Une mère russe (Les Cahiers Rouges) (French Edition)

Most will be diverting. The brave woman who confided her disappointment to Le Figaro was that humble creature, the common reader. We wish her well in her quest, and assure her that her observations have been noted. The road to Auschwitz. A novel saved from the flames. Last autumn, some novels were published in France for the start of the new literary season.

Most will exhaust their average three months of shelf life and vanish before finding a public. It was duly awarded a major literary prize, the Prix Renaudot, though not the Goncourt, which by tradition is reserved for living writers. She was born in Kiev in into an upwardly mobile middle-class Ukrainian family.

In , in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, the family fled to Finland, where they remained for a year before moving to Sweden, and thence to France, in She took a degree in French Literature at the Sorbonne and in began selling short stories to magazines and periodicals.

It was translated into English and German and the rights were bought by Julien Duvivier who turned it into a film. In the decade that followed, she published a new title every year or so and her work drew admiring notices from novelists as different as Joseph Kessel, who was Jewish, and Robert Brasillach, an anti-Semite. For many, salvation is achieved through renunciation of the crass materialism so valued by the rest of the world. Her cosmopolitanism was not the raffish and escapist kind popularized by Paul Morand and Maurice Dekobra. What drew readers into her fictional world was her human warmth, her emotional intensity and self-effacing manner.

These were traits she greatly admired in Chekhov, whose biography she wrote in It is an elegy on the life, work and early death of a modest, unassuming, good man and a writer of acute, understated sensibility. Her writing method was drawn from the traditions of French realism. A first draft laid out the bare bones of the narrative which enabled her to know her characters, for whom she compiled full dossiers on their past, personality, appearance and education. This approach she learned from.

It was a conversion prompted almost wholly by the deteriorating international situation. She and Michel stayed in Paris but visited them regularly.

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A new novel appeared in and her Chekhov book and another novel were completed but not published. A second law in June made them liable for deportation. They moved to Issy but made no attempt to flee the country. Slowly the net closed. Michel made frantic efforts to discover her fate, but he in turn was arrested in November and sent to Auschwitz where he was gassed on arrival. Their two girls were saved by the village schoolmistress who smuggled them to Bordeaux, where they hid in cellars and survived the war. In their hurry to flee, they took the notebook that had seemed so important to their mother.

Parisians fled the capital by train, car and lorry and, when the stations closed and the petrol ran out, on foot. Madame will take the children to safety in the Midi.

We meet Gabriel Corte, popular novelist and successful playwright, who is accompanied by his mistress and driven by his chauffeur, and Charles Langelet, a wealthy aesthete who rates beauty higher than people and worries less about the fate of France than about his collection of antique china.

But Corbin, the banker, like his mistress, Arlette, who has a heart like a bag of knuckles, does well. Abusing his position, he bullies the Michauds, a conscientious, middle-aged couple who work for him. They have a son, Jean-Marie, at the Front.

They are the only decent people in sight. They had grown tired of the Republic, she notes, as a man tires of a spouse, and had flirted with dictatorship. But they had wanted only to deceive their wife, not kill her, and now she was dead and they had lost their freedom. Langelet is killed by a car driven by Arlette, who is set to have a good war, as will Corbin, who sacks the Michauds and leaves them to face an uncertain future and their worries about Jean-Marie.

Few, and certainly not the well-to-do, emerge with any credit. There is also a distinct sound of scores being settled with the smug bankers and the complacent bourgeois who include the publishers who dropped her and her kind. We follow the interwoven fortunes of a smaller and largely fresh cast of characters who illustrate a natural history of collaboration: But others react differently. It takes the villagers three months to move from defeat and occupation to full-blown collaboration and the beginnings of Resistance.

What would have happened next is hinted at in the brief notes which are set out in an appendix to this volume. But the exact shape of the narrative would have to wait on events. Lucile is determined to be free. The completed five-segment sequence was to have the rhythm of a Beethoven symphony or perhaps a film. How this would have worked is now impossible to assess. It has great delicacy of feeling, marvellously varied humour, a lyrical appreciation of nature, and a style which ranges from the slyly ironic to the Proustian period. Many admirable autobiographies and novels about that dark time have appeared since But they all start with the knowledge of how it all ended.

After the Liberation, they travelled to Nice, where their grandmother had spent the war in some comfort. She refused to see them. Through the door she told them that since they were orphans they had best take themselves off to an orphanage. It is recorded, however, that she died in one of the more comfortable quartiers of Paris in at the age of Denise Epstein n'est pas une victime. J'ai fait cadeau de mes cailloux. Ils attendent la fin de l'orage.

Un officier allemand fait comprendre qu'il faut fuir. Le manuscrit part chez un notaire. A 20 ans, Denise essaie de vivre: Elle lit beaucoup, s'occupe de ses trois enfants, milite. 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 I were on a raft, my legs rucked under me!

My friends the bumblebees, delightful insects, seem pleased with themselves and their buzzing is profound and grave. I like low, serious tones on voices and in nature In a moment or so I will try to find the hidden lake. This was to be a novel written in five sections, dealing with France under German occupation. The book, she thought, would be a thousand pages long: She intended to revise, noting that the death of one character was perhaps schmaltzy, and that she found "in general, not enough simplicity".

This search for simplicity reflects Mansfield's own longing to purge her work of effective little writerly tricks. Her model for this large-scale novel set in wartime was Tolstoy's War and Peace, which she knew intimately.

Paris dans les années 30 : Sur Serge Efron et quelques agents du NKVD

Their departure is absurd, and it is observed with cool, merciless comedy. Her portrait of French society in the tumult of war and occupation is not judgmental, but it is devastating. The Michauds, clerks who belong neither to the bourgeoisie nor to the working class, are almost alone in their kindness, their gentle, practical goodness and their realism about human suffering.

This couple resembles the wise innocents so cherished by both Tolstoy and Dostoevky, who become touchstones for those around them without making the slightest claims to moral grandeur. But her work does not repudiate her Russian identity: The influence of Turgenev and Chekhov is also apparent. Her descriptions of the French rural landscape have the blend of realism and poetic tenderness that Turgenev perfected in Sketches From a Hunter's Album. Like Chekhov, she observes and powerfully expresses the detail that fixes a scene, whether interior or exterior. For example, when the injured soldier Jean-Marie Michaud is sheltered by a farming family in a remote hamlet, a girl puts a bunch of cherries next to him on the pillow.

Jean-Marie is delirious and has returned to a childlike state as he slips in and out of consciousness. But all the time he's aware of the cherries. From her notes, it's clear that she knew her new work was of a different order. Work on it tirelessly. She was taken first to Pithiviers concentration camp, and from there was deported to Auschwitz, where she died on August 17 Her husband, Michael Epstein, had begged for her release but was also arrested and sent to the gas chamber immediately after he arrived at Auschwitz on November 6.

Her children escaped death only because of the dedication of their carers. She kept her mother's leather-bound notebook with her each time she and her younger sister were moved from one place of safety to another. Almost 60 years later, Denise read the notebook and discovered that it contained not a diary, as she had always supposed, but a novel.

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The history of the manuscript, and its survival, is remarkable enough. The authority of the novel, though, does not come from its history, but from its quality. Incomplete as it is, lacking the revision that its author undoubtedly wished to give it, the narrative is eloquent and glowing with life.

Its tone reflects a deep understanding of human behaviour under pressure and a hard-won, often ironic composure in the face of violation. She created characters who would coexist comfortably with these violations, such as the author Corte, a man of letters whose preciousness about his own creativity is matched only by his mean-spiritedness.

Some are stunned, while others already jockey for position in the new order. A few prepare themselves to resist. But nothing is abstract; everything is made present, whether it's the cherries on the pillow, the privileged little dinner that Corte secures for himself and which is then snatched away by a hungry man, or the sound of music drifting over a lake at evening while young German soldiers celebrate.

Their dreams of peace vanish; fantasies of a bargain between conquerors and conquered cannot survive. Helen Dunmore's House of Orphans is published by Penguin. More on the English translation, here. Il ne restera pas pierre sur pierre de la monstrueuse machination stalinienne.

Ils sont partisans d'un renouveau religieux et de l'autarcie. Le rayonnement de cette tendance provenait de la collaboration d'intellectuels et d'aristocrates connus: Sviatopolk Mirsky, Pierre Souvtchinsky, etc. Savitsky de Prague tente de renouveler l'organisation. Le pays des soviets. Plus loin, Tchistoganoff fait part de son sentiment:.

Elle accepte, en pensant qu'il s'agirait d'effectuer des traductions, etc. On ne le retrouvera jamais plus! Pozniakoff fait louer un appartement au nom de Ducomet pour Dimitri Smirensky, au 28 rue Lacretelle Marc Zborowski, d'origine russe, souhaitait retourner dans son pays natal. Mais quelques jours plus tard, il devait mourir En effet, celui-ci cultive de bien curieuses relations.

Tout ceci n'est qu'une simple supposition de ma part. Serge Efron, le mari de Marina Tsvetaeva. Quant aux membres de l'Union pour le rapatriement, elle affirme ne. Concernant l'assassinat de Reiss, elle fait remarquer: Parmi ceux-ci je puis citer deux noms: Aucun des membres de la bande ne connaissait son adresse ou son nom de famille. Les assassins du NKVD pourront donc poursuivre leurs basses besognes. On retrouvera son tronc dans la Seine Surnom de Pierre Ducomet voir Ducomet 2.

Photographe, avant son recrutement par le NKVD en , vit de travaux occasionnels. Ami des Efron de longue date, il n'a pas de travail fixe, vit de subsides de ses amis et travaille pour le compte du NKVD. L'assassin Roland Abbiate ?