemise », comme on dit en russe, le destin n’en a pas fait son favori, simplement autour de lui les circonstances s’ordonnent savamment pour

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

173

que naisse et mûrisse son œuvre. Anton Pavlovitch Tchekhov est né en 1860, dans la ville de Taganrog, auprès de la mer d’Azov et de la steppe. Son grand-père […]. (11) There is something of a martyr in the figure of Anton Chekhov, and everything he stoically endured along his life seems to have been put on his way with the purpose of making him the writer he then became. Chekhov is not “born in a shirt,” as they say in Russian; he was not one favoured by fate. Simply put, circumstances cleverly arranged themselves around him, so as to produce and let his work evolve. Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was born in 1860 in the city of Taganrog, near the Sea of Azov and the steppe. His grand-father […].

Despite her choice of simple portraiture, Triolet’s brisk style does not preclude the occasional appearance of tender accents, especially when it involves the description of Chekhov’s family: we perceive her desolation when she relates the adversities faced by the Chekhov brothers or their mother’s hopeless grief (24–25). However, this warmth is short-lived and, apart from the affectionate “Antocha” with which she calls Chekhov throughout the book, Triolet keeps a tone that is mostly matter-of-fact and emotionally distant. Contrary to Triolet, Némirovsky chose to wait before disclosing the name of her subject, thus suggesting that it is experience—that which forms individuality—that contributes to creating the name. With the name also comes the geo-spatial dimension of the narrative: “Dehors, la boue stagnait comme dans toutes les rues de cette petite ville de la Russie méridionale où vivaient Sacha et Anton Tchekhov” (VT: 14. Outside, the mud putrefied like on all the streets of this small town of southern Russia, where Sasha and Anton Chekhov lived). Indications of the temporal dimension arrive only in the second chapter where, in a footnote, Némirovsky supplies Chekhov’s date of birth (17 January 1860). Similarly to her contemporaries, Némirovsky chose to open La Vie de Tchekhov with a description that, as encouraged by Maurois, combined “the imaginative freedom of belles-lettres with documentary precision” (qtd. in Pachmuss 1990: 36), that is, relying on the author’s imagination while being rooted in accurate data.25 The subjectivity of these first lines also reveals the desire to penetrate the psychological development of the subject and the other characters, as the omniscient narrator lingers over

174

M.-L. CENEDESE

childhood episodes that characterize Chekhov’s early relationships with his parents, his brothers and the neighbours. Némirovsky uses all her skills as an experienced novelist to unravel the emotions and to involve the reader. Instead of presenting life as it unfolds, she tries to convey the way Chekhov experienced it through the use of dialogues, free indirect discourse and quotations from his letters. In this fashion, Némirovsky answers the second requirement of biography: to “depict the inner life of its subjects” so that it “deals rather more with motive, feeling, and mental existence than with the externals of event and circumstance” (Jefferson 2007: 225). The tender vividness with which Némirovsky depicts little Anton seems to ask for the reader’s sympathy and compassion. There is a certain Dickensian quality in the chronicle of Chekhov’s childhood:26 the poverty, his kind-heartedness, the despotic father, the damaged older brothers and the feeble mother. Cette jeunesse abandonnée, ce père fuyant la prison pour dettes font songer à l’enfance de Dickens, mais le petit Russe ne souffrait pas de sa pauvreté, de sa déchéance de la même façon que l’Anglais. Jamais, sans doute, Anton n’éprouva la honte qui torturait Charles Dickens au souvenir de son passé. Il était moins orgueilleux, plus simple qu’un Occidental. Il était malheureux, mais il ne raffinait pas sur son malheur ; il ne l’empoisonnait pas de vanité blessée. Il ne cachait pas avec confusion ses vêtements usés, ses bottes percées. Il sentait d’instinct que cela n’était pas essentiel, ni même très important et ne touchait en rien à sa véritable dignité. (VT: 52–53)27 The abandoned youth, the father fleeing prison for debt, remind us of Dickens’ childhood, although poverty and degradation did not bring as much suffering to the little Russian as they did to the Englishman. Without any doubt, Anton never felt the shame that tortured Charles Dickens when he remembered his past. He was less proud, simpler than a Westerner. He was unhappy, but he did not fuss over his misfortune; he did not let it poison his wounded vanity. Chekhov did not hide hurriedly his worn-out clothes, his broken boots. He instinctively felt that it was neither essential nor very important, and that it had no effect on his self-worth.

Némirovsky moves the writing inward towards the complexity of Chekhov’s inner life, “the most vital element of human subjects” (Jefferson 2007: 226). Indeed, Némirovsky is trying to make the reader feel the humanity of the man she is describing, presenting both his

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

175

strengths and shortcomings, calling for “imaginative empathy with the writer’s inner life” (234). While merging historical elements with psychological intuitions, Némirovsky never parted from her belief that art revealed the humanity and truthfulness of life. Under her pen, Chekhov becomes a finely researched, acutely explored and skillfully described man. Her habit of writing full biographies of her fictional characters is evidence of her ability to create life with art, and art out of a life. The rise of the genre of biography to literary status concurred in producing a shift towards authorship. The emphasis on the role of the author marks a significant move from the anonymous biographies of journalistic style of the nineteenth century which, even when written by accomplished writers, were not considered for their literary qualities but for their polemical content and the interest of the subjects described (Jefferson 2007: 228). Instead, at the beginning of the twentieth century the importance of the biographical author becomes the main criterion for the success of the work. This element engages two interlaced considerations regarding the author’s relationship to the material. The necessary detachment is essential for the achievement of a balanced account, whereby the author must “refrain from becoming a creator of that life, or of projecting himself into that life” (Pachmuss 1990: 32). At the same time, despite such “necessary detachment” the biographer might find herself involved in the narrative through some kind of selfreflexive identification; even Maurois affirmed that biographical writing is “an opportunity for the expression of strong emotions which the author has felt” (qtd. in Jefferson 2007: 229), and years later Marguerite Yourcenar will say that biographical writing has “un pied dans l’érudition, l’autre dans la magie, ou plus exactement, et sans métaphore, dans cette magie sympathique qui consiste à se transporter en pensée à l’intérieur de quelqu’un” (Yourcenar 1981: 330. “One foot in scholarship, the other in magic arts, or, more accurately and without metaphor, absorption in that sympathetic magic which operates when one transports oneself, in thought, into another’s body and soul” [Yourcenar 2000: 275]). Therefore, the creative process involved in writing a biography invests the author’s participation, which is visible in the connection that is established with the object of study and which in turn becomes a pretext to reflect on oneself and/or the present. Némirovsky’s biographers suggest that she probably identified with Chekhov (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 307 and 439; 2010: 216–217 and 314), and through such identification she was able to voice parts of her own experience and to create

176

M.-L. CENEDESE

a convincing dialogue between past and present. In La Vie de Tchekhov Némirovsky practiced what historian Ivan Jablonka calls the reflexive mode, which turns the researcher’s activity into literary creation by being “both form and research” (Jablonka 2018: 253). As a researcher as well as a fiction writer, Némirovsky bridges the methodological gap between fiction and history by tying herself (and thus her readers) to the object of her biography through a projection of elements of her own subjective experience.28 Even Némirovsky’s contemporary, Louis Aragon, alluded to the distortive and/or transformative qualities of biography when he said, “[e]t je peux bien raconter l’histoire d’autrui, c’est toujours la mienne” (qtd. in Forest 2015: 13. I can very well tell someone else’s story, it is always my story). An example of this practice is visible in the way Némirovsky turned the memory of her troubled relationship with her mother into a creative experience, which resulted in the many monstrous and frivolous mother figures of her novels, such as Gloria Golder (David Golder, 1929), Mme Karol (Le Vin de solitude, 1935), and Gladys Eysenach (Jézabel, 1936)—to quote just a few. In her Tchekhov we can still find echoes of this private knowledge when she writes about the playwright’s adolescence: Mais cette liberté nouvelle, si elle consolait Anton, ne le rendait ni sec ni indifférent. En ces trois années de solitude, il grandit, se fortifia de corps et d’âme. Il était à l’âge où l’adolescent, encore saignant des blessures de l’enfance, se libère péniblement comme s’il se débarrassait de liens qui ont déchiré sa chair. C’est l’âge où l’on mesure ce qu’on a souffert et où l’on juge les parents et les maîtres qui vous ont infligé ces souffrances. (VT: 55) However, this new freedom, though it consoled Anton, did not make him curt or indifferent. During these three years of solitude he grew up, he became stronger in body and soul. He was at the age when the adolescent, still bleeding from childhood wounds, painfully frees himself as if he were getting rid of the ties that had torn his flesh. It is the age when one measures what one has suffered, and where one judges the parents and teachers that inflicted these sufferings.

Ultimately, the analysis presented above demonstrates that La Vie de Tchekhov conforms to the main requirements set forth by practitioners and theoreticians of biography in the interwar period. By respecting the conventions Némirovsky proved her legitimacy as a biographer, while

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

177

at the same time she also stretched them by playing with the imaginative potential of the literary biography. Indeed, by exploiting the literary and the possibilities of appropriating the biographical subject, Némirovsky seeks her readers’ empathy and thus brings to our attention the issue of the ethical challenge of biographical writing. This topic will be explored in the next chapter, where La Vie de Tchekhov is examined in relation to its most recent context of reception and alongside the thriving return of the biographie romancée in the 2000s.

Notes 1. According to Némirovsky’s biographers, Sabatier planned to retrieve the material with the help of the famous dancer Serge Lifar, also born in Kiev in 1905, who was at the time grand maître at the Paris Opera and known by the Occupation authorities (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 462). 2. Némirovsky loved going to the bibliothèque Tourguéniev, but in 1941 was unfortunately unaware that since summer 1940 its 130,000 volumes had been taken to Germany by the Reichslater Alfred Rosenberg, a lover of Russian literature (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 491; 2010: 352). 3. Maria Spangaro, “Est : le retour des anciens,” Le Quotidien de Paris, 10 January 1990 (IMEC, ALM 262.15). 4. “André Maurois. Tourguénev. Grasset 1931,” Chisla, 5 (1931), 248–250. 5. An earlier French draft of her review is available at the IMEC, NMR 7.3— Notes pour le projet “La Vie amoureuse de Pouchkine”. The following French quotations will be taken from that version. My hypothesis is that Némirovsky wrote a first draft of the review in French, which she then reworked and translated into Russian with the help of her husband. 6. In Cyrillic in the original. 7. In her article Maria Rubins cites from the final Russian version of Némirovsky’s review. The passage that I have cited from the manuscript reads as follows: “Verotno, imets poqti nepreodolimye trudnosti dl pravilno ocenki pisatel, esli ne znat ni zyka ego, ni strany, osobenno, esli strana predstavlets francuzu tako arhaiqno i stranno , kak Rossi 40-h godov. […] [Morua] ne dostaet tolko polnogo ponimani togo, qto, dae ne analiziru, owuwaet kady russki : to osobo prelesti, smexanno s qistoto , melanholie i nenost, kotorym my daem nazvanie ‘Turgenevskie.’ No to po met tolko russki qitatel. Dl drugih kniga ostanets lix prekrasnym obrazom kritiki […]” (qtd. in Rubins 2012: 380. There are likely almost insurmountable difficulties to assess a writer properly, if one does not know their language, nor their country, especially if the country

178

M.-L. CENEDESE

8.

9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

appears to the Frenchman so archaic and strange as the Russia of the 1940s must have. […] [Maurois] does not achieve a complete understanding of something that, without analysing it, every Russian feels: that special charm, mixed with purity, melancholy and tenderness, which we call “Turgenevian”. But this can only be grasped by the Russian reader. For the rest, the book will remain just a wonderful exemplar of criticism). An ethnographic, political and literary notion, the myth of the “Russian soul” believes in the influence of nature on national character. According to this principle, the harsh Russian climate and its vast and varied landscape are the cause, for instance, of Russians’ melancholia and their extreme and conflicting behaviours, between realism and mysticism (De Grève 1995: 120–122). In literature, its roots can be found in Michelet’s work and in the French reception of Dostoevsky, seen as incarnating Russian national character (Kershaw 2010: 76–77). This idea was also popularized by Melchior de Vogüé in his Le roman russe (1886). Indeed, Némirovsky said she was used to writing “[…] l’apparence physique et la biographie complète de tous les personnages, même les moins importants” (F. Léfèvre, “Une révélation : une heure avec Irène Némirovsky,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 11 January 1930 [NMR 11.1]. The physical appearance and the complete biography of all the characters, even the least important ones). Elsewhere she confirmed: “[…] ce que je fais avant d’écrire un roman, je travaille dans la masse, je sors un à un mes personnages dont j’écris toute la vie, leur physique, leur éducation, ce que seraient leurs réactions en présence d’événements étrangers au livre lui-même. Je couvre ainsi des pages et des pages, je vis avec eux” (M-J Viel, “Comment travaille une romancière,” NMR 11.1. “Well, it’s exactly what I do before writing a novel, I work in a broad sweep, gradually I bring out my characters and I describe their lives, their physical attributes, their education, what their reactions would be confronted with events that are outside the book itself. In this way, I cover pages and pages, I live with them” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 420n36]). “Tourguéniev agissait toujours ainsi. Il écrivait non seulement la biographie de ses héros principaux, mais celle des personnages secondaires de son œuvre et c’est cela, à mon sens, qui les rend tellement vivants” (F. Léfèvre, op. cit. [NMR 11.1]. Turgenev always worked like that. He would write the biographies of the heroes as well as those of the secondary characters of his works, and that is, to my mind, what makes them so alive). Cf. Kershaw (2010: 50). Cf. also Stemberger (2006: 292–293). Edited by L. D. Frenkel, with notes and forward by M. Kritchevsky. Unless otherwise stated, translations from Russian are my own. Many thanks to Alexander Gruzenberg for his help and advice.

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

179

15. A brief note in ALM 3000.7 also reports the unsuccessfulness of the performance: “Qaka provalilas 17-ogo okt. 1896 g” (The Seagull was a failure on 17 October 1896). McMillin notes the parallel with the “famous flop of Rakhmaninov’s First Symphony on 13 March 1897” and how this “has drawn the attention of many memoirists, comparing the reactions of the two to such a blow to their confidence, when Rakhmaninov abandoned composing completely and Chekhov gave up playwriting” (McMillin 2004: 7). 16. See Chapter 2, p. 51n8 for references. 17. Indeed, Némirovsky confirms this in an interview from 1940: “Tout cela [French and Russian form and style] est tellement amalgamé à ce qui demeure en moi de ma race et de mon pays, qu’avec la meilleure volonté du monde, il m’est impossible de distinguer où finit l’un, où commence l’autre” (All of this [French and Russian form and style] is so mixed up with what remains of my race and my country within me, that even with the best intentions in the world, it would be impossible to distinguish where one ends, and where the other begins). In “Les Conrads français: Irène Némirovsky,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 30 March 1940 (NMR 11.1). 18. IMEC, NMR 1.5–1.9: NMR 1.5—Chapters 1 to 8; NMR 1.6—Chapters 9 to 15; NMR 1.7—Chapters 16 to 21; NMR 1.8—Chapters 22 to 27; NMR 1.9—Chapters 28 to epilogue. 19. Strikethrough shows Némirovsky’s editing in the original manuscript. 20. Némirovsky uses the pre-revolutionary Russian spelling; all Russian words are here transliterated using the current, post-revolutionary spelling: for instance, to Némirovsky’s hlb (khl’b’’ ) corresponds present-day hleb (khleb). 21. A. Maurois, “La Vie de Franz Liszt, par Guy de Pourtalès,” Nouvelles Revues française 154 (1926), pp. 104–105. 22. André Maurois, “David Golder d’Irène Némirovsky,” Le Spectacle des lettres. Excerpt without date. 23. Cf. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Six Authors in Pursuit of the Searchers,” Screen 17:1 (1976), pp. 26–33; extract printed in John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship: A Reader (London: Psychology Press, 1981), pp. 221–223. 24. Cf. above, p. 169. 25. Cf. IMEC, ALM 3000.7/8/9 for more details on the sources Némirovsky used. 26. Némirovsky’s biographers remind us that Némirovsky had toyed with the title Autobiographie romancée à la Dickens for Le Vin de solitude (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2009: 299). 27. Stemberger refers to this same passage as emblematic of Némirovsky’s stylization of Russianess in the most clichéd sense of the word, that is,

180

M.-L. CENEDESE

“simple”, “barbaric” and not refined enough in comparison to his Western colleagues (Stemberger 2006: 292). 28. For more details about Némirovsky’s reflexive mode of writing, see Chapter 9. Stemberger also remarks that La Vie de Tchekhov is not only about the biographical subject but also about the biographer herself, and therefore it is as much relevant for learning about Chekhov as it is for learning about Némirovsky (Stemberger 2006: 153).

References Berberova, Nina. 1987. Tchaïkovski. Paris: Actes Sud. Bergson, Henri. 1907/2012. L’évolution créatrice/L’evoluzione creatrice. Trans. Marinella Acerra. Milano: BUR. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. “L’illusion biographique.” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 62/63: 69–72. De Grève, Paul. 1995. “Problèmes specifiques de la réception de la littérature russe en France.” Revista de Filologìa Francesa 7: 115–128. Epstein, Denise. 2014. Survivre et vivre. Paris: Folio. Forest, Philippe. 2015. Aragon. Paris: Gallimard. IMEC, GRS 315 DG—Dossier de presse David Golder. IMEC, NMR 1.5 à 1.9—Manuscrit de La Vie de Tchekhov. IMEC, NMR 2.1 à 2.14—Manuscrit de Suite française. IMEC, NMR 7.2—Procès de Riom, notes pour Les Feux de l’automne, 1941. IMEC, NMR 7.3—Notes pour le projet « La Vie amoureuse de Pouchkine, » sans date. IMEC, NMR 11.1—Dossier réuni par Elisabeth Gille et Denise Epstein. IMEC, NMR 11. (4–6)—Dossier critique 1929–96: Dossier de presse concernant Irène Némirovsky. IMEC, 78NMR 16—Critique NMR. La Vie de Tchekhov. IMEC, ALM 262.15—« Irène Némirovsky, réédition ». Dossier de presse. IMEC, ALM 3000.2—Nouvelles 1940. Projets. IMEC, ALM 3000.7—Carnet pour Tchekhov. IMEC, ALM 3000.8—Notes de lecture pour La Vie de Tchekhov. IMEC, ALM 3000.9—Transcription de lettres d’Anton Tchekhov à A. S. Souvorine. IMEC, PLH 173.19—Némirovsky, Irène à Paulhan, Jean. Jablonka, Ivan. 2018. History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Jefferson, Ann. 2007. Biography and the Question of Literature in France. Oxford: Oxford UP.

8

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV : A ROMANCED BIOGRAPHY

181

Kershaw, Angela. 2010. Before Auschwitz: Irène Némirovsky and the Cultural Landscape of Inter-War France. New York and London: Routledge. Lienhardt, Patrick and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2009. La Vie d’Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus. McMillin, Arnold. 2004. “Russian Music in and Around Chekhov.” ASEES 18:(1–2), 1–16. Némirovsky, Irène. 2008. La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey. 1976/1981. “Six Authors in Pursuit of the Searchers.” Screen 17:1, 26–33. In John Caughie (ed.), Theories of Authorship: A Reader. London: Psychology Press, 221–223. Pachmuss, Temira. 1990. D.S. Merezhkovsky in Exile: The Master of the Genre of Biographie Romancée. New York: Lang. Philipponnat, Olivier. 2011. “Notice à La Vie de Tchekhov.” In Irène Némirovsky. Œuvres complètes, tome II. Introduction, présentation et annotations des textes par Olivier Philipponnat. Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 703–705. Pollock, Griselda. 2018. Charlotte Salomon and the Theatre of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale UP. Rubins, Maria. 2012. “Figures de l’émigré dans les écrits d’Irène Némirovsky.” In Charlotte Kraus and Tatjana Victoroff (eds.), Figures de l’émigre russe en France au XIXe et XXe siècle: Fiction et réalité. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 377– 392. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Triolet, Elsa. 1954. L’histoire d’Anton Tchekhov: sa vie, son œuvre. Paris: Éditeurs Français Réunis. Yourcenar, Marguerite. 1958/1981. Mémoires d’Hadrien. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2000. Memoirs of Hadrian. Trans. Grace Frick. London: Penguin.

CHAPTER 9

La Vie de Tchekhov in the Twenty-First Century

At the end of the previous chapter I pointed out that one of the possible results of a strong authorship is the author’s emotional participation, activated through identification with the biographical subject; such identification comes in the form of self-reflexivity, where past and present continually interlace in the effort to apprehend the here and now (that is, oneself and the present moment). At the time of writing Chekhov’s biography, Némirovsky was in a precarious situation as a stateless Jew in Occupied France. Up until then she had firmly believed in her complete assimilation into French society, in the honesty, kindness and fairness of French people, but the current situation raised concerns that she expressed in her journals and which then also filtered through her work.1 Although the majority of Némirovsky’s meditations on the actions and responsibilities of individuals, their repercussions within communities, and the role played by history in the making and unmaking of these relationships are mostly present in Suite française and the late short stories,

This chapter was written during a research period in the project “Identity Work: Narrative Agency, Metanarrativity and Bibliotherapy” (PI Hanna Meretoja) which is part of the consortium “Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory” (2018–2022), funded by the Academy of Finland (project number 314769). © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_9

183

184

M.-L. CENEDESE

in La Vie de Tchekhov we can also find, in essence, similar reflections.2 Here, instead of being woven within the narrative and vocalized by the characters through their utterances, actions, behaviours and thoughts (as it is the case in Suite française), such meditations take the form of essay-style considerations that, at an attentive analysis, prove to be quite revelatory of Némirovsky’s subjectivity. The presence of these reflections confirms Stemberger’s argument that, in a sense, Némirovsky’s biography of Chekhov is quintessentially autobiographical (Stemberger 2006: 153). Indeed, biographer Philippe Forest suggests that “[q]uel que soit le héros qu’elle choisit, il n’est pas de biographie qui ne donne également à lire, dans ses marges et entre ses lignes, l’autobiographie de celui qui en fut l’auteur” (Forest 2015: 14. No matter the chosen hero, there is no biography that does not also reveal, within its margins and between its lines, the autobiography of its author). Reflecting on the (self-)reflexive aspects of La Vie de Tchekhov is very interesting for two reasons, which structure this chapter and allow us to bring Némirovsky in dialogue with present-day literary production. The chapter’s first section will show how Némirovsky’s thorough study of Chekhov’s context (historical, cultural and social), and an understanding of his work within this context, enabled her to engage with the present, to recognize similarities, to think about past and present as a continuum rather than as separate entities, and to reflect on the role of the writer and the writer’s engagement. The second section of the chapter will bring us to the present day. Although written and first published in the 1940s, La Vie de Tchekhov appeared again in 2008 after Némirovsky’s “rediscovery” and so it joined the recent renaissance of fictionalized (auto)biographies and present-day explorations of the genre, which involve a major metanarrative dimension.3 Thus, testing the extent of what the method of creative influence can reveal, this chapter considers yet another creative way to address the legacy of Russian literature on Némirovsky. My contention is that we may see Némirovsky’s turn towards selfreflexive modes of writing as an effect of her intense research on Chekhov. Following in his footsteps, she started to embed wilful self-reflexive and memory practices into her texts in a much more intentional way than she previously had. This praxis is particularly relevant to presentday (auto)biographical writing, which forms the context of La Vie de Chekhov’s reception and also of Némirovsky’s pattern of (creative) influence and reception—of which Chekhov is an important link. Indeed,

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

185

Chekhov is “one of the first authors […] who saw the desire for autobiographical self-reflection as a form of life inherent to the modern condition” and “one of the narrative and dramatic artists who explored what they viewed as the continuum of a river, a stream of consciousness and practices of remembrance in which memories are inseparably fused with their interpretation in languages and larger ideas of self and identity” (Brockmeier 2015: 98–99). As anticipated in the Introduction, Part III explores the influence of Chekhov on Némirovsky from a different perspective and through a different genre. With the previous chapter on La Vie de Tchekhov we addressed (similarly to Chapter 2) the process of writing, what materials were used, and how the book engaged with the practice of biographical writing at the time of production. And now this chapter looks at the work within the context of major reception (the decade 2008–2018), which, quite significantly, is marked by a renewed interest in the biographical genre. In this way, the study brings Némirovsky into dialogue with contemporary forms of life writing and foregrounds the metanarrative aspects of La Vie de Tchekhov.

Self-Reflexivity and Engagement As already mentioned above, in La Vie de Tchekhov Némirovsky was able to carve a space in which she started to reflect on the interlacing of past and present, and where she incorporated, within the linear evolution of the historical narrative, contextual elements of Chekhov’s life from a simultaneously sociological, cultural and political perspective. In her overview of Némirovsky’s Russian-related work, Maria Rubins argues that, alongside the narration of Chekhov’s life, Némirovsky seeks to understand the genesis of the revolutionary events of the twentieth century that were going to change the lives of her generation (Rubins 2012: 381). For instance, in Chapter 14 of La Vie de Tchekhov,4 Némirovsky puts on hold the unfolding narration of Chekhov’s life and, in what seems like a desire to make clearer for the French reader the social and political stage on which Chekhov moved, she reflects on the events, actors and circumstances that led to the revolutionary movements and the implosion of Russian society.5 In the chapter, Némirovsky swiftly brings up the detrimental role of the intelligentsia which, having initially idealized the moujik (peasant)6 as “un prophète, un saint” (a prophet, a saint), became disappointed when, following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, “[il] s’était révélé une brute ignorante, aussi capable de cruauté et de

186

M.-L. CENEDESE

lâcheté que ses maîtres” ([he] turned out to be an ignorant brute, capable of as much cruelty and cowardice as his masters), who did not aspire to social mobility but was content to remain “misérable comme par le passé” (as miserable as in the past) (VT: 77).7 In these pages Némirovsky attempts to understand (and explain) the causes of the quickening erosion of the pre-revolutionary order: she finds faults in the practice of censorship and repression of the last two decades of the century; she accuses corrupt politics (and politicians); she points out the widespread indifference to other people’s misery; and in particular she blames the gullible intelligentsia, oblivious to the (disappointing) muzhiki and the working class.8 Némirovsky laments the absence of forward-thinking initiative by the affluent class when she declares: “À distance, et maintenant que nous savons ce que cachaient les années à venir, comme elle paraît pathétique, cette tristesse, cette apathie de la classe privilégiée, alors qu’elle était promise à la plus terrible fin !” (VT 78. In hindsight, and now that we know what was to come, how pathetic this sadness seems, this apathy of the privileged class, when in fact it was destined to a most terrible ending!) This is where we, as readers, stop and wonder: may we read this sentence, in hindsight, as a reference and accusation to her own absence of forwardthinking (and that of other French intellectuals), when nationalist and anti-Semitic movements were taking hold of Europe in the 1930s? Shall we read more behind the “classe privilégiée […] promise à la plus terrible fin,” and glean from this interjection a lament against French Jews like herself,9 who did not act against discrimination, who stayed mostly silent in their belief of being righteous citizens like others, only to realize too late the extent of what was happening to them (and, for that matter, to all Jews around Europe)? Such self-reflexive reading of La Vie de Tchekhov becomes even more plausible if we consider another passage, where Némirovsky draws an audacious parallel between “les hommes des années 80,” the people living in the Russian Empire in the 1880s, and the people of contemporary Europe, even though she acknowledges herself the substantial differences between the two periods (“[o]n ne peut imaginer une époque plus différente de la notre que celle-là” [VT: 79. It would be difficult to imagine a period more in contrast to our own]). Yet, she continues, in a moving assessment that conveys all the discouragement of someone who has experienced the upheavals of history and sees more ahead:

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

187

Ces gens nous semblent heureux. Ils ne savaient rien des maux dont nous souffrons. Ils souhaitaient la liberté. Ils n’ont pas connu la tyrannie qui pèse sur nous. Lorsqu’on les imagine, dans leurs vastes demeures, ne connaissant, en fait de guerres, que celle de Turquie, très loin, sur les confins de l’Empire, que des troubles agraires ou des grèves, au lieu de nos révolutions, combien nous les envions ! (79) The people of those days seem happy to us. They knew nothing of our current sufferings. They were fighting for freedom. They did not know the tyranny weighing on us. When we imagine them, in their large houses, having experienced only the Turkish war, very far away at the borders of the Empire, or some agricultural troubles and strikes, instead of our revolutions, how do we envy them!

However emphatic in her condemnation of the present misery, Némirovsky is not interested in quick judgements or in declaring a winner in a competition for the most miserable of peoples. The adverb that starts the following sentence—“pourtant” (however)—is indicative of how she was already turned towards a more sensitive and ethically nuanced appraisal of the past, in the attempt to reveal similarities with which one might connect: Pourtant, ils étaient malheureux, sincèrement et profondément, plus malheureux que nous, peut-être, car ils ignoraient ce qui les faisait souffrir. Le mal régnait, alors comme maintenant ; il n’avait pas pris, comme aujourd’hui, des formes d’Apocalypse, mais l’esprit de violence, de lâcheté et de corruption était partout. De même qu’à présent, le monde était divisé en bourreaux aveugles et en victimes résignées, mais tout était mesquin, étriqué, pénétré de médiocrité. (VT: 79. Emphasis added) However, they were unhappy, sincerely and deeply, perhaps more unhappy than we are, because they did not know what made them suffer. Evil reigned, then as now; it had not taken apocalyptic forms as it does today, but the spirit of violence, cowardice and corruption was everywhere. Just as it is at the moment, the world was divided into blind torturers and resigned victims, but everything was mean, petty, and steeped in mediocrity. (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 305)

Her allusion to the divide between perpetrators and victims, neither of whom has complete agency—the torturers are blind as much as the

188

M.-L. CENEDESE

victims are resigned—strikes us for its uncanny poignancy (at the time of writing as well as in the present moment). Némirovsky’s “now” (“maintenant”) is artfully left vague: is she talking about contemporary Stalinist Soviet Union? Or about France? Or, more broadly, about totalitarian Europe—Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, the colonial empires, the rise of nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiments, and the incipient war? Is she comparing the two Russias—the one she was born in and the new one she escaped—or is she reflecting on the European situation as a whole? While Rubins alludes to “Western Europe” (Rubins 2012: 381), biographers Lienhardt and Philipponnat hesitate to give a face to “le mal [qui] régnait” and wonder whether Némirovsky was referring to either Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia (“the swastika or the hammer and sickle” [Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 305]).10 In agreement with Rubins, I would argue that Némirovsky is not thinking of either Germany or the Soviet Union, but rather of “Western Europe” tout court.11 Nonetheless, it is without a doubt that at the moment of writing Chekhov’s biography Némirovsky found herself in a precarious personal situation that may have urged her to reflect on the connections between the past and the present, as well as initiating a thoughtful apprehension of the roles played by people and groups, and the ethics of such interlacing. How does the past explain the present and how do peoples’ thoughts and behaviours contribute to it?—she seems to be asking. Furthermore, in the process of writing a writer’s biography, she is compelled to consider the role of literature and, in particular, the role of the writer in giving voice to the spirit of a society, as well as in critically engaging with it.12 In her evocation, the writer seems to embody the figure of the messiah, alongside the storyteller of the present condition: “On attendait l’écrivain qui parlerait de cette médiocrité sans colère, sans dégoût, mais avec la pitié qu’elle méritait” (VT: 79. They were waiting for the writer who would talk about this mediocrity without anger, without disgust, yet with the pity it deserved). The close of the chapter affirms that literature is not only an aesthetic product, and therefore the writer is not to be seen simply as the creator of a literature of entertainment sans substance. On the contrary, the writer may offer a way of looking at the world; they may propose a different way of being in the world; or they may initiate an ideology (e.g. think of Tolstoy and his social-religious doctrine, Tolstoyism). Némirovsky writes:

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

189

La littérature avait, alors, un grand pouvoir sur les âmes. Ce public oisif, cultivé, fin, ce qu’il recherchait, ce n’était pas une distraction brillante, ni une pure satisfaction esthétique, mais une doctrine. Au meilleur sens du terme, l’écrivain russe était un maître. […] on l’interrogeait anxieusement : “Que devons-nous être ?” Et tous s’efforçaient de répondre à leur manière. (VT: 79–80) At the time, literature held great power over minds. This idle, cultured, and refined public was neither looking for a brilliant distraction, nor for pure aesthetic satisfaction. Rather, they were looking for a doctrine. In the best sense of the word, the Russian writer was a master. […] we anxiously questioned him: “What should we be?” And all of them tried to answer in their own way.

Némirovsky refers to a past (“avait, alors”) and a precise entity (“l’écrivain russe”); however, behind the specific references it is possible to infer a generalized questioning about literature and the responsibility of the writer. First of all, this passage is part of a chapter in which the narration of Chekhov’s life has been paused and which reads like a condensed essay on Russian society in the nineteenth century and the place of the writer within it. Secondly, having been herself the storyteller of the Eastern European emigration for most of her career, oftentimes condemned for her unflattering descriptions of wealthy Jews, and having been an acute critic of the interwar generation, we can suspect that, with the imminent war and the revival of widespread xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments, Némirovsky must have gone back to reflect on the role she might have played through her novels. The self-reflexivity implicit in the text, written in a passionate yet lucid tone, conjures the following questions: did she contribute to the current xenophobic and anti-Semitic sentiments? If the answer is yes, then, how do writers influence readers’ opinions? How can literature advance and combat certain stereotypes and/or antagonistic thinking? How do novels help or hinder a biased (even politicized) sense-making of the world that surrounds us? Should she have been more careful? The questions we read between the lines of La Vie de Tchekhov suggest that we might read the biography as a metanarrative text in which we can find, in an embryonic form, Némirovsky’s sense-making reflections, or else, what we may call a “cautious engagement.” Indeed, later on in the biography Némirovsky returns to the public role played by writers: “[e]n Russie c’était quelque chose de plus grand encore qu’ils recherchaient : cette sorte de vérité qui fut également le rêve suprême de Tolstoï,

190

M.-L. CENEDESE

de Tchekhov, des plus grands—une vérité à la fois éthique, sociale, artistique, presque une religion” (VT: 163. In Russia they were looking for something even bigger still: that kind of truth that was also the supreme dream of Tolstoy, Chekhov, of the greatest—an ethical, social, artistic truth, almost a religion). Némirovsky concedes that Russian writers (and artists in general) were not simply at the service of their art, their trade, their public; the authority they are associated with was due to the moral and ethical aspects that their work was expected to convey. The passages above show how, behind the historical narrative, Némirovsky is also scrutinizing the role that writers are ascribed to by society and hence reflecting on her own position as a well-known writer in 1930s France. If writers are expected (in Russia and elsewhere) to be lighthouses for the “truth,” or less presumptuously, to have a moral duty towards fellow citizens, how to reconcile the general expectations with their personal quests and beliefs? What is exactly the function of the writer and of their fiction? If we foreground the personal questioning of certain passages from La Vie de Tchekhov, we are compelled to advance the hypothesis that, at the time, Némirovsky was reflecting on fiction as offering the possibility (or potentiality) for personal commitment—political and ethical. In the period immediately after World War II the question of the écrivain engagé rose to the heart of French letters. Although the idea that a writer would engage with their political, social and intellectual present was not a new one—think of Zola’s “J’accuse” (L’Aurore, 1898)—after the experience of the war littérature engagée became prominent, most famously theorized and exemplified by Jean-Paul Sartre. The notions of “engaged literature” and “engaged writer” did not emerge in a vacuum after the war: the formulation of engagement originally appeared in the 1930s in the journal Esprit and in the context of the antifascist battle led by the writers of the Popular Front.13 In the essay Qu’est-ce que la littérature? (What is Literature?), published in Les temps libres in 1947, Sartre affirmed that words are actions and therefore to speak up and to write, or to stay silent, do have an impact; the writer has the responsibility to denounce the social and political problems of their times: to write is to be politically engaged. And to make littérature engagée after the Occupation, therefore, means to “to take action” (agir) by using words as guns (“les mots […] sont des ‘pistolets chargés’. S’il parle, il tire” [Sartre 1948: 31]. “Words […] are ‘loaded pistols’. If he speaks, he fires” [Sartre 2001: 15]) or, as he most famously said, by turning the

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

191

pen into a sword (in Les Mots, his autobiography, Sartre famously wrote that for a long time he mistook his pen for a sword). But before the war, and in particular before the horrors of the “concentrationary universe”14 became widely known, a foreign writer whose luminous trajectory had been halted (once more, may we add), and who had kept away from expressing any political sympathies, was still distant from the fully fledged activist vigour emphasized by Sartre: that is why it might be more apt to call Némirovsky’s kind of engagement “cautious”—a burgeoning awakening that, had she lived, could have led to the consciousness that “the novelist always discloses certain aspects of the world from a particular ethically and politically charged perspective” (Meretoja 2014: 228). As seen above, the role of the writer within society is a topic that Némirovsky approached initially in La Vie de Tchekhov, and that she continued to explore much more closely in Suite française—as the writer of a work that dissected society in a moment of historical upheaval and where she included a controversial writer-figure (Gabriel Corte) and a future writer (Jean-Marie Michaud).15 Némirovsky’s self-reflexive questioning, the “cautious engagement” that comes forth in her late work, although different from the kind that Sartre preconizes,16 shows her turn to writing as a sense-making and ethical practice. Such self-reflexive and ethical engagement brings us to present-day (auto)biographical writing and metanarrative literature.

Contemporary Romanced Biographies: Cultural Memory and Narrative Hermeneutics Over the past decade the literary sphere has seen a renewed interest in the biographical genre, in particular in the type of biography that we called romancée, or romanced, and the evolution of which we explored within the early twentieth-century French context in Chapter 8.17 Successful examples of recent romanced biographies abound, both in France and abroad. For instance, there is Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (2006. The Kindly Ones ), winner of the Goncourt prize and the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, a historical novel narrated as a fictional autobiography by former SS officer Maximilian Aue, and which has caused much controversy since the time of its publication for its “ethically questionable attempt” to give voice to and invite identification with a Nazi perpetrator (Meretoja 2018: 218).18 In 2011, winner of

192

M.-L. CENEDESE

the Renaudot prize was Emmanuel Carrère’s novel Limonov, “a knowingly inaccurate biography” (Barnes 2014) of Russian poet and politician Eduard Limonov (a real-life controversial figure on account of his political views, including the cult of Stalin, and his sexism and misogyny). In Aragon (2015), a biography of French author Louis Aragon, biographer Philippe Forest engages from the onset with the inescapable fictionality of his work: “La vraisemblance d’une telle anecdote, si j’y réfléchis, me paraît très douteuse aujourd’hui. […] J’ai dû plutôt rêver cette scène. Comme l’on rêve toujours sa vie. Ou bien celle des autres. C’est la même chose” (Forest 2015: 14. The verisimilitude of such an anecdote, when I think about it, seems quite doubtful today. […] I must have dreamt this scene. Just like we dream our lives. Or other people’s lives. It’s the same thing). In 2016 the winner of the Médicis prize was the novel Laëtitia, ou, La fin des hommes , where historian Ivan Jablonka retraces the life of a young woman kidnapped and murdered in 2011. Jablonka had already published Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus (2012. A History of the Grandparents I Never Had), an essay-biography subtitled “une enquête” (an investigation) that retraced the life of his grandparents—Polish Jews exiled in France who were deported and died at Auschwitz—in which he attempted to “produce a work of social science in a form partaking of investigation, testimony, biography, autobiography, narrative, and literature all at once: the book does history by implementing a line of reasoning, and performs literary creation in making the text live” (Jablonka 2018: 236). Outside of France, in Italy for instance, Elena Ferrante’s acclaimed series The Neapolitan Novels (2011–2014) is a fictional autobiography that engages with how identity and agency must negotiate with dominant cultural narratives; Helena Janaczek’s fictional biography of Gerda Taro, La ragazza con la Leica (2017. The Girl with the Leica), won the 2018 Premio Strega and Premio Bagutta and was among the finalists of the Premio Campiello. On the whole, these recent biographies romancées bear witness to the current fascination with a genre that in France, as we have seen, underwent its most important evolution at the beginning of the twentieth century, at a time in which Némirovsky was taking her first steps into the literary world and then consolidating her place within it. Almost a century later, this genre is undergoing a renewed theoretical and creative scrutiny. Although Irène Némirovsky wrote la Vie de Tchekhov between 1939 and 1941, thanks to the post-Suite française rediscovery of her oeuvre, the biography’s 2008 re-release joins the recent passion for fictionalized

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

193

biographies and takes Némirovsky’s text out of its context of production and brings it into dialogue with literary works written at the beginning of the twenty-first century. A work that, as Chapter 8 demonstrated, met with the debate about the literary legitimacy of biography in the 1920s and 1930s, La Vie de Tchekhov can also sit comfortably in the current literary panorama and fit with the metanarrative quality of present-day (auto)biographical writing. In this final section of the book I ask: how does Némirovsky’s work compare to these recent biographies? How does it stand the passing of time? And what insights may that provide about Némirovsky and her work? As I pointed out earlier, the self-reflexive quality of La Vie de Tchekhov, though not expansive, indicates the act performed by Némirovsky of “writing herself into” the text of Chekhov’s life, working through history, memory and the writer’s potential for engagement, whereby “[c]eux qui sont morts sont morts, et il leur est bien égal qu’on leur rende hommage. Mais c’est pour nous, les vivants, que cela signifie quelque chose. La mémoire n’est d’aucune utilité à ceux qu’elle honore, mais elle sert celui qui s’en sert. Avec elle je me construis, et avec elle je me console” (Binet 2009: 244. “The dead are dead, and it makes no difference to them whether I pay homage to their deeds. But for us, the living, it does mean something. Memory is of no use to the remembered, only to those who remember. We build ourselves with memory and console ourselves with memory” [Binet 2013: 150]). I would like to suggest that this operation brings Némirovsky’s text close to twenty-first-century biographies. Although the form is anchored to the standards of the context of production, where the “strong authorship” is still mostly submitted to a required detachment and where the author’s “I” never comes forward to interrogate her practice or motivation, the reflexive passages of La Vie de Tchekhov make visible Némirovsky’s interest in the act of narrating as a hermeneutic practice with an ethical potential. I am well aware that, at the time of writing, Némirovsky did not have “hermeneutic” or “ethical” agendas in mind. However, looking at it as part of the evolution of Némirovsky as a novelist, it is possible to see in La Vie de Tchekhov an attempt to approach the ways in which narratives can boost our capacity for sense-making through their “empathetic perspective-taking” and their ethical engagement (Meretoja 2018: 3). In this sense, the current considerations bring us back to this book’s Introduction and the convergence we hypothesized between creative influence as a method that connects with Nussbaum’s “narrative imagination” and “empathetic imagining” (2010) and henceforth to the question of the

194

M.-L. CENEDESE

“ethics of influence.” Némirovsky’s reflexivity in La Vie de Tchekhov is embedded in her own experience of Chekhov’s literary work and of her historical present: first as a reader who exercised her “ethical sensitivity” and “moral discrimination” (Hawthorn and Lothe 2013: 6); and then as the writer who becomes the “moral agent” who “stimulates our imagination” with stories that “enlarge and complicate—and therefore improve—our sympathies” and “educate our capacity for moral judgment” (Sontag 2007: 213). Writing about Chekhov, Némirovsky is not only giving homage to one of her favourite writers, but she is also doing “memory work,” which is an ethical meaning-making practice in itself. Indeed, memory is a productive lens to explore the entirety of Némirovsky’s oeuvre, and it would probably deserve an entire book on its own. Here, however, I would like to single out two related points of interest that come up when considering Némirovsky from the perspective of cultural memory studies. The first is the multidirectionality (Rothberg 2009) of Némirovsky’s memory work, by which I mean that she is at the same time making sense of the past from the horizon of the present as well as making sense of the present from the horizon of the past,19 as demonstrated above, while forgoing both hierarchical and competitive applications. Secondly, cultural memory emphasizes the productivity of memory as a “form of work, working through, labor, or action” (Rothberg 2009: 4) that connects the past, the present and the future. The examples cited in the first part of this chapter make evident Némirovsky’s performing of such “labor,” or “working through,” as she allows different historical memories to interact in a “productive, intercultural dynamic” (3) in which writing about the past becomes a means to engage with the present and to consider the role of the writer and of herself as one. In conclusion, we can analyse La Vie de Tchekhov from the point of view of cultural memory and detect its metanarrative potential. We can also read it as Némirovsky’s ante litteram attempt at narrative hermeneutics—an “interpretative practice that makes someone’s experiences in a particular situation intelligible by drawing meaningful connections between them” and that “explore[s] narratives as an activity of organizing experiences that has bearing on our sense of who we are and who we could be” (Meretoja 2018: 7). This allows us to make an epistemological connection with contemporary biographical writing and, in this way, we are able to grasp the full force of Némirovsky’s production, to wonder what it could have become, and so to regret more acutely her untimely death.

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

195

Notes 1. On Némirovsky’s late disillusionment with “assimilation” see also Chapter 6, pp. 120–127. 2. For a discussion of the interlacing of history, individuals and communities, see Chapter 2, pp. 44–51. 3. When I use the terms “metanarrative” (and “metanarrativity”) I mean the quality of storytelling practices and texts to be self-reflexive about their own form; about cultural processes of narrative sense-making; and about the roles that narratives play in our lives (in shaping intersubjectivity and narrative agency). Cf. Meretoja 2014: 3; 2018: 24. 4. A shorter version of this chapter was originally published in May 1940 as a self-sustaining piece in Les Œuvres libres: La Jeunesse de Tchekhov, “Variété historique inédite,” Les Œuvres libres, no. 226, May 1940 (Lienhardt and Philipponnat 2010: 433n40). 5. We should not forget that Némirovsky and her family hid for a time in Moscow shortly after the Revolution and had to escape in disguise after a price was put on her father’s head. The family escaped St. Petersburg (Petrograd) and reached Finland in 1918. See Lienhardt and Philipponnat (2010: 67 and 70–81) for an account of the exile years in Finland and Sweden until June 1919, when Irène arrived in France. 6. About Némirovsky’s use of Russian words and their translation, see Stemberger (2006: 292–293; 2013: 65–71). 7. Elsewhere Némirovsky writes: “Il [Tchekhov] voyait bien que l’intelligenzia se trompait. Les moujiks russes n’étaient pas des saints. […] Mais, dans l’ensemble, quelle dureté, quelle bestialité, quelle vie féroce et misérable ! Des êtres humains qu’un long esclavage avait rendus semblables à des bêtes et dont la filiation divine apparaissait par éclairs, d’une manière émouvante et saisissante […]” (VT: 148–149. He [Chekhov] saw very well that the intelligentsia was wrong. Russian muzhiks were not saints. […] But on the whole, what a harsh, what a brutal, what a ferocious and miserable life! Human beings that a long slavery had turned into animals, whose divine filiation appeared in moving and striking flashes). 8. Rubins remarks that Némirovsky’s considerations echo the thoughts of writer Ivan Bunin and certain philosophers of the Russian emigration (Rubins 2012: 381). 9. By “like herself” I mean an “assimilated, secular Jew,” as Némirovsky considered herself to be until it was too late. 10. It is my assumption that Némirovsky was targeting both totalitarian regimes. A note from the archives might, if not answer the question, at least give us an inside look at Némirovsky’s attitudes towards communism and national-socialism: “[…] restent donc en présence deux formes

196

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

M.-L. CENEDESE

de socialisme. Ne m’enchantent ni l’un ni l’autre mais there are facts ! Un d’eux me rejette, donc … le second … mais ceci est hors de la question” (IMEC, NMR 2.1. In English in the original. “Therefore left with two types of socialism. Neither of them appeals to me but there are the facts ! One of them rejects me, therefore … the other … But that is out of the question” [SF: 361]). I would like to remind here that this citation is preceded by the following, which makes clear on which side stood Némirovsky as early as 1940: “Mon parti : régime bourgeois représenté par Angleterre, malheureusement fichu, demande du moins à être renouvelé car au fond il est immuable dans son essence ; mais il ne se reprendra sans doute qu’après ma mort” (“My option: England’s style of government by the middle classes, unfortunately impossible, at least wishes to be revived, for in the end its essence is immutable; but it definitely will not happen until after I die” [SF: 361]). We should not forget that Némirovsky was a comparatist, émigré and cosmopolitan writer and that, despite her wealthy social status (first as the daughter of a rich banker, then as a famous writer), she had lived through temporary deprivations, had been a refugee and was a stateless person until her death). Furthermore, when she cites the revolutions that contemporary mankind has had to endure, as well as the adjacent wars, we must read that as including both the newly started war, World War I, the 1917 revolution and the ensuing civil war (1918–1922) that Némirovsky witnessed first-hand as a teenager. Stemberger also mentions Némirovsky’s explicit thematizing and, to some extent, theorizing of “the act of writing” in La Vie de Tchekhov (Stemberger 2006: 155–156). Paul-Louis Landsberg introduced the section “La pensée engagée” in the journal Esprit in 1936; Jean Guéhenno spoke at the “Congrès pour la défense de la culture” that took place in Paris on 21 June 1935. See Denis 2005: 31–42 (n1). The term “concentrationary universe” comes from David Rousset’s L’Univers concentrationnaire (1946). For a full exploration of this concept, see Pollock and Silverman 2013, 2015: 1–43. Cf. Chapter 3, pp. 62–64 and Chapter 4, p. 85 and pp. 88–89. Némirovsky must have read Chekhov’s letter to Suvorin where he writes that “[i]t is not the duty of writers to accuse, not to prosecute, but to champion even the guilty once they have been condemned and are enduring punishments … Great writers and artist ought to take part in politics only so far as they have to protect themselves from politics. There are plenty of accusers, prosecutors and gendarmes without them” (qtd. in McMillin 2004: 12–13). Cf. Chapter 8, “Birth and Evolution of the Genre,” pp. 166–171.

9

LA VIE DE TCHEKHOV IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

197

18. For excellent analyses of this novel see, for example, Suleiman (2012) and Meretoja 2018: 217–254. 19. I am intentionally using the word “horizon” to make a semantic connection with reception aesthetics, i.e. Jauss 1982 (cf. Introduction, “Influence, Intertextuality, Readers and Writers” [pp. 6–11]).

References Barnes, Julian. 2014. “Julian Barnes on Limonov by Emmanuel Carrère Review—Portrait of a Political Punk.” The Guardian (24 October 2014). https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/24/julian-barneslimonov-emmanuel-carrere-punk. Binet, Laurent. 2009. HHhH . Paris: Le Livre de Poche. ———. 2013. HHhH . London: Vintage. Brockmeier, Jens. 2015. Beyond the Archive: Memory, Narrative, and the Autobiographical Process. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Carrère, Emmanuel. 2011. Limonov. Paris: P.O.L. Denis, Benoît. 2005. “Engagement littéraire et morale de la littérature.” In L’engagement littéraire: (Cahiers du Groupe ϕ). Rennes: presses universitaires de Rennes [online]. Ferrante, Elena. 2011. L’amica geniale. Rome: E/O. ———. 2012. Storia del nuovo cognome. Rome: E/O. ———. 2013. Storia di chi fugge e di chi resta. Rome: E/O. ———. 2014. Storia della bambina perduta. Rome: E/O. Forest, Philippe. 2015. Aragon. Paris: Gallimard. Howthorn, Jeremy and Jakob Lothe. 2013. “Introduction: The Ethical (Re)Turn.” In Jakob Lothe and Hawthorn Jeremy (eds.), Narrative Ethics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1–10. IMEC, NMR 2.1—Suite française, 1940–42. Jablonka, Ivan. 2012. Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2016. Laëtitia ou la fin des hommes. Paris: Seuil. ———. 2018. History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences. Trans. Nathan Bracher. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Janaczek, Helena. 2017. La ragazza con la Leica. Milan: Guanda. Lienhardt, Patrick and Philipponnat, Olivier. 2010. The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903–1942. Trans. Euan Cameron. London: Chatto & Windus. Littell, Jonathan. 2006. Les Bienveillantes. Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2010. The Kindly Ones. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. London: Vintage. McMillin, Arnold. 2004. “Russian Music In and Around Chekhov.” ASEES 18:1–2, 1–16.

198

M.-L. CENEDESE

Meretoja, Hanna. 2014. The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2018. The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford: Oxford UP. Némirovsky, Irène. 2008. La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2014. Suite Française. Trans. Sandra Smith. London: Vintage. Nussbaum, Martha. 2010. Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP. Pollock, Griselda and Max Silverman. 2013. Concentrationary Memories: Totalitarian Terror and Cultural Resistance. New York and London: I.B. Tauris. ———. 2015. Concentrationary Imaginaries: Tracing Totalitarian Terror in Popular Culture. New York and London: I.B. Tauris Rothberg, M. 2009. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP. Rousset, David. 1946. L’Univers concentrationnaire. Paris: Editions de Pavois. Rubins, Maria. 2012. “Figures de l’émigré dans les écrits d’Irène Némirovsky.” In Charlotte Kraus and Tatjana Victoroff (eds.), Figures de l’émigre russe en France au XIXe et XXe siècle: Fiction et réalité. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 377– 392. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1948. Qu’est-ce que la littérature? Paris: Gallimard. ———. 2001. What Is Literature? And Other Essays. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. London and New York: Routledge. Sontag, Susan. 2007. “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning.” In At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. London: Hamish Hamilton, 210– 231. Stemberger, Martina. 2006. Irène Némirovsky: Phantasmagorien der Fremdheit. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. ———. 2013. “« … vous appelez ça du ‘Nietchevo’ n’est-ce pas ? » Mises en scène de la langue « étrangère » chez Irène Némirovsky.” In Évelyne Enderlein and Lidiya Mihova (eds.), Écrire ailleurs au féminin dans le monde slave au XXe siècle. Paris: L’Harmattan, 55–84. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2012. “Performing a Perpetrator as Witness: Jonathan Littel’s Les Bienveillantes.” In Jakob Lothe, Susan Rubin Suleiman, and James Phelan (eds.), After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Columbus, OH: Ohio UP, 99–119.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion: A Russian Suite

The interest in Irène Némirovsky that the posthumous publication of Suite française in 2004 initially sparked has only grown stronger with the appearance of her other novels and short story collections, their adaptations, museum exhibitions and increasing scholarship. This strength testifies to the vitality of Némirovsky’s oeuvre and its unwavering relevance to contemporary readers. Through her practice, Némirovsky was able to observe her world with both passion and detachment and to portray the complexities of 1930s France. It is her intrinsic cosmopolitan perspective, her transnational literacy, her engagement with history, individual efforts and communitarian struggles that lend Némirovsky’s work its unique appeal to, and potency in, the contemporary context. In this book I have explored the relationship between Némirovsky and three masters of Russian literature: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. My hope was to narrate the story of their encounter across time and space, in ways both subjective and objective, rigorous but creative. Although she considered herself part of the French literary establishment, Némirovsky in primis was unable to detangle herself, her identity and hence her creativity, from the culture of her native land. Her stance was ambiguous, often playing with stereotypes, such as the opposition between the French “mesure, maîtrise de soi, harmonie,” and the Russian “désordre, fatalisme, mysticisme,” all the while conceding that “avec la meilleure volonté du monde, il m’est impossible de distinguer où finit l’un, où commence © The Author(s) 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3_10

199

200

M.-L. CENEDESE

l’autre” (even with the best intentions in the world, it would be impossible to distinguish where one ends, and where the other begins).1 In the 1920s and 1930s, many émigré intellectuals and artists were part of the tissue of cultural production and exchange that turned Paris into the cultural capital of the world; a significant contribution came from the Russian community, whose many members had gone into exile after the Bolshevik revolution, the subsequent civil war and the international recognition of the Soviet regime. They were “cosmopolitan bohemians,” who gravitated mainly around Montparnasse and its cafés, the reflection of a Zeitgeist but also the womb of a creative community (Rubins 2015: 3). Némirovsky’s family history is quite different from that of Montparnasse artists; nonetheless, her work is also fed and shaped by a transnational context incorporating migrant experiences, plural identities and crossings of boundaries that stimulated dialogue and suggested resistance to narrow definitions. My own approach to Némirovsky’s novels was shaped by knowledge of this cultural context and was driven by a sense that, for all her tendency towards French conventions “typical of so-called quality writing by establishment authors of the 1930s” (Suleiman 2016: 8), it was also evident that Némirovsky was inextricably connected to Russia. Do not her first novels propose Russian-themed stories, sometimes even set in Russia and where Russian-born characters lead the action forward? Was not Suite française hailed as the French War and Peace? The problem I encountered was one of method: how to show incontrovertible evidence of this profound connection? If the writing journal of Suite française provides tangible proof that War and Peace was a primary model, how to explain Némirovsky’s more Dostoevskian motifs? How to integrate La Vie de Tchekhov in a study of literary influences? The more I progressed with my research, the more I also realized that the France–Russia dichotomy and the dialogic perspective of my study were insufficient. If it was true that I was exploring the influence of these writers on Némirovsky, I was also harnessing the creative ways in which she had transformed such reception and, in order to do so, I was employing my own creative ways of reading these exchanges. It became apparent to me that the question of literary influence was not linear, but it rather called for a rhizomatic representation, since it involves more than just writers and their sources but also readers, readers-researchers and writers-researchers. Finally, I could not silence my reflections on the role of literature for society and my

10

CONCLUSION: A RUSSIAN SUITE

201

growing interest in the ethical aspects of narratives, that is, how storytelling practices influence our understanding of the world, particularly when considering a writer with a history such as that of Némirovsky. Thus this book, its methodology, and the way it is structured are the logical product of these circumstances. Creative influence became first a way to broadly define how I positioned Némirovsky in relation to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov: influence, because I was talking about a younger writer and her esteemed predecessors; creative, because this influence did not come about as verbatim imitation, but more as a “deliberate reinterpretation […] expansion or contraction […] the absorptions of motifs into new structures, and inspired misreadings or wilful failures of inheritance” (Foster 1981: 18–19, qtd. in Clark 2011: 10). Creative, also, because I, the researcher, was mediating among these writers through my own personal perspective. Finally, the term creative influence remained as a concept accounting for the multifarious directions and relationships between subjects, as well as a method that makes clear the affective and imaginative intrusions of the “I”, since “like every writer, researchers have the right to be magicians on occasions, but they must reveal the tricks of their trade” (Jablonka 2018: 255). Both as a concept and as a method, creative influence granted space for an engagement with Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov that enabled the researcher to widen the variety of genres analysed and also to enlarge the critical perspectives taken. Let me briefly revisit the three parts of this book and their specificities so that I can draw some overall conclusions. Part I looks at the interplay between Némirovsky’s Suite française and Tolstoy’s War and Peace, premised on abundant manuscript entries and led forward by the investigation of Némirovsky’s creative solutions to reach unity and coherence for the sake of her future readers. Though set differently, the three chapters foreground Némirovsky’s underlining preoccupation with form and how Tolstoy provided an input towards balancing it with the content; they demonstrate the different narrative approaches taken by their authors; and most importantly, they uncover how Némirovsky came to certain decisions that allowed her Suite française to move beyond War and Peace, so that she could craft not a pale imitation but her own novel. The relation of influence between Némirovsky and Tolstoy emerging from Part I eschews anxiety and instead shows a “meeting of artistic minds” (Le Juez 2014) that is both critical (Némirovsky mediated her reception

202

M.-L. CENEDESE

thanks to E. M. Forster) and instrumental in the writer’s creative practice. Part II takes a different approach to the question of influence, this time seeking out those “unconscious” influences for which there is no possibility of referring to direct sources. In this case, reading horizons need to expand, while the analysis becomes even more closely textual: failing the presence of direct sources but a line from Les Chiens et les loups and two other short stories, in which the characters are referred to as “having something Dostoevskian,” the analysis brings into play critical dimensions outside of Némirovsky’s horizon. Did Dostoevsky influence Némirovsky? The answer is yes, and similarities between the works of the two authors are proposed throughout the three chapters of this part by reading in pairs several novels while engaging with recent critical studies and notions advanced by theorist Julia Kristeva. By establishing a productive dialogue between concepts and interpretations, Part II shows how the search for influences is not disqualified by the lack of direct sources, but instead can be achieved through creative criticism. Finally, Part III suggests that influence can be seen in the self-reflexive dialogue engendered by a predecessor and, in turn, in the ethical engagement that such self-reflexivity affords the readers. Contrary to the previous ones, Chapters 8 and 9 do not seek to discern how Chekhov tangibly influenced Némirovsky, but rather to look into the broader effects of the act of reading and researching an influential writer: the situatedness of Némirovsky as a reader and biographer of Chekhov collide with the situatedness of the recipient of the biography sixty years later. Instead of producing dissonance, this collision brings to the fore the metanarrative quality of Némirovsky’s late work, thus additionally foregrounding its ethical relevance for contemporary readers. All in all, the last chapter of this book gestures towards new angles that open up intriguing questions about Némirovsky’s work that unfortunately fall outside of the scope of this project. Still, within their different approaches to the question of influence, the three parts are subtly connected not only by virtue of being distinct modes within one method, but also thanks to the echoes that they establish among them. For instance, while discussing the influence of Tolstoy, Chapter 3 introduces Bakhtin’s study on Dostoevsky (1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics ) and therefore anticipates the connection with the author of The Brothers Karamazov, addressed in Part II. Chapter 4, although it concentrates on the role played by music in Némirovsky’s writing, hints at Part III with its allusions to the musicality

10

CONCLUSION: A RUSSIAN SUITE

203

of Chekhov’s prose and music’s gesturing towards the issue of narrative ethics. Chapter 7, instead, suggests that the “anthropology of suffering” proper to Dostoevsky and Némirovsky could use further insights by adding an analysis of male deaths in Tolstoy. And Némirovsky’s own method of writing full biographies of her characters, whether protagonists or minor figures, while useful to understand how she worked on the biography of Chekhov, also shows the influence of another great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev.2 Thus, considered in relation to one another, the chapters of this book illustrate the depths of cultural resonance that connect Némirovsky’s French-language work to the Russian literary heritage of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. It was Susan Sontag who said that her advice to writers would be the following: “Take care to be born at a time when it was likely that you would be definitively exalted and influenced by Dostoyevsky, and Tolstoy, and Turgenev, and Chekhov” (Sontag 2007: 211). Némirovsky was lucky enough to have been born at a time when she could follow, without knowing it, such advice. In conclusion, this book has explored how this likely influence could materialize, using a method that unites influence, reception and creativity as forming an interdependent relationship that is essential to understanding not only Némirovsky’s work and creative practice, but also that of others. I hope it can suggest how, theoretically and methodologically, the study of reception and influence could be revived by comparatists in creative ways: the conclusions of this study and the process through which I came to them can offer an example of how creativity can be integrated into robust academic analysis and vice versa.

Notes 1. In “Les Conrads français: Irène Némirovsky,” Les Nouvelles littéraires, 30 March 1940 (IMEC, NMR 11.1). 2. There are many avenues for discussion that the limited scope of this project has deterred me from treading. Some were hinted at, like Turgenev’s influence, or the productivity of memory as an analytical lens, others could be read between the lines. All of these avenues for research could provide further insight into the transnational and multidisciplinary craft of Némirovsky’s work, a job I hope to have launched in this project.

204

M.-L. CENEDESE

References Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1984. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press. Clark, Heather. 2011. The Grief of Influence. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Oxford: Oxford UP. Foster, John Burt. 1981. Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism. Princeton: Princeton UP. IMEC, NMR 11.1—Dossier réuni par Elisabeth Gille et Denise Epstein. Jablonka, Ivan. 2018. History Is a Contemporary Literature: Manifesto for the Social Sciences. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP. Le Juez, Brigitte. 2014. “Creative Reception: Reviving a Comparative Method.” http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org/entry/creative-receptionreviving-comparative-method. Némirovsky, Irène. 2006. Suite française. Paris: Folio. ———. 2008a. La Vie de Tchekhov. Paris: Albin Michel. ———. 2008b. Les Chiens et les loups. Paris: Albin Michel. Rubins, Maria. 2015. Russian Montparnasse. Transnational Writing in Interwar Paris. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Sontag, Susan. 2007. “At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral Reasoning.” In At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. London: Hamish Hamilton, 210– 231. Suleiman, Susan Rubin. 2016. The Némirovsky Question. The Life, Death, and Legacy of a Jewish Writer in 20th-Century France. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Tolstoy, Leo. 2009. War And Peace. Trans. Richard Peaver and Larissa Volokhonsky. London: Vintage.

Index

A Abjection, 17, 18, 117–121, 123, 124, 127–129, 131–134, 137–139, 141, 150–152 abject space, 17, 18, 120, 123, 131, 137 see also Heterotopia; Jews,assimilation; Jews, ghetto; Kristeva, Powers of Horror Affect/affective, 2, 3, 11, 14, 20, 123, 138, 151, 201 encounter See Archive reading, 11, 20 see Abjection Agency, 18, 55, 58, 89, 143, 144, 151, 187, 192, 195 agentic potential, 55 of readers, 55 see also Suffering Ahmed, Sara, 4 Albin Michel, 12, 90, 98, 157, 158 Ambiguity See Abjection

Anthropology, 18, 139, 149, 150, 203 dostoevskian, 18, 139, 140, 145 némirovskian, 141, 142, 144, 147 see Suffering Anti-Semitis See Jews Aragon, Louis, 176, 192 Archive, 11, 12, 14–16, 19, 22, 23, 195 “archival sensibility”, 12 manuscripts, 19 see IMEC/INA/BMD/Archives nationales Archives nationales , 14 Artist agency, 18, 55 artistic apprenticeship, 7 painting/painter, 99, 101, 105 see also Dream, dreamer Assimilation, 17, 18, 122–124, 132, 159, 183, 195. See also Abjection; Jews Audiat, Pierre, 170

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 M.-L. Cenedese, Irène Nèmirovsky’s Russian Influences, Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44203-3

205

206

INDEX

Author author’s discourse, 58 authorial voice, 50, 57, 58 authorship, 20, 171, 175, 183, 193 “Death of the Author”, 8. See also Barthes, Roland; Biography

B Bach, Johann Sebastian, 16, 77, 80, 82, 83, 85 Cello Suites , 80 Französische Suiten, 80 Backshadowing, 62 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 7, 8, 16, 21, 51, 57–62, 66, 69–74, 90, 146, 152, 202 Dialogic Imagination, 57 Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics , 57, 72, 202 Barthes, Roland, 6–9, 22 “Death of the Author”, 8 “From Work to Text”, 8 Bartlett, Rosamund, 51, 90, 91 Bassnett, Susan, 9, 98 Baudelle, Yves, 58, 62, 65, 66, 69, 70 Becker-Leckrone, Megan, 6, 8, 22, 141, 151 Beethoven, Ludwig van diabelli variations , 79 5th Symphony, 40, 81, 82 6th Symphony (The Pastoral Symphony), 79 see also Forster, Edward Morgan Beginning, 13, 33, 41, 42, 47, 48, 50, 58, 61, 79, 96, 97, 105, 107, 119, 120, 142, 144, 164, 166–168, 172, 175, 192, 193 side-paths , 48, 50 Berberova, Nina, 168, 169 Tchaikovsky, 168 Bergson, Henri, 170

L’évolution créatrice, 170 Berlin, Isaiah, 45 Berlioz, Hector Symphonie fantastique, 79 Biography, 4, 9, 15, 19–21, 158, 159, 161, 166–172, 174–178, 183, 184, 188, 189, 192, 203 authorship, 171, 175 literary value, 19, 166, 167, 169, 170, 175, 177 romanced, 20, 161, 166, 171, 191 Bloch, Ernst Baal Shem, 78, 90 Bloom, Harold A Map of Misreading , 6, 21 The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, 6, 22 BMD (Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand), 14, 22, 23 BNF (Bibliothèque Nationale de France), 13, 14 Bourdieu, Pierre, 172 Brewer, Daniel, 3, 5, 7 Brockmeier, Jens, 185

C Carnival See Bakhtin, Mikhail; Dialogism Carrère, Emmanuel Limonov, 192 Castellani, Marie-Madeleine, 79, 80, 82, 87 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 117, 118, 132 Chaudier, Stéphane, 17, 97, 100, 101, 112, 150 Chekhov, Anton Ivanov, 163 The Seagull , 161–163, 179 Three Sisters , 162, 163 see Némirovsky, La Vie de Tchekhov

INDEX

Chiaromonte, Nicola, 44 Chisla, 159, 168, 169 Chopin, Frédéric, 77 Cinema cinematic vocabulary, 52 seventh art, 52 Clark Lectures, 51, 167 Class, 47, 49, 61, 68, 100, 142, 186 Comparative literature/analysis, 9, 20, 34 Content, 12, 32, 33, 35, 51, 77, 83, 175, 186, 201. See also Form Context, 7, 34, 44, 47, 100, 172, 190, 191, 193, 199, 200 historical, 10, 44, 161, 184, 185 of production, 9, 10, 14, 19, 193 of reception, 10, 14, 177, 184, 185 Conversion Tolstoy’s, 31 Creative/creativity action, 2, 3 approach, 5 encounter, 4, 12 impetus, 3 interpretation, 6 meeting, 3 minds, 90, 201 practice, 11, 15, 20, 33, 35, 72, 202, 203 process, 12, 15, 19, 22, 32, 55, 83, 170, 175 production, 2 response, 3, 36 solution, 33, 201 see Influence

D Davis, Natalie Zemon, 12 Death murder, 18, 144, 145, 149 of the author See Barthes, Roland

207

suicide, 18, 142, 144, 145, 149 see also Suffering Decembrists See Tolstoy, War and Peace Délas, Dominique, 79, 80, 82, 87 Depression See Kristeva, Black Sun; Suffering Diabelli, 79 variations, 79 see Beethoven, Ludwig van Dialogism, 7, 8, 16, 51, 57, 59, 60, 71, 74 double-voiced discourse, 57 see Bakhtin, Mikhail; Polyphony Dibb, Saul, 13 Discourse, 8, 47, 57–61, 65, 66, 69, 70 indirect free, 50, 124, 174 Donadille, Christian, 51 Dostoevsky, Feodor dostoevskian, 17, 18, 57, 58, 77, 95, 100, 101, 111, 112, 119, 133, 139, 150, 202 The Double, 106 Notes from Underground, 102, 105, 110, 111, 140 The Possessed, 118, 145 White Nights , 17, 102, 105, 110, 111 Double See Freud, Sigmund; Rank, Otto Dream artist, 105 dreamer, 17, 102, 104, 105, 110–112, 150 see Reality Underground-Dreamer, 103 Duvivier, Julien, 13

E Élan vital See Bergson, Henri

208

INDEX

Emerson, Caryl, 60, 70–72, 152 Emotions, 108, 111, 120, 174, 175 emotional response, 2 physical, 111 see also Affect/affective Empathy, 95, 177 imaginative, 175 Encounter abject encounter See Abjection affective See Archive creative, 4, 12 Engagement See Sartre, Jean-Paul; Writer, écrivain-engagé Epstein, Denise, 164, 165 Epstein, Michel, 73, 163, 165, 166 Erwartungshorizont See Jauss, Hans Robert Esménard, Robert, 98 Ethics, 31, 203 ethical potential, 20, 193 of literature, 5, 20 see Influence, ethics of Expansion See Forster, Edward Morgan Experience aesthetic, 9 creative, 167, 169, 170, 176 horizon of, 9 sense-making, 10. See also Bergson, Henri

F Farge, Arlette, 12 Ferrante, Elena Neapolitan Novels , 192 Feuer, Kathryn B., 34, 41 Flaubert, Gustave, 2, 3, 34, 65 Forces françaises libres (FFL), 88 Foreign/foreigner, 34, 59, 100, 121, 124–126, 159, 172, 191 “étranger”, 95, 99, 101, 113, 126

see also Jews; Russia Forest, Philippe, 176, 184, 192 Aragon, 192 Forgiveness anthropology of, 18 see also Kristeva, Black Sun; Suffering Form, 4, 15, 16, 20, 32, 33, 35, 38, 41, 44, 77, 79, 82, 83, 87, 89, 140, 149, 183–185, 189, 192, 193, 201. See also Content Forster, Edward Morgan, 15, 32, 40, 42, 51, 81, 82, 202 Aspects of the Novel , 15, 32, 36, 39, 51, 73, 81 expansion, 15, 39–43 “Pattern and Rhythm”, 39, 81 Foucault, Michel, 12, 18, 120, 131, 132 see also Heterotopia Franck, César Symphony in D minor, 77 Freedom, 4, 10, 14, 31, 40, 45, 142, 143, 149, 173, 176, 187. See also Death; Gender Freud, Sigmund, 137 “The Uncanny”, 106

G Gender femininity, 17, 109 -less creature, 110 performance, 163 power structures, 17 roles, 7, 144, 188 sexuality, 17, 109 stereotypes, 17, 110 Gide, André, 118, 138, 151 Dostoïevsky, Articles et causeries , 118 Ginzburg, Leone, 118 Guéhenno, Jean, 196

INDEX

H Haraway, Donna, 4 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 5, 194 Hermeneutic, 3, 10, 11, 100, 170, 193 narrative hermeneutic, 20, 191, 194 Heteroglossia See Bakhtin, Mikhail; Dialogism Heterotopia abject space, 18 “heterotopology”, 131 see also Abjection; Foucault, Michel, 18 Hidalgo, Anne, 23 History and communities, 15, 44, 45, 87, 183 and fiction, 34, 46, 176 and individuals, 15, 44, 45, 51, 87, 195, 199 Tolstoy’s philosophy of, 45 Holmes, Diana, 47, 52 Horizon of expectations See Erwartungshorizont Hybridization See Dialogism

I Identification See Reflexive/reflexivity Identity, 22, 34, 45, 99, 101, 106, 109, 113, 118, 120–122, 124, 132, 134, 159, 169, 185, 192, 199. See also Jews, Jewish identity Imagination, 2, 3, 5, 10, 36, 56, 103–106, 138, 168, 169, 173 “empathetic imagining”, 193 “imaginative activity”, 5 narrative imagination, 5, 193 IMEC (Institut Mémoires de l’Édition Contemporaine), 12, 13, 21, 96, 157, 158, 161, 171, 177, 179, 196, 203

209

INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel ), 14, 22, 52 Influence anxiety of, 32, 101 creative, 3–7, 9, 11, 14, 16, 19, 98, 119, 139, 184, 193, 201 ethics of, 6, 194 poetic, 6, 21 unconscious, 14 Intertextuality, 4, 6–9, 21 intertextual connections, 9 see Barthes, Roland; Kristeva, Julia Interwar, 1, 15, 19, 29, 166, 167, 176, 189 Paris, 3 Irony, 16, 50, 61, 62, 66, 69, 70, 100, 101 Iser, Wolfgang, 10 The Implied Reader, 10 Issy l’Évêque, 13

J Jablonka, Ivan, 4, 10, 21, 176, 192, 201 Histoire des grands-parents que je n’ai pas eus , 4, 192 History is a Contemporary Literature: A Manifesto for the Social Sciences , 4 Laëtitia, ou la fin des hommes , 192 James, Henry, 34 Janaczek, Helena, 192 Jauss, Hans Robert, 9–11, 100, 197 Toward a Theory of Aesthetic Reception, 10 Jefferson, Ann, 166–168, 170, 174, 175 Jews assimilation, 17 ghetto See Abjection Jewish identity, 132, 134

210

INDEX

Jewish question, 13 pogrom, 18 Yiddish, 99 K Kaakinen, Kaisa, 11 Kershaw, Angela, 9, 14, 22, 23, 32–35, 51, 61, 62, 70, 98, 100, 106, 112, 142, 151, 159, 160, 178 Kristeva, Julia Black Sun. Depression and Melancholia, 18, 137, 138, 141, 142 Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , 21 Powers of Horror. Essay on Abjection, 117, 132, 137, 141 Tales of Love, 18, 141 “Word, Dialogue, and Novel”, 8 L Landsberg, Paul-Louis, 196 Laporte, Stéphane, 13 Léfèvre, Frédéric, 178 Le Juez, Brigitte, 2, 3, 5, 9, 15, 21, 201 Lemoine, Virginie, 13 Lienhardt, Patrick, 14, 19–23, 29, 42, 51, 52, 77–79, 81, 88, 98, 157, 161, 175, 177–179, 187, 188, 195 Lifar, Serge, 177 Limonov, Eduard See Carrère, Emmanuel Littell, Jonathan Les Bienveillantes , 191 Li, Xiaofan Amy, 18, 134 Lloyd, Christopher, 39 Lothe, Jakob, 5, 194

Love See Kristeva, Tales of Love; Suffering Love, Jeff, 45 Lussone, Maria Teresa, 19

M Maurois, André Ariel ou la vie de Shelley, 167 Aspects de la biographie, 167, 170 Tourguénev, 159, 168, 177 Melancholia See Depression Memory, 12, 20, 88, 97, 105, 124, 129, 132, 176, 184, 193, 194 multidirectional See Rothberg, Michael Mérande, Denise See Némirovsky, Irène Metanarrative/metanarrativity, 19, 20, 184, 185, 189, 191, 193–195, 202 Monologism, 7, 21, 51, 60, 61, 69, 71 monologic discourse, 8 monologic novel, 74 see Bakhtin, Mikhail Mosaic See Intertextuality Moujik/mouzhik, 185 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 77, 85 Music and literature, 40 as external structure, 79–83 as internal structure, 83–89 choir, 83, 84, 87 easy and difficult, 40, 81 “Pattern and Rhythm”, 39, 81 rhythm, 40, 81, 82, 87 solo instruments, 83, 87 sonata form, 16 symphony, 40. See also Forster, “Pattern and Rhythm”

INDEX

N Name See Biography; Bourdieu, Pierre; Pollock, Griselda Némirovsky, Irène Major works David Golder, 13, 132, 161 Dimanche et autres nouvelles , 13 L’Affaire Courilof; Le Bal , 96 L’Enfant génial , 13 L’Ennemie, 13 La Proie, 98, 142, 147, 149, 151 La Vie de Tchekhov, 13, 19, 20, 30, 31, 157, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 170, 171, 173, 176, 177, 184–186, 189–194, 200 Le Pion sur l’échiquier, 98, 133, 143, 145 Le Vin de solitude, 32, 77, 78, 88, 176 Les Biens de ce monde, 13 Les Chiens et les loups , 1, 13, 17, 98, 101, 102, 106, 107, 110, 111, 113, 119, 123, 202 Les Feux de l’automne, 13, 161 Suite française, 1, 13, 15, 16, 30, 32, 33, 36, 39, 42, 43, 47, 49–51, 55, 56, 58, 60–62, 69, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82, 83, 86–89, 97, 160, 161, 183, 191, 192, 199, 201 Scenarios “La Comédie bourgeoise”, 53 “La Symphonie de Paris”, 53 Short Stories “Espoirs”, 23, 112 “Film parlé”, 53

211

“Fraternité”, 17, 98, 113, 120, 124, 129, 131, 132 “Ida”, 23, 112, 133 “La Confidente”, 133 “La Niania”, 13 “Le Spectateur”, 133 Nerey/Neyret, Pierre See Némirovsky, Irène Nozière, Fernand, 13 Nussbaum, Martha, 5, 193 Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities , 5, 26, 196 O Oppositions, 16, 80, 81 opposing drives See Abjection see Music Other/otherness, 120, 132 space of See Abjection, abject space P Pachmuss, Temira, 167, 173, 175 Parody, 62, 69, 70 Paulhan, Jean, 157 Philipponnat, Olivier, 14, 16, 19–23, 29, 35, 42, 51, 52, 77–79, 81–84, 86–88, 90, 91, 98, 124, 134, 157, 161, 175, 177–179, 187, 188, 195 Pogrom See Jews Point of view, 11, 16, 32, 46, 55–58, 61, 68, 152, 160, 194 monologic, 58 variable, 50, 56, 58 Pollock, Griselda, 172 Polyphony polyphonic novel, 16, 56–60, 70, 74, 77 see Bakhtin, Mikhail; Dialogism “Positional thinking”, 5

212

INDEX

Proust, Marcel, 95–97, 118 À la recherché du temps perdu, 40, 82 La Prisonnière, 95 R Rank, Otto The Double: A Psychoanalytical Study, 106 Rayfield, Donald, 90 Reader act of reading, 5, 10, 202 reading, 6 reading in pairs, 112, 202 reading public, 11 situated, 6, 10, 202 Reality, 45, 60, 63, 64, 66, 69, 86, 102–105 and dreams, 17, 18, 104–106 Reception aesthetics of, 4, 11 context of, 10, 14, 177, 185 creative, 2, 3, 9, 14, 16, 49 “oblique”, 17, 97, 150 Reflexive/reflexivity, 78. See also Jablonka, Ivan:History is a Contemporary Literature mode, 4, 176, 180 self-, 20, 32, 51, 146, 175, 183–186, 189, 191, 193, 195, 202 Repulsion See Assimilation Researcher, 3–6, 12, 14, 15, 58, 98, 112, 139, 176, 200, 201 writer-researcher, 3, 200 Rhythm difficult/whole, 40, 81 easy, 40, 81 see Forster, Edward Morgan; Music Rothberg, Michael, 194 Rubins, Maria, 46, 159, 177, 185, 188, 195, 200

Russia emigration, 20, 159, 168, 195 émigré literature, 1, 97, 168 language, 34 literature, 2, 6, 15, 20, 34, 95, 184, 199 “mode russe”, 97, 100, 160 revolution, 185 Russian masters, 3, 15 “russian soul”, 19, 158, 160 Soviet Union, 188

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 190, 191 Qu’est-ce que la littérature?, 190 Satire, 16, 61, 62, 64, 69, 70 Sensitivity ethical, 5, 194 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 90 Shukman, Ann, 59, 60 Sorbonne, 14, 15, 34, 164 Stemberger, Martina, 21, 100, 108, 109, 112, 113, 121, 133, 134, 142, 178–180, 184, 195, 196 Strauss, Richard Alpensinfonie, 79 Structure, 7, 16, 17, 33, 34, 38, 39, 58, 69, 70, 79, 80, 88, 89, 102, 167, 184 musical, 78 of Suite française, 33, 36 Subject, 3, 4, 6, 18, 20, 45, 77, 81, 117, 120, 122, 123, 131, 133, 138, 141, 144, 160, 173, 177, 183, 201 subject formation, 117, 137 see also Abjection Suffering anthropology of, 18, 137–150 see Kristeva, Black Sun

INDEX

Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 4, 10, 11, 22, 106, 109, 111, 113, 141, 151, 197, 200 Suvorin, Aleksey, 161–164 letters, 163 T Tamboukou, Maria, 12 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 90, 169 Thiele, Wilhelm, 13 Tolstoy, Leo Anna Karenina, 30, 60 Death of Ivan Ilyich, 29, 96, 146 “Three Deaths”, 59 War and Peace, 15, 30, 32, 33, 41, 61, 70, 72, 97, 201 Transposition See Intertextuality Triolet, Elsa, 169, 172, 173 L’Histoire d’Anton Tchekhov: sa vie, son œuvre, 172 Turgenev, Ivan, 34, 159, 203 Bibliothèque Tourguéniev (library), 177 U Underground, 81, 102

213

-Dreamer See Dream Man, 17, 102, 107, 140, 150 see also Dostoevsky, Man from Underground Unity, 11, 15, 16, 33–36, 38, 40, 57, 58, 69–72, 81–83, 88, 201 of Suite française, 70, 87 of War and Peace, 15, 35 W Wallen, Jeffrey, 11, 12, 14, 22, 23 World War II collaboration, 50, 56 exodus, 56, 89 maquisard, 56 occupation, 56, 89, 90 Vichy regime, 16, 62 Writer écrivain-engagé, 20 responsibility of, 189 role of, 20 writer-researcher, 3, 200 Z Zola, Émile “J’accuse”, 190