Emmanuel Carrère Untangles His Russian Roots
The New Yorker · Madeleine Wulfahrt ·
Madeleine Wulfahrt reviews the French writer Emmanuel Carrère’s latest book, “Kolkhoz,” a conflicted family story that intertwines with Russian history.
Why did Carrère wait so long to visit? He asks himself this very question toward the end of his latest book, “Kolkhoz,” a conflicted family history that won the 2025 Prix Médicis. His mother, whose father was the son of a prominent Georgian intellectual and whose own mother was the daughter of a Russian aristocrat, never went at all—she had a fraught relationship with the success of Zourabichvili, whom she treated with “condescending affection.” One would be forgiven for assuming that, as a friend of his joked, Carrère had waited to visit the country until a member of his family was running it. But Carrère’s explanation, characteristically self-effacing, is as shamefully self-interested as it is startlingly frank. “I am my mother’s son, I felt Russian like her, not in the least Georgian,” he writes, “but it’s become so awful to be Russian today that I’m searching for other roots.”
In the course of the past decade or so, there has been a flurry of memoirs and autofictional novels by émigré writers and their descendants, grappling with the challenging inheritance of Russia’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries—the suffering, and the guilt. On the more poised side is Maria Stepanova’s “In Memory of Memory”; on the more beguilingly chaotic is Keith Gessen’s “A Terrible Country.” “Kolkhoz”—along with Evan Gershkovich’s prison memoir, “This Cursed Beautiful Land,” also out this fall—is the most prominent such book to have been published since the beginning of Russia’s war on Ukraine. It is also the most virtuosically, infuriatingly honest.
Carrère, who broke out with his 2000 work of literary true crime “The Adversary,” is one of the most confounding figures in French letters. Written from the surreal intersection of narcissism, self-absolution, and investigative journalism, his books purport to be “about” subjects of general interest—yoga, the iconoclastic Russian writer Eduard Limonov, a perplexing murder spree on the Swiss border—but are, without fail, about himself. More often than not, they are also about his marriages and the extramarital affairs that end them. But, somehow, Carrère never entirely alienates his readers. There’s something refreshing about his frank insistence on his shortcomings, and the way that he manages to neither glorify nor vilify them.
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