Kolkhoz

Winner of the Prix Médicis

The award-winning literary nonfiction writer turns to his own family’s archive and unlocks a century of war, obsession, deception, and truth.

The day Emmanuel Carrère is set to fly to Russia for the film adaptation of his book Limonov, a “special military operation” begins in Ukraine. Unease ripples across the world. Nevertheless, Carrère goes and, finding himself called to report on the unfolding events and revisiting fond family memories, extends his stay. One century before, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, his ancestors made the reverse journey. As Carrère roams the Hotel Ukraina, increasingly perturbed by the face of Russia that the war reveals, he wonders about the one he had been raised to know.

Just after the Second World War, Louis Carrère d’Encausse, a young Bordeaux bourgeois, and Hélène Zourabichvili, a poor stateless young woman from a shattered Georgian-Russian lineage, married in Paris. Zourabichvili would make a career of the terrain she had left behind, becoming France’s preeminent Russian authority. Drawing on her work and on his father’s obsessive family records, Carrère writes a “true novel,” one his mother would never have wanted, spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and taking us right up to the war in Ukraine.

Clear-eyed, alert to the absurdity of truth, and alive to every shadow in a portrait, Carrère does what only Carrère can do: he turns genealogy into narrative velocity, archives into suspense, grief into an engine of thought. At once intimate and geopolitical, tender and ferociously intelligent, Kolkhoz is Carrère in full command: the master of the moral double take and the deceptively simple sentence.