In our family histories we all have ghosts, but few of us go in search of them and even fewer of us write about them. The French author Emmanuel Carrère discovered how devastating that search can be with his book My Life as a Russian Novel (2007). For two years he and his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, an eminent historian of Russia and the steely secretary of the Académie Française, didn’t speak. Hélène’s aggrieved response to the publication of her son’s inquiry into the suspected status of her father, Georges Zurabishvili, as a collaborator of the Nazis during the second world war, shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Carrère understood perfectly well that he was betraying his mother’s trust and admitted as much in one of the book’s closing chapters: ‘My mother has forbidden me to write about my grandfather.’
Emmanuel Carrère’s obsession with the truth borders on a form of fanaticism
In the end, France’s high-profile mother-son duo smoothed things over. But we were left wanting. Carrère’s justification for the decision to publicly expose the family secret was scattered like crumbs, insubstantial and fleeting, throughout My Life. The cosmic force that appeared to make the writing of that book inevitable – ‘sooner or later, one way or another, I will have to defy her to do what I must do’ – felt somewhat contrived, even melodramatic. Kolkhoz, Carrère’s latest book, alleviates those suspicions. Set in the aftermath of his mother’s death, it is ostensibly a family history that spans four generations. But, at its core, it is the biography of a formidable woman, written by her grieving son.
