When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, and as Moscow turned into a rogue city overnight, Emmanuel Carrère, one of France's most famous non-fiction writers, boarded a plane to the Russian capital.
His agent warned him: “You don’t fly to a country that is in the process of invading its neighbor.” But Karer had a professional obligation there and, more importantly, he felt the need to understand what had happened to the country he had long loved and that had inspired some of his most successful works.
Karer spent ten days in Moscow, long enough to see the world around him collapse. New laws were passed that punished anyone who dared to call a war a war, and his friends were frantically trying to flee the country.
Perhaps most poignant of all, for a man whose passion for Russia was once so strong that he spent weeks in remote areas 700 kilometers east of Moscow, as he described in the book "My Life as a Russian Novel," was the realization of how many Russians supported the war or simply turned a blind eye.
“Something inside me broke, and it’s still broken, and my love for Russia took a serious hit,” Karer said in a recent interview in his Paris loft, the white walls of which are covered with rows of books. He noted that everything that once attracted him to Russia, its rich literature, tragic history and monumental personalities, now seems to have culminated in a brutal war.
"There has been some kind of dizzying devaluation of Russian values," he said.
That realization permeates his latest book, “Kolkhoz,” published in France in August and expected in the United States next year. The book, which became a bestseller in France and was shortlisted for this year’s Goncourt Prize, the country’s most prestigious literary award, is a kind of autobiography that explores Carrère’s Russian origins and his relationship with his mother, who was France’s foremost historian of Russia during her lifetime.
The new book helps readers understand his “deep love” for Russia, as he described it, before the war led him to question that attachment and the forces that shaped it.
In search of answers, Karer traveled to war-torn Ukraine to speak with those resisting Moscow, and visited Georgia, which Russia invaded in 2008. Although his grandfather was Georgian and a cousin was until recently the country's president, Karer had never been to Georgia before. His love for Russia always took precedence.
His introspective writing about Russia also serves as a mirror for many others in France, starting with his mother, Hélène Carrère d'Encausse. Her condescending attitude toward the Kremlin, which Carrère sharply criticizes in the book, reveals a particular French fascination with Russia, shaped by a shared history of revolution, empire, and great cultural achievement.
“If we are so interested in his story, it is because we recognize ourselves in it,” said Lena Moze, editor of the French magazine “Comet,” which published several of Carrère’s reports from Ukraine and Georgia that served as the basis for his latest book.
Karer, who is 67, began his career as a novelist, but has dedicated the last 25 years to perfecting his nonfiction prose.
His topics include a man who cheated on his family for 18 years before killing them all, his turn to meditation, and the trial of those responsible for the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks.
Yet Russia is a constant thread in his work, the focus of two books and numerous newspaper articles, because, as he writes on the opening pages of his latest work, "Russia is, for better or worse, a family affair."
His mother, whose parents were a Russian-Prussian aristocrat and a Georgian immigrant who spoke Russian with her, was a prolific historian of Russia and a regular participant in television debates about the Kremlin. She passed on that passion to her son, taking him on research trips to Moscow and, at the age of thirteen, introducing him to Dostoevsky’s The Idiot and its immersion into the “Russian soul.”
This type of education gave Karer, as he says, “the feeling that life in Russia is more intense.”
He began traveling there regularly in the late 2000s, and, drawn to the unusual, almost quixotic characters, wrote a story about a Hungarian World War II soldier captured by Soviet forces and discovered, half a century later, in a remote Russian mental hospital. Then, in 2011, he turned his attention to Eduard Limonov, a Russian writer who became a Soviet dissident and later an ultra-right politician.
At the time, Vladimir Putin was already consolidating his autocratic rule and shaping his imperial ambitions - attacking NATO expansion in 2007 and seizing a fifth of Georgia's territory the following year. Karer, like many others, paid little attention to this, seeing Putin as a "mafia" who could still be talked to.
His mother, who passed away in 2023, was, he writes in the book "Kolkhoz", particularly blind:
“Her love for Russia was real, visceral. The tragedy is that it turned into indulgence for Putin. For the past twenty years, she has consistently conveyed the Kremlin’s messages to French presidents, telling them that ‘Russia is a great country that should not be judged by our standards’ and that ‘Putin is a man of peace – provided, of course, that he is not humiliated.’”
“Looking back, it’s clear that we should have figured all this out much earlier,” Karer writes.
But we didn't - not before Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
On the day the war began, Karer was scheduled to travel to Moscow to take part in the filming of a film adaptation of his biography of Limonov, directed by Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian director who later fled Kremlin persecution. After a brief hesitation, curiosity got the better of him and he boarded the plane.
In Moscow, he says, he watched "Russia being born in war," while belligerent rhetoric overshadowed everything else, and "a large number of people calmly absorbed" the Kremlin's propaganda.
To try to make sense of it all, Karer decided to look at Russia through the experiences of those under its fire. He first traveled to Georgia, where he met with the cousin of Salome Zurabishvili, the country's former president, who opposed its gradual fall to pro-Russian forces.
In Georgia, Karer began to view Russia through the prism of colonialism, as a country that had long dominated its smaller neighbors, first through the empire, then through the Soviet Union. Now, he realized, it was trying to regain that dominance.
“The war made me realize that,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t think I would have ever thought of Georgia as a colonized country before.”
He then visited Ukraine, joining Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko on trips to frontline cities - Kherson and Kharkiv - in late 2023. During those trips, they had long conversations about Ukrainian efforts to free the country from Russian cultural influence and finally separate from Moscow.
The experience, Karer says, deeply disturbed him. But it helped him “begin to see things through the eyes of Ukrainians” and understand why Dostoevsky, with his anti-Western and nationalist views, was so hated there. He adds, however, that he hopes that once the war is over, this reexamination will be more measured.
Yermolenko said the trip, organized by PEN Ukraine, a writers' association, was important to show Carrera "what the Russian world really means and what is actually hidden behind that facade of Russian culture."
He took Karer to Kherson, to see streets devastated by constant shelling, and to Kharkov, where they spent an evening together in a basement, hiding from Russian attacks - at an event where people, against all odds, shared their poetry.
Did those experiences make him reconsider his earlier writing about Russia? He paused. If he had known then what he knows now, he said, he might have portrayed Eduard Limonov, who grew up in Kharkov during the Soviet era but despised Ukraine as a nation, differently.
“It’s a story of decomposition,” said Lena Može, editor of Kometa magazine, speaking of Karer. “Something shaped him, and now he’s decomposing it.”
Since 2022, Karer has traveled to Georgia four times and Ukraine four times. Will he continue to write about Russia? He's not sure. He says he wants to find other roots.
"Because a void has opened up," he wrote in Kometa magazine at the end of 2023. "Because I loved Russia and, as shocking as it may be to say that about an entire nation, one can still love some Russians - but one can no longer love Russia."
Bonus video:
