Emmanuel Carrère traces the extraordinary family history behind Kolkhoz

Emmanuel Carrère’s new memoir, Kolkhoz, brings together a family saga that reaches from stateless poverty in Paris to the Académie Française, with stops in Georgia, Russia and wartime France along the way. The 400-page book, translated into English by John Lambert, is both a tribute to Carrère’s parents, Hélène and Louis, and an attempt to set down the history that shaped them.

The memoir opens from a moment of public mourning. When Hélène died in 2023 at the age of 94, President Macron spoke at her memorial, where 200 people gathered at Les Invalides in Paris. She had served as “perpetual secretary” of the Académie Française, effectively its head, and her death brought official recognition of a life that had moved from obscurity to the centre of French cultural life. Louis, Carrère’s father, was also present, in a wheelchair and only partly aware of what was happening around him.

A family shaped by displacement

Carrère traces Hélène’s background to a difficult childhood in Paris. She was the daughter of Georges Zourabichvili, whose parents had fled Georgia in 1921, and Nathalie von Pelken, who had six governesses as a child, one for each day except Sunday. That contrast between aristocratic memory and material hardship runs through the family story. The memoir recalls a “fallen Russian aristocracy” in the background, but the circumstances were still harsh, especially after Georges disappeared in 1944 and was killed by partisans on suspicion of Nazi collaboration. Hélène was 15 and tried unsuccessfully to shield her younger brother Nicolas from the truth.

Her response was one of determination and ambition. She briefly considered acting, but found her vocation in Russian history. Carrère also recounts the striking episode in which an Afghan pilot on a flight from Tashkent to Paris via Tehran invited her to the cockpit, then landed in Kabul in an attempt to abduct her. She remained there for four days before US aid workers helped her leave on a private plane.

By then, she was married to Louis, who worked for an insurance company and was often away on business. At home she dominated family life, creating the “kolkhoz” arrangement that gives the memoir its title: the children slept around her bed, there was no television or radio, and reading was compulsory. Carrère describes being pushed from adventure fiction and classic novels to Dostoevsky by the age of 13, while also writing his mother long, anguished letters whenever she travelled.

Marriage, silence and rupture

The memoir also confronts the tensions inside the marriage. Carrère says he felt abandoned when Hélène began receiving calls from a “Mr N” and speaking to him in long, secret conversations. Louis was devastated and threatened suicide. Hélène ended the affair in order to spare him, but the marriage never recovered. Louis moved out of the couple’s bed and into a small room, and Hélène largely stopped speaking to him, a silence that lasted to the end of her life. When she was later diagnosed with cancer and moved to palliative care, she told him only that she would be away at a conference.

Carrère presents Kolkhoz as a work of homage, but also as an act of repair. The relationship between mother and son remained close until he published A Russian Novel, a book that explored the story of her father, Georges, despite her opposition. She had told him not to write it, insisting that Georges’s story was hers. The publication caused what he describes as a family catastrophe, and she blamed Nicolas for helping bring it about. Although she eventually forgave him, the disagreement left a lasting mark.

Russia, politics and inheritance

The memoir also shows how family loyalties extended into politics. Hélène remained sympathetic to Russia, and a week before the invasion of Ukraine she described Vladimir Putin as a rational man committed to good relations with Europe. Carrère was deeply unsettled by that view and travelled to Georgia and then Ukraine, while continuing to oppose Putin strongly.

Part of the book’s force comes from the way Carrère presents himself alongside his parents rather than apart from them. Hélène appears as a formidable intellectual and administrator, while he writes as someone who has lived with drink, journalism, failed relationships, a third marriage that brought happiness, and bipolar disorder. He also draws on family papers, including his father’s genealogical research and his uncle Nicolas’s memoirs, to fill in gaps in the story.

The result is a memoir that moves between grandeur and intimacy. Hélène is remembered as a woman who helped complete the latest Académie Française dictionary after a 40-year effort, down to the word zygomatique. Carrère notes, however, that the work had not truly reached the end; the dictionary was still back at zoo, with dozens of words remaining, the last of them zz, an onomatopoeic entry for sleep. That combination of exactitude, family tension and historical reach gives Kolkhoz its distinctive shape: a personal account that also reads like a portrait of a European century.