In this time when novels must be punched, when the quest for the self often dominates, in this era where we want rebel characters, twisted stories, told in a tongue that is jostling, Andreï Makine, who does not check any of the fashionable boxes, appears as a writer overwhelmed by his time. However, it has never been so relevant.
Russia, a fertile literary soil, has given us some of the greatest voices in literature. And several of them have forcefully denounced the drifts of their homeland. The best known is undoubtedly Alexandre Soljenitsyne, figurehead of the Soviet dissent and Nobel Prize in 1970, of which The Gulag archipelagoin 1973, had the effect of a thunderclap in literary and political heaven. This hit book revealed with painful precision the inhumanity of work camps and political oppression of the Stalinist regime.
Russia fascinates and worries for a long time. Its excesses and drifts still concern the world today and also inspire foreign authors.
In Laugh stomach you kremlinthe author Giuliano Da Empoli, born in France, dissects how the new masters of Russia replaced Marxism with nationalism to maintain their grip on power. The book gives cold in the back.
The cold, precisely, snow and silence are familiar characters from the work of Andreï Makine. Prisoner of the scarlet dreamhis most recent novel, talks about these Westerners intoxicated by the Marxist dream who have chosen to emigrate to the USSR, ideological paradise where “condemned people receive a salary and can buy everything except alcoholic drinks. They can afford an individual room, they read, write, see films, make music, “he wrote.
Lucien Baert is one of those cuckolds in history. Young French communist, he went to the USSR on a trip and was stuck there after missing his train. He will know hell, the gulag, the torture, will be sent to the forehead serve as cannon fodder. Baert changes its identity, becomes Matvei Belov. He leads an anonymous life in the steppe where he meets Daria, who will help him return to France.
But his country of origin is going through a troubled era. Baert will live his hour of glory by telling his story in a book, but finally, stateless in this boiling France of the 1960s that he does not recognize, he returns to Russia. He becomes Matvei Belov again.
The USSR was not the hoped -for paradise, but it was not the hell that is often described, insists Makine. In a radio interview with RCF in 2023, he explains that “the notion of fraternity was not an empty word. It really existed. She had the latest reflections of this dream, I would not even say communist, but a collectivist, where man was no longer considered a wolf for another ”.
At the end of the novel, it is this solidarity that allows the inhabitants of a small village isolated to survive in taiga. Marvei and Daria finally find happiness in what, somewhere, is the essence of the socialist dream.
If Marxism has not been dreamed of paradise, according to Makine, wild and unbridled capitalism, that of the oligarchs which gave us Putin, is certainly not either.
He will also break the dreams of Matvei, Daria and the others. The diets and ideologies may change, history continues to shake up our lives, notes Daria. “At the university, we studied these beautiful theories and I even had good marks with exams. But … those who tortured you in prison had read Lenin. And with what result? »»
There is, in the work of Makine, nature, this Russian steppe, immense and omnipresent, cousin of the Taiga of Quebec or the Netshimit of the Innu, insensitive to humans and their torments. Happiness is possible for humble who love its beauty and accept its hardness. “The wind throws him in the face of the wet snow flows, the wheels skate. It curves and this progression reminds him of a deeply buried past: the same road which advances, keeping only a cloud in the place of memory, a bit like this view blurred by the grapecut of the flakes. »»
In this stripped universe, Matvei wonders. “Happiness … Is it a matter of classes, wealth, power?” »»
We always ask this question. And Makine’s work helps us find, between Soviet disappointment and capitalist illusion, a little hope. In these new darkness times while the cannons are thundering and the dictators bomb the torso, it is precious.
Prisoner of the scarlet dream
Rasset
414 pages
