How to Be an Ethical Russophile
He’s a memoirist, not a polemicist—“I prefer to rely on my experience, ” he has said —but he has an abiding interest in how individuals come to believe grand narratives and insulate themselves from truth.
Key points
- Later that year, the American writer Elizabeth Gilbert announced that she’d asked her publisher to pull her forthcoming novel—a historical drama set in Siberia with no apparent relevance to the current conflict—after hearing from aggrieved readers in Ukraine.
- Carrère is best known in France for his lancing, digressive nonfiction, which often takes on controversial subjects: the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, the lives of outlaws, his own experiences with bipolar disorder.
- Carrère’s portraits of these unrepentantly bourgeois people are lively and tinged with affection—they’re Tolstoyan, in that way—but as he recounts their ordeals, he’s struck by their apparent myopia.
This time around, he’s focused more narrowly on Hélène and her maternal relatives, whose life stories, pieced together with the help of family records collected by his father, an avid Russophile, make up the heft of the book.
Additional details
- In May 2023, the free-speech nonprofit PEN America seemed to be swayed by this argument, abruptly canceling a festival panel of Russian dissident writers after protests from Ukrainian attendees.
- In May, Cannes awarded one of its top prizes to a Russian director whose anti-war film has been criticized by Ukrainians for going too easy on President Vladimir Putin.
- Kolkhoz —published in France last year and newly translated into English by the discerning John Lambert—picks up on some of the threads of that family drama.
- Insurgents had been agitating against them for decades, and yet they “hadn’t seen anything coming”; the revolution arrived as a sucker punch.….
- Ask someone to name a few Russian novels, and they might rattle off the greatest hits: Anna Karenina, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov.
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