TEXTOS SOBRE IRÈNE NÉMIROVSKY EN INGLÉS E

ITALIANO

COETZEE, J. M, “Irène Némirovsky: The Dogs & the Wolves”, The New York Review of Books, 20-11-2008 (web)

The reputation of Irène Némirovsky, in the English-speaking world as in France, rests on Suite Française, an unfinished multipart novel that appeared in print only in 2004, some sixty years after its author’s death. During her lifetime Némirovsky was best known for an early work, the novel David Golder (1929). Astutely promoted by its publisher and swiftly adapted for stage and screen, David Golder was a runaway commercial success.

Némirovsky never struck it quite as rich in the rest of her short career (she died at the age of thirty-nine, one of the victims of the Final Solution). She wrote a great deal, her books sold well, but in an age when experimental Modernism held the high ground she received little serious critical attention. After the war she slid into obscurity. When in 1978 Germaine Brée published her authoritative survey of French literature of the half-century 1920–1970, Némirovsky did not figure in the list of her top 173 writers (nor, however, did Colette, who would today be among many critics’ top ten). Even feminist critics paid her scant attention.

All of that changed when Suite Française—which by amazing good luck survived the war in manuscript—was finally published. Against all precedent, Némirovsky was awarded the Prix Renaudot posthumously. Suite Française became both a critical success and a best seller. Hastily her publishers began reprinting her oeuvre.

With its large cast of characters and wide social range, Suite Française is more ambitious than anything Némirovsky had previously attempted. In it she takes a hard look at France during the Blitzkrieg and the subsequent occupation. She saw herself as following in the line of Chekhov, who had addressed the “mediocrity” of his times “without anger and without disgust, but with the pity it deserved.” In preparation for her task she also reread War and Peace, studying Tolstoy’s method of rendering history indirectly, through the eyes of his characters.

Of the four or five novels of the planned Suite, only the first two were written. At the center of the second is a young woman, Lucile Angellier, whose husband is a prisoner of war and who has to share her home with a Wehrmacht officer billeted with her. The officer, Lieutenant von Valk, falls deeply and respectfully in love with her, and she is tempted to respond. Can she and he, nominal enemies, not transcend their political and national differences and, in the name of love, make a separate peace? Must she really, in the name of patriotism, deny herself to him?

Today it may seem puzzling that a writer confronting the crisis for the individual conscience occasioned by the occupation and the wider war should have framed that crisis in such romantic terms. For the war in question was not just a matter of political differences spilling over onto the battlefield: it was a war of conquest and extermination

aimed at wiping certain despised peoples from the face of the earth and enslaving others.

Genocide is of course not the enterprise von Valk signed up for. Lucile has even less of an inkling of Hitler’s ultimate goals. But that is hardly the point. Had Némirovsky appreciated how monstrous the conflict was in which France and Germany were embroiled, how different in essence it was from the wars of 1870 and 1914, she would surely, one thinks, have given herself a different plot to work with, one that would pivot on the question not of whether a separate peace was attainable between individuals but rather—for instance—of whether honorable German soldiers should not disobey the orders of their political masters, or of whether French civilians like Lucile should not be prepared to risk everything to save the Jews among them. (Interestingly, Lucile does risk her life to save a fugitive, but that fugitive is not a Jew—there are no Jewish characters in Suite Française. As for von Valk, Némirovsky’s design was for him to die fighting on the Eastern Front.)

Unlike War and Peace, which, as Némirovsky notes in her diary, was written half a century after the event, Suite Française is written from “on the burning lava.” It was planned to cover the occupation from beginning to end. Its first two parts take us through mid-1941. What would happen next—in the novel as in the real world—Némirovsky could not of course foresee: in her diary she called it “God’s secret.” In regard to herself, God’s secret was that, in July of 1942, she would be arrested in her home by French police and passed on to the German authorities for deportation. Weeks later she would be dead of typhus in Auschwitz. In all, some 75,000 Jews would be shipped from France to the death camps, a third of them full French citizens.

Why did Irène Némirovsky and her husband—who certainly had the means to do so—not flee while there was time? Both born in Russia, they were, technically speaking, stateless persons residing in France, and therefore unusually vulnerable. Yet even when, in the mid-1930s, popular opinion began to harden against foreigners, and the anti-Semites on the French right, emboldened by events in Germany, began to beat their drums, the two did nothing to regularize their status. Only in 1938 did they exert themselves to obtain papers of naturalization (which, for whatever reason, were not issued) and go through the motions of renouncing the Judaic faith in favor of the Catholic.

After the defeat of 1940 they had an opportunity to relocate from Paris to Hendaye, a stone’s throw from the Spanish border. Instead they chose the village of Issy-l’Évêque in Burgundy, inside the German-administered zone. In Issy, as anti-Jewish measures began to bite (bank accounts of Jews were frozen, Jews were forbidden to publish, Jews had to wear the yellow star), the truth may have begun to dawn on them, though not the full truth (it was only in the winter of 1941–1942 that word began to filter down to the administrators in the conquered territories that the solution of “the Jewish Question” was to take the form of genocidal extermination). As late as the end of 1941, Némirovsky seems to have believed that whatever might befall the Jew in the street would not befall her. In a letter addressed to Marshal Pétain, head of the Vichy puppet government, she pleads that as a “respectable” ( honorable ) foreigner—as distinct from an “undesirable”—she deserves to be left in peace.

There are two broad reasons why Irène Némirovsky should have considered herself a special case. The first is that for most of her life it had been her heart’s desire to be French; and to be fully French, in a country with a long history of harboring political refugees but notably unreceptive to notions of cultural pluralism, meant being neither a Russian émigré who wrote in French nor a French-speaking Jew. At its most juvenile (see her partly autobiographical novel Le Vin de solitude ), her wish took the

form of a fantasy of being reborn as a “real” Frenchwoman with a name like Jeanne Fournier. (Némirovsky’s youthful heroines are typically spurned by their mothers but cherished by more than motherly French governesses.)

The problem for Némirovsky as a budding writer in the 1920s was that aside from her facility in the French language, the capital she commanded on the French literary market con-sisted in a corpus of experience that branded her as foreign: daily life in pre-revolutionary Russia, pogroms and Cossack raids, the Revolution and the Civil War, plus to a lesser extent the shady world of international finance. In the course of her career she would thus alternate, according to her sense of the temper of the times, between two authorial selves, one pur sang French, one exotic. As a French authoress she would compose books about “real” French families written with an irreproachably French sensibility, books with no whiff of foreignness about them. The French self took over entirely after 1940, as publishers became more and more nervous about the presence of Jewish writers on their lists.

As for the exotic self, exploiting it required a careful balancing act. To avoid being labeled a Russian who wrote in French, she would keep her distance from Russian émigré society. To avoid being cast as a Jew, she would be ready to mock and caricature Jews. On the other hand, unlike such Russian-born contemporaries as Nathalie Sarraute (née Cherniak) and Henri Troyat (né Tarasov), she published under her Russian name, in its French form, until the wartime ban on Jewish writers led her to resort to a pseudonym.

The second reason why Némirovsky should have thought she would escape the fate of the Jews is that she had cultivated influential friends on the right, even the far right. In the months between her arrest and his own, these friends were the first people her husband contacted with pleas to intercede. To bolster her case he even scoured her books for anti-Semitic quotes. All of these friends let her down, mainly because they were powerless. They were powerless because, as it began to become clear, when the Nazis said All Jews with no exceptions they meant all Jews with no exceptions.

For her compromises with the anti-Semites—who, as the Dreyfus affair had made plain a half-century before, were fully as influential in France, at all levels of society, as in Germany—Némirovsky has recently had to undergo the most searching interrogation, notably by Jonathan Weiss in his biography of her.1 I do not propose to extend that interrogation here. Némirovsky made some serious mistakes and did not live long enough to correct them. Misreading the signs, she believed, until it was too late, that she could evade the express train of history bearing down on her. Of the large body of work she left behind, some can safely be forgotten, but a surprising amount is still of interest, not only for what it tells us about the evolution of a writer now in the process of being absorbed into the French canon but as the record of an engagement with the France of her day that is never less than intelligent and is sometimes damning.

Irène Némirovsky was born in Kiev in 1903. Her father was a banker with government connections. An only child, Irène had French governesses and spent summer vacations on the Côte d’Azur. When the Bolsheviks took power the Némirovskys moved to Paris, where Irène enrolled at the Sorbonne and dawdled for five years over a degree in literature, preferring partying to studying. In her free time she wrote stories. Interestingly, though Paris was the hub of international Modernism, the magazines to which she sent her work were conservative in their literary and political outlook. In 1926 she married a man from the same milieu (Russian Jewry, banking) as herself; they had two children.

For her first foray into the novel form Némirovsky drew heavily on her family background. David Golder is a financier and speculator with a special interest in

Russian oil. Having begun his career in Russia buying scrap metal, he makes his mark supervising railroad crews in California. Now, in 1926, he owns an apartment in Paris and a villa in Biarritz. He is growing old, he has a heart problem, he would like to begin to retire. Behind him, however, flogging him on like a galley slave, are two women: a wife who despises him and flaunts her infidelity, and a daughter with expensive tastes in cars and men. When he has his first heart attack, his wife bribes the doctor to tell him it is not serious; when swings in the market bankrupt him, his daughter uses sexual wiles to get him to stagger out one last time to do battle in the boardrooms.

David Golder is a novel of stock characters and extravagant emotions, with a heavy debt to Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. Golder himself is a stereotypically unscrupulous wheeler-dealer. His wife is obsessed with her looks; his daughter is so locked into her round of pleasures that she barely sees her parents as human. But these crude materials undergo some development and modulation. Between Golder’s wife and her lover of many years—a parasitic minor aristocrat who may well be the daughter’s natural father—there are moments of near-domestic affection. The daughter is allowed a chapter of lyrical sex and gastronomy in Spain to persuade us of her claim that pleasure is a good in itself. And beneath the features of the titan financier we get to see first the mortal man frightened of death, then the little boy from the shtetl.

The last pages of David Golder are as affecting as anything Némirovsky wrote. Sick and dying, barely able to draw breath, Golder boards a tramp steamer at a Black Sea port and takes to his bunk. There he is tended by a young Jew with his own dreams of getting to America and making his fortune. As he dies, Golder drops the masks of the French and Russian languages and returns to the Yiddish of his childhood; in his last vision he hears a voice calling him home.

There is plenty of anti-Semitic caricature in David Golder. Even the end of the novel can comfortably be accommodated to the worldview of the anti-Semite: beneath a veneer of cosmopolitanism Golder’s deepest loyalties turn out after all to be archaic and Jewish. In an interview given in 1935 Némirovsky conceded that if Hitler had been in power when she was writing the book she would have toned it down, “written it differently.” Yet considering its sympathy for the lonely and unloved Golder, battling on three fronts with ruthless competitors, predatory women, and a failing body, it is hard to see the book as at core anti- Semitic. Némirovsky seems to have felt so too: in the interview she goes on to say that to have toned it down at the time—that is, without an adequate political motive—would have been wrong, “a weakness unworthy of a true writer!”

On the back of the success of David Golder in its various incarnations Némirovsky built a prosperous career as a woman of letters. At her peak she was bringing in considerably more money than her husband, an executive with the Banque des Pays du Nord. The couple kept a spacious apartment in Paris with domestic staff (maid, cook, governess); they took vacations at fashionable resorts. Their lifestyle became unsustainable once restrictions on Jews participating in the economy came into effect. By the time they were deported in 1942, the Némirovskys were in dire financial straits.

David Golder comes to us now in a collection with three other short works from Némirovsky’s early phase: The Ball (1930), Snow in Autumn (1931), and The Courilof Affair (1933). Claire Messud provides a perceptive introduction; Sandra Smith’s translations are of the highest quality, though the decision to give Russian names in their French forms is puzzling: Pobiedonostsef, Tcheka instead of Pobedonostsev, Cheka.

The Ball is a slighter affair than David Golder. M. and Mme Alfred Kampf, petit-bourgeois arrivistes who have made a fortune on the stock market, decide to come out in Paris high society. They plan a ball, no expenses spared, for which they draw up a list of two hundred fashionable invitees. To their unloved daughter Antoinette falls the task of mailing the invitations. But Antoinette, full of resentment against her mother for refusing to let her appear at the ball, secretly tears up the invitations. The great night comes and no guests arrive. With grim pleasure Antoinette watches as her parents, humiliated in front of the servants, go to pieces. In the last scene she pretends to console her weeping mother, while inwardly reveling in her victory.

The inimical mother-daughter couple recurs often in Némirovsky’s fiction, the mother determined to repress at all costs the daughter who, by emerging into womanhood, threatens to overshadow and supersede her. It is perhaps Némirovsky’s most telling weakness as a writer that she is unable to do anything with this material beyond reproducing it again and again.

Snow in Autumn, retitled from the French Les Mouches d’automne (The Flies of Autumn), and not to be confused with the as yet untranslated Les Feux de l’automne (The Fires of Autumn), follows the declining years of Tatiana, faithful nanny to the Karines, a wealthy Russian family forced to abandon their estate during the Civil War and make their home in France. As time passes, it is Tatiana who emerges as the principal victim of the Revolution rather than the Karines, who have managed to smuggle out a considerable fortune and have adapted to life abroad rather easily. Tatiana, by contrast, unable to make sense of France, yearns for the country estate where she grew up and for the snows of Russia. More and more neglected by the Karines, her mind wandering, she leaves the apartment one foggy morning and is drowned, or drowns herself, in the Seine.

Snow in Autumn owes a general debt to Chekhov and a specific debt to A Simple Heart, Flaubert’s coolly factual story of a similarly faithful retainer. Aside from the arbitrary ending—Némirovsky’s endings tend to be cursory, perhaps a consequence of her habit of starting a new project before the old one was properly finished—it is an accomplished piece of work, opposing Russian provincial life and old-fashioned fidelities, embodied in Tatiana, to Paris and the new, casual sexual mores that the younger Karines find so attractive.

The Courilof Affair takes the form of a memoir written by a member of a terrorist cell, telling of how, shortly before the failed 1905 revolution, he infiltrated the staff of Count Courilof, the Tsar’s minister of education, with the object of carrying out a spectacular assassination. Posing as a Swiss doctor, he becomes the intimate observer of Courilof’s struggle with on the one hand liver cancer, on the other political rivals who are using his marriage to a woman with a dubious past to engineer his downfall.

Slowly the would-be assassin begins to appreciate the better qualities of his victim: his stoicism, his refusal to distance himself from the wife he loves. When the time comes to hurl the bomb, he cannot do it: a comrade has to take over. Arrested and sentenced to death, he escapes across the border, returning later to enjoy a career in the Soviet secret police during which he tortures and executes enemies of the state without compunction, before being purged and exiled to France, where he pens his memoir.

Redolent of the Conrad of Under Western Eyes, The Courilof Affair is Némirovsky’s most overtly political novel. (Conrad, the anglicized Pole, impressed Némirovsky as a model of successful acculturation.) The central plot device—a foreigner with fake medical papers becomes the confidant of one of the most powerful men in Russia—may be implausible, but it pays off handsomely. The gradual humanization of an assassin brought up in the most blinkered of revolutionary circles is

masterfully done: Némirovsky allows herself all the space she needs to trace his erratic moral evolution. Courilof emerges as something like a hero, a complex man, severe but incorruptible, touchingly vain, devoted to the service of a sovereign whom he personally despises. For all his weaknesses, he stands for values that this ultimately elegiac book endorses: a cautious liberalism, the culture of the West.

With the publication of these four short fictions, English-speaking readers have access to the best of Némirovsky’s early writing to set beside her great, truncated novel of the war years. What we still lack is works from the phase 1939–1941, when she was trying to establish herself as an unambiguously French author, most notably the posthumously published Les Biens de ce monde (The Goods of This World), which traces the fortunes of a family of paper manufacturers in the years before and after World War I, and Les Feux de l’automne, which has at its center a woman coping with a wayward husband in the Paris of the interwar years. In both cases the milieu is impeccably French: no foreigners, no Jews.2

Both novels offer a diagnosis of the state of France. They blame France’s decline, culminating in the defeat of 1940, on political corruption, lax morals, and slavish imitation of American business practices. The rot set in, they suggest, when servicemen coming home from the trenches in 1919, instead of being given the task of reconstructing the nation, were fobbed off with easy sex and the lure of speculative riches. The virtues the books endorse are much the same as those promoted by the Vichy government: patriotism, fidelity, hard work, piety.

As works of art these two novels are unremarkable—part of Némirovsky’s aim in writing them was to show how well she fitted into the tradition of the family-fortunes novel exemplified by Roger Martin du Gard and Georges Duhamel. Their strengths lie elsewhere. They reveal how intimately Némirovsky knew ordinary petit-bourgeois Parisians—their domestic arrangements, their amusements, their little economies and extravagances, above all their placid satisfaction with the bonheur of their lives. Némirovsky was remote from the experiments in the novel form going on around her: of her American contemporaries, those she seems to appreciate most are Pearl Buck, James S. Cain, and Louis Bromfield, whose Monsoon she took as a model for the first part of Suite Française. As chronicles of the impact of wider forces on individual destinies, these most “French” of Némirovksy’s novels tend to be rather dutifully naturalistic.

The writing comes to life, however, when her interest in the psychology of moral compromise is engaged, as when the heroine of Les Feux de l’automne begins to have doubts about the celibate path she has been following. What if her women friends are right after all—what if chastity is démodé, what if she is going to be left on the shelf? With a sinking heart she dons her best outfit, fixes her face, and rings the doorbell of the man who has been pursuing her, ready to offer him her body if that is how relations between the sexes work in this new age. Fortunately for the book’s thesis—”the key to all existence [is that] one must be faithful”—the man in question has had second thoughts, and to win this paragon of virtue is now prepared to propose marriage.

In these two novels Némirovsky shows herself ready to take on traditionally masculine forms like battle narratives, where she acquits herself more than competently. She also composes lengthy set pieces about the evacuation of cities—clogged roads, cars piled high with household goods, quests for scarce gasoline, etc.—that in effect rehearse the powerful chapters opening Suite Française, in which defeated soldiers and panic-stricken city-dwellers flee the German advance. About the selfishness and cowardice of the civilian population in the face of danger she is scathing.

Both novels extend chronologically into the present of World War II and thus into the territory of the later Suite Française. Némirovsky clearly saw a role for herself as chronicler and commentator on unfolding events, even without knowing how the war would turn out. If we can extrapolate to the author from her characters, she would seem to stand behind Agnès, the most rock-solid figure in Les Biens de ce monde : “We will rebuild. We will fix things. We will live.” Wars come and go, but France endures. Vis-à-vis the German occupiers her approach is, understandably, ultra-cautious: they barely figure on her pages. Released after a year in a POW camp, a French serviceman breathes not a word against his captors.

The notebooks of Némirovsky’s last year disclose a far less sanguine view of the Germans, together with a hardening of her attitude toward the French: we may infer a degree of prudent self-censoring over the text of the Suite that has come down to us. They also reveal a foreboding that she will be read only posthumously.

Constructing herself as an unhyphenated French novelist was only half of Némirovsky’s life-project. As she was shoring up her French credentials she was also delving into her Russian Jewish past. Published in 1940 just before restrictions on Jewish authors came into effect, Les Chiens et les loups (The Dogs and the Wolves) has as its heroine Ada Stiller, a Jewish girl who grows up in the Ukraine but moves to Paris, where she lives from hand to mouth painting scenes of the world she has left behind, scenes too “Dostoevskian” in tone for French tastes. Complicated plotting involving wealthy relatives and financial skulduggery results in Ada being deported from France; the book ends with her facing a precarious future as an unwed mother somewhere in the Balkans.

At the heart of Les Chiens is the question of assimilation. Ada is torn between two men: Harry, the scion of a wealthy Russian-Jewish family, married to a French Gentile but drawn mystically to Ada; and Ben, a macher from the same shtetl as Ada, who believes she and he inherit a strain of “madness” that sets them apart from the “Cartesian” French. Which man should she follow? To which side does her heart incline: to the side of dogs like Harry, tame, assimilated, or that of wolves like Ben?

Sex plays no part in Ada’s decision-making. She is as asexual a heroine as could be. The inner voice that will tell her which future to choose, as dog or as wolf, will be the voice not of love but of her ancestors, the same voice heard by the dying David Golder. It will warn her that people like Harry, caught between two races ( sic ), Jewish and French, have no future. (Similarly, at a climactic moment in Suite Française, Lucile will feel “secret movements of [the] blood” that will tell her she cannot belong to a German.) Despite himself, Harry must concur: his assimilated self is a mask, but he cannot get rid of it without tearing his flesh.

We may want to bear in mind how matters stood in France at the time when Némirovsky was composing this most Jewish of her novels. On the eve of the war France’s Jewish population numbered some 330,000, most of them foreign-born. Initially the new arrivals had been welcomed—France had suffered huge losses of manpower in World War I—but after 1930, with the decline of the world economy, that welcome began to sour. The influx of a half-million refugees after Franco’s victory in Spain only hardened anti-immigrant sentiment.

The anti-Semitism that grew up in the 1880s and found its most vocal expression in the Dreyfus affair extended across the social spectrum and had several strands. One was the traditional anti-Judaism of the Catholic right. Another was the burgeoning pseudoscience of race. A third, hostility to “Jewish” plutocracy, became the province of the socialist left. Thus when popular resentment began to fester against refugees, Jewish

refugees in particular, there was no substantial political group prepared to stand up in their defense.

France’s settled, secularized Jews, too, viewed with unease the flood of poor cousins from the East, adhering to their own language, dress, and cuisine, following their own rites, rife with excitable political factions. Spokesmen for French Jewry tried to warn the new arrivals that their unwillingness to fit in would give fresh impetus to the anti-Semites, but got nowhere. “The nightmare of old assimilated French Jewry had come true: what was perceived as an uncontrollable flood of exotic oriental Jews had compromised the position of them all,” write Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton in Vichy France and the Jews.3

The Judaic slant of Les Chiens et les loups—a more substantial, more ambitious, and less equivocal work than David Golder—thus comes as somewhat of a surprise, considering Némirovsky’s own assimilationist record and her comfortable place in French society. Partly as a result of happenstance but mainly because her secret soul tells her so, Némirovsky’s Ada Stiller opts not for the dogs of the fashionable suburbs but for the wolves from the East—the wolves from whom most dogs prefer to distance themselves, not wishing to be reminded of their origins.

Set mainly in Russia around the time of the revolution, published in 1935 but probably written earlier, Le Vin de solitude is a study in mother-daughter relations for which Némirovsky draws freely on her own life history. Hélène Karol is a gifted, precocious adolescent. Her father is a war profiteer, selling obsolete weaponry to the Russian government. Her mother, Bella, is a beautiful but depraved society hostess (“To hold in her arms a man whose name she did not know, or where he came from, a man who would never see her again—that alone gave her the intense frisson she craved”). Antagonistic to her daughter, Bella does all she can to undermine and humiliate her (a rerun of The Ball ). To revenge herself, Hélène sets out to steal her mother’s current lover. In doing so she strays into murkier and murkier moral territory. Lying in the man’s arms, she glances into a mirror and sees her own face, “voluptuous, triumphant, reminding her…of her mother’s features when she was young.” Troubled by this transformation, she dismisses him:

You are the enemy of all my childhood… Never will I be able to live happily with you. The man I want to live side by side with would never have known my mother, or my home, not even my language or my native country; he would take me far away, it doesn’t matter where. Le Vin de solitude is part novel, part autobiographical fantasy, but mainly an

indictment of a mother who casts her daughter in the role of sexual rival, thereby robbing her of her childhood and precipitating her too early into a world of adult passions. Jézabel (1936) is an even more lurid attack on the mother figure. Here a narcissistic socialite of a certain age, obsessed with her public image, purposely lets her nineteen-year-old daughter bleed to death in childbed rather than have it emerge that she has become a grandmother (years later the spurned grandchild will return to blackmail her). Books like Jézabel, dashed off in a hurry, offering sensationalistic glimpses into the lives of the fast set, make it easier to understand why Némirovsky was not taken seriously by the literary world of her day.

Némirovsky’s real-life mother was, by all accounts, not a nice person. When in 1945 her orphaned granddaughters, aged sixteen and eight, turned up on her doorstep, she refused them shelter (“There are sanatoriums for poor children,” she is reputed to have said). Nonetheless, it is a pity we will never hear her side of the story.

1. Irène Némirovsky: Her Life and Works (Stanford University Press, 2007). A translation of the illuminating new biography by Olivier Philipponnat and

Patrick Lienhardt ( La Vie d'Irène Némirovsky ), which draws heavily upon diaries and notebooks that have resurfaced in the last few years, is due to be published in the US by Knopf in 2009.

2. Les Biens de ce monde, Le Vin de solitude, Les Chiens et les loups, and Jézabel are due to appear in Everyman's Library in 2010 or 2011, in English translations by Sandra Smith.

3. Basic Books, 1981, p. 366

MESSUD, Claire, “Introduction” to David Golder, The ball, Snow in autumn, The Couriloff affair, London, Everyman’s Library, 2008, pp. IX-XIX.

“Each of us has his weaknesses. Human nature is incomprehensible,” muses the mysterious Leon M., narrator of Irene Nemirovsky’s 1933 novel, The Courilof Affair. “One cannot even say with certainty whether a man is good or evil, stupid or intelligent. There does not exist a good man who has not at some time in his life committed a cruel act, nor an evil man who has not done good….” The complicated, often murky ironies of human interaction are the stuff of Nemirovsky’s fictions: no matter what her subject—and her range was considerable—her work is unified in its unsparing examination of the desires and feelings that lie behind the most apparently clear-cut scenarios. In The Courilof Affair, Leon M., in his retirement in Nice, pens his memories of his revolutionary days in Russia in the early years of the century and, in particular, of his assignment to assassinate the Tsar’s Minister of Education, Valerian Alex-androvitch Courilof, known as “the Killer Whale,” in 1903 (incidentally, the year of the author’s birth). In preparation for the attack, Leon takes on the identity of Marcel Legrand, a Swiss doctor, and becomes the personal physician to Courilof. Over the course of their time together, he is moved by a growing understanding not simply of Courilof, but of human frailty. Compassion and revolutionary terrorism are not easily compatible, and his new knowledge threatens Leon’s mission. As he recalls of Courilof and his politically problematic French wife (and former mistress), Margot, “It remains impossible for me to explain, even to myself, how I could… understand these two people…. For the first time, I saw human beings: unhappy people, with ambitions, faults, foolishness.” This capacity genuinely and fully to see human beings, to acknowledge the tender humanity of their flaws, is one of the supreme gifts of fiction, both for the writer and for the reader. Nobody knew this better than Irene Nemirovsky, whose novels are fiercely preoccupied with the unveiling of her characters’ foibles but who, through that unveiling, provides her readers with a bracing, unnerving, and often moving vision of ourselves as we really are. This is nowhere more true than in her unfinished masterpiece, Suite Francaise, the relatively recent discovery and publication of which have brought Nemirovsky to the attention of a new generation of readers. Set in France under German occupation and written, extraordinarily, under the circumstances it describes, Suite Francaise moves between chilling satire of the petty selfishness of the bourgeoisie and a poignant evocation of the realities of village life under occupation—realities much like those of Leon M., in which to recognize the enemy’s humanity is to compromise, or disable, a warrior’s hatred. In reading that novel—or, more properly,

those two novellas, since the remaining three segments that would have completed the masterpiece were never written— this reader, for one, gained an understanding of what it meant to live in France during the Second World War that I had not had before, steeped though I was in books and films on the subject. Consistently through her work, Nemirovsky’s vision is neither easy nor comfortable; nor was her own life untainted by the moral complexities she captured so keenly in fiction. In its broadest outlines, of course, the tragic story of Irene Nemirovsky’s life is by now widely known: she was a refugee from the Russian Revolution who made France her home; she enjoyed literary acclaim and considerable privilege there during the ‘20s and ‘30s; and she mistakenly thought that privilege would protect her from the Nazis, an error that cost her her life. She was taken by the Germans in 1942 and died in Auschwitz of typhus not long after her arrival there. Her husband, Michel, left her final manuscript in the care of her two small daughters, who managed to salvage it in spite of their own tribulations during the war. They kept her notebook without reading it, for decades, and only in the 1990s did her older, surviving daughter, Denise Epstein, realize that these pages constituted not a diary but the fragments of a novel. It was published in France in 2004 and subsequently translated into English. The book has been an international best seller. It may have seemed, to most English-language readers, that Nemirovsky sprang into literary existence, fully formed, with the writing of Suite Francaise. In fact, however, she was in France a prolific, critically acclaimed, and popularly successful author, whose reputation long survived her. Her third novel, David Golder (the two first, Le Malentendu and L’Ennemie, were released in a monthly magazine, Les OEuvres Libres), was published when she was twenty-six, in 1929. The book made her name (and was made into a film and a play, both starring Harry Baur), and she was hailed by the New York Times, upon its 1930 translation into English, as a successor to Dostoevsky. In its wake she published a book almost every year until the Second World War. Her captivity and death, in this light, are all the more shocking: it is painful to think of the literary legacy that was lost. Irene Nemirovsky’s ability to grasp life’s contradictions was at least in part the result of the deeply contradictory facts of her own brief life. She was born in Kiev on February 11, 1903, the only child of Leon and Fanny (Margoulis) Nemirovsky. Her father was a prosperous banker, allied with the Tsar’s court, and as such the family enjoyed privileges rarely available to Jewish families. As for many White Russians, French was the lingua franca of their household. According to a recent biography by Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, “she spoke a bookish Russian; so to speak, Russian was not her mother tongue,” and possibly Nemirovsky’s closest early relationship was with her French governess, Marie, whom she called “Zezelle.” But the political allegiances of the Nemirov-skys would cost them dearly, and the family fled their home, penniless, at the time of the Revolution, inJanuary 1918, coming to France only after many peregrinations and a nearly yearlong stint in a village in Finland, just behind the Russian frontier. Once settled in Paris, Leon Nemirovsky set about restoring the family fortunes, and as she reached adulthood, Irene moved in elite circles: largely politically conservative, generally Catholic (although she also contributed to left-wing journals such as Marianne). Her family was fully assimilated, and while she never denied her Jewishness (tellingly, she chose to marry a fellow Russian Jewish exile, Michel Epstein, whose history mirrored her own; and she asserted, in a 1935 interview, that “I never dreamed of hiding my origins. Whenever I had the occasion, I protested that I was Jewish, I even proclaimed it!”), she also did not fully embrace it. In 1939, Nemirovsky converted to Catholicism, a decision that has caused controversy in recent

discussions of her life, work, and relation to her Jewish heritage. It has been asserted that she was herself anti-Semitic—her novel David Golder, in particular, has been held up as an example of this fact, as has her religious conversion—a claim that has threatened to cast a shadow upon her reputation. The reality is, inevitably, more complicated. Certainly questions of social class play powerfully in Nemirovsky’s identity: in Russia, her family was set apart from other Jews not only by her father’s occupation but by their situation in Kiev, where they lived among the wealthy in the hills high above the poverty-stricken Jewish ghetto of the inner city. Her unquestionably unsavory depictionsofJews (for example: “Golder looked with a kind of hatred at Fischl, as if at a cruel caricature. Fat little Jew … He calmly held in his killer’s hands a porcelain bowl of fresh caviar against his chest.”) reflect both some measure of self-loathing and a willed detachment from the Jew as “Other.” As Irene Nemirovsky puts it herself in her veiled autobiography, The Wine of Solitude (1935), “I spent my life fighting an odious blood, but it is inside of me.” That these two positions seem initially paradoxical is, in truth, but an illusion, one of the many that we all harbor in the hope of parsing life more clearly, of making orderly sense of the world. Nemirovsky—allied from birth with White Russians and hence against her own people, the Jews, and consequently most naturally affiliated, in France, with political conservatives, who were often anti-Semitic—did not have the luxury of such illusions; and she does not grant them to her characters. What she sees may not be attractive, but she is resolute in seeing clearly and has the courage to record her truths, however unappealing they may be. Therein lies her courage as a writer. (It is worth noting, indeed, that while many of her supposed literary friends in Paris abandoned her at the outset of the war, it was Horace de Carbuccia, editor of the notably right-wing and often anti-Semitic journal Gringoire, who arranged to publish her work pseudonymously during the occupation and who thereby guaranteed Nemirovsky’s family some desperately needed income. This apparent irony would not have surprised her.) David Golder is the remarkable, compelling, and at times painfully unsympathetic portrait of an aging Russian Jewish businessman and his entourage in 1920s France. It opens, significantly, with the word “No,” as Golder denies his business partner, Simon Marcus, support in a venture pertaining to Russian oil wells. Golder’s denial prompts Marcus’s suicide and encourages others, including the reader, to see Golder as a ruthless, even heartless, entrepreneur. As the novel unfolds, however, our sympathies cleave to this brutal ruin of a man, preyed upon and exploited by his grasping wife, Gloria; her lover, Hoyos; and their friends; and by his beautiful, spoiled, and adored daughter, Joyce. Golder rages that “I’m just expected to pay, pay, and keep on paying… That’s why I’ve been put on this earth”; and it seems he isn’t wrong in this assessment. Joyce is his passion—”Every time he came back from a trip, he looked for her in the crowd, in spite of himself. She was never there, and yet he continued to expect her with the same humiliating, tenacious, and vain sense of hope”— and his Achilles’ heel. To the last, in spite of all he learns about her, he can deny her nothing—even his life. Central to our ultimate understanding of David Golder is the portrait of his old acquaintance and cardpartner, Soifer, of whom we are told that “his meanness bordered on madness…. For several years now, since he had lost all his teeth, he ate only cereal and pureed vegetables to avoid having to buy dentures.” Soifer is, regrettably, a grotesque caricature of the greedy Jew; and surely he provided fine fodder for the growing number of anti-Semites in 1930s France. By 1935, Nemirovsky said of the book, “If there had been Hitler [at the time], I would have greatly toned down David

Golder, and I wouldn’t have written it in the same fashion”; and again, three years later, “How could I write such a thing? If I were to write David Golder now, I would do it quite differently…. The climate is quite changed.” But there is, nevertheless, in Nemirovsky’s portrayal, a strange tenderness even for Soifer: she writes of him, in a searing passage, “Much later, Soifer would die all alone, like a dog, without a friend, without a single wreath on his grave, buried in the cheapest cemetery in Paris by his family who hated him, and whom he had hated, but to whom he nevertheless left a fortune of some thirty million francs, thus fulfilling till the end the incomprehensible destiny of every good Jew on this earth.” This is an appalling indictment, not of Soifer himself but of the warping force of the society around him. If it is an anti-Semitic portrait, and crudely drawn, it is also a portrait of the potential horror of any immigrant’s life: if one were to substitute the word “immigrant” for “Jew,” Nemirovsky’s depiction would carry the same force, with considerably less offense. How many immigrants have been emotionally deformed by their travails, have given everything for their families only to be hopelessly misunderstood and even abandoned by their kin? Is it not the fate of many in diasporas of different kinds, not simply of Jews? Agonizing isolation—to be unknown, unacknowledged, unloved—is mercifully not every immigrant’s fate; but it is certainly a fate of immigrants, of the displaced, more surely than of the rooted. As Nemirovsky wrote in 1934, “I continue to depict the society I know best, that is composed of misfits, those who have been expelled from their milieu, the place where they would normally have lived, and who do not adapt to their new lives without clashes or suffering.” Unlike for Soifer, there is, for David Golder himself, a measure of grace. The novel concludes with his death, but not before he has returned to his native Russia and embarked from the port he knew as a youth, rendered by Nemirovsky without a hint of sentimentality: “The port. He recognized it as clearly as if he had left the day before. The little customs building, half in ruins. Beached boats buried in the black sand, which was littered with bits of coal and rubbish; watermelon rind and dead animals bobbing in the deep, muddy green water, just as in the past.” Golder is, at the last, relieved, at least somewhat, of his lifelong deracination. Nor is he condemned to die alone: he is accompanied, in his final voyage, by a young Jew leaving Russia for the first time, to seek his fortune in the West. To him, at the end, David Golder speaks, for the first time in years, in his native Yiddish; and in the wake of their communication, in his last moments Golder is granted a vision of his own boyhood, and he hears the sound of his mother’s voice. The echo of Tolstoy’s Death of Ivan Ilyich is strong in this novel, even if Golder’s Gerasim is a young man on the make who will pocket the contents of Golder’s wallet (with Golder’s blessing) when he leaves. Nemirovsky’s vision is darker than her Russian forebear’s; and her sense of her protagonist’s fate is not rooted in a tradition of Christian redemption. But the debt is strong, and clear: from the novel’s opening lines, Golder is learning how to approach death, and, very quickly, from his first heart attack onward, how to die. This is the matter of the book. Moreover, Golder’s visit to Marcus’s widow, early in the novel, echoes Peter Ivanovich’s visit to Ivan Ilyich’s widow in the opening pages of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. And by the time Golder confronts death for the last time, in its absolute inexorability, he is both granted a Tolstoyan grace and must submit to a different, and mercilessly worldly, banality. David Golder is not without flaws (not least of which is a lack of genuine complexity in all the characters besides Golder himself) nor, to a contemporary reader at least, without problematic elements. But it remains a remarkable novel. Nemirov-sky was only twenty-three when she wrote the first version of it; and yet none of her

subsequent novels achieved comparable fame in her lifetime. The other early works gathered in this volume are perhaps less fully realized, and stand less firmly on their own merits, than David Golder. That said, each of them has distinct strengths, each moving the reader in a different way; and together they serve almost as instructive studies, or sketches, in Nemirovsky’s literary development, as she expands her range and sympathies, stretching toward the maturity that enabled the writing of Suite Francaise. The Ball, first published in 1929 under the pseudonym “Nerey,” is the slightest of these efforts, the story of a girl of fourteen, Antoinette Kampf, whose newly wealthy parents are preparing to throw a ball. Set in 1928, two years after Alfred Kampfs fantastic “killing on the stock market,” the action is contained, and rather implausibly melodramatic. Antoinette, forbidden by her mother to attend the ball, wreaks her revenge by destroying all but one of the invitations when she is sent to post them, a sin masked by the fact that her English governess, Miss Betty—who was to have taken them to the post office but who was, instead, trysting with her boyfriend—maintains that she herself mailed the envelopes. As a result of Antoinette’s vicious act, the single guest at the Kampfs’ ball is their Cousin Isabelle, a resentful and impoverished music teacher to the aristocracy, who gloatingly witnesses the debacle. Madame Kampf, in whom the vanity of the socially aspirant is excruciatingly caught, is bitterly shamed by her apparent failure in society and turns to her despised daughter for consolation. It is somewhat difficult to suspend disbelief in this tale—Would the Kampfs really have expected their guests to appear, not having heard from any of them? Would they not have smelled a rat?—but the novella’s strength lies in its portrait of the relationship between Antoinette and her mother. Nemirovsky, whose relations with her own mother were strained, repeatedly creates monstrously selfish middle-aged women in the maternal role, women who rage at the passing of their beauty and who see material compensation as their due and their only hope (Gloria Golder is another such character). The novella’s interest lies, particularly, in the mind of young Antoinette, who sees herself and her parents more clearly than they possibly can, and yet whose immaturity prevents her from feeling any compassion: “No one loved her, no one in the whole world… But couldn’t they see, blind idiots, that she was a thousand times more intelligent, more precious, more perceptive than all of them put together—these people who dared to bring her up, to teach her? These unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches?” Antoinette is a dual creature, a living paradox, enacting at once her inevitable association with, and simultaneous detachment from, her parents: like Irene herself, she is caught between two worlds, one in which she can step back and condemn her parents as “unsophisticated, crass nouveaux riches,” and another in which, at the novella’s end, she eagerly accepts her mother’s needy embrace. That this young woman is condemned to live this paradox, and that this paradox awakens in her a terrible and inevitable rage, is what makes The Ball more than a simple melodrama: there is here, albeit in embryo, a novelist’s understanding of the intractable ironies of human nature of which Leon M. speaks so frankly in The Courilof Affair. Snow in Autumn appeared a year after The Ball, in 1931, but is the definitive version of a tale published in 1924, “La Niania,” a discreet homage to her grandmother, Rosa Margoulis, who had just fled from the USSR to France. It represents a departure of sorts for Nemirovsky, in that it tackles the Russian emigres’ flight to France from a different angle, and also in its choice of a servant as the protagonist. The Karine family is aristocratic, and the novel opens on their Russian estate as their two sons, Youri and Cyrille, depart for war against the Bolsheviks. The story focuses on Tatiana Ivanovna,

the household’s nanny, who has been with the Karine family for fifty-one years and who sees anew, in the departure of these young men, the departure and loss of her earlier charges, generations before. The unraveling that ensues—the loss of one son, the family’s retreat to Kiev and eventually to France, where they are forced to begin again with nothing—is painful to Tatiana Ivanovna chiefly as the loss of history. Long the repository of family lore and the keeper of family belongings, she carries the memory of the contents of every cupboard, of every piece of furniture, of every childhood incident on the lost Karine estate. But survival for the Karines requires a definitive break with their past, and Tatiana Ivanovna’s role becomes painfully obsolete. There is, as in David Golder, an intimation of the autobiographical in Snow in Autumn: the Nemirovskys did not have a large country estate or the former serfs who would have remained on such properties; but their fraught removal to France, and the agonies of starting over, are at least somewhat reflected in the Karine family’s trajectory. Loulou, the Karines’ twenty-year-old daughter, is, like Joyce Golder, a hard, cold young woman, cynical and greedy for pleasure; but unlike Joyce, whose petulance is that of a spoiled child, Loulou’s ferocity is born of all she has endured. At one point she breaks down, like a child, with her nanny: “Nianiouchka… I want to go home! Home, home!…Why have we been punished like this? We didn’t do anything wrong!” The Karines are different from the Golders in genuinely having had a home, and in having lost it, rather than having left voluntarily in search of something better. The strangeness of Nemirovsky’s life is that she could identify with both the Golders and the Karines, and she could write their stories with equal authenticity. She could even inhabit the mind of Tatiana Ivanovna, for whom the loss of identity—an identity bound up in a place, and in things, and in a long life’s history—proves insurmountable. The CourilofAffair is a political novel; but its analysis of politics is ultimately, as another biographer, Jonathan Weiss writes, “a reflection on the moral corruption of all politics and ideology.” Weiss further maintains, “It is clear that for Irene, the motivation for political action is not substantially different from the motivation of the businessman; in both cases, self-preservation and the willingness to sacrifice others for one’s own profit take precedence over human kindness and generosity,” but this reading is, I think, inaccurately harsh: the trajectory of Leon M.’s story records, in fact, a growth from unthinking political zeal into humanity and compassion, and thence into sorrowful cynicism, a recognition that it is possible fully to feel the agonies of the enemy and yet still to be forced, by history and circumstance, to show none of the mercy one feels. Leon says, “As long as we are on this earth, we have to play the game. I killed Courilof. I sent men to their deaths whom I realized, in a moment of lucidity, were like my brothers, like my very soul…” The range of emotions that Leon experiences for Courilof anticipates, clearly, the emotions experienced by Lucile for her German soldier in “Dolce,” the second section of Suite Francaise. Nemirovsky could evoke, so effectively, the contradictory emotional ramifications of war, even in the midst of war, because she had already known those contradictions in the Russian Revolution: they defined her life and her work. The Courilof Affair is not a direct antecedent to Suite Francaise, but it anticipates many of its themes. And in our own time of political instability and terrorism, it offers both a window upon the revolutionary mindset and, powerfully, hope for an antidote to that mindset. It is a book that, rather like Dostoevsky’s fiction, seems almost troublingly contemporary in its understanding of ressentiment and anomie. Readers discovering Nemirovsky in these pages for the first time will thrill to her acuity and her frankness, and will marvel at her ability to evoke scenes, both externally and in their unspoken interiority. Even though she considered herself a

French writer—and much about her work, formally and in its subject matter, is emphatically French—Nemirovsky also remains a deeply Russian writer, whose gifts draw upon the examples of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. She remains, as a woman and a writer, a contradiction who embraced her contradictions. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously said that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Nemirovsky’s entire life and her literary output were about reality’s duality, or multiplicity, and they constitute a stand— true, often beautiful, and in her own case, tragically doomed— against limitation, singleness, and impossibility. Fitzgerald went on to say, “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” In the courage of her writing, Nemirovsky undertook just that task. If, in our times, we need an example of why literature matters, even in the face of adversity and death, then Nemirovsky stands as that example. Already in these early works, she reveals herself to be a writer of the utmost seriousness, and of considerable importance, whose clarity in the face of complexity enlarges our capacity for compassion and expands our humanity. You can’t—in fiction or in life—ask for more than that. Claire Messud

NADOTTI, Maria, “Introduzione” a Il vino della solitudine, Roma, Newton-Compton, 2012 (ebook)

Gli uomini quali sono

  C’è un quadro di Klee che s’intitola Angelus Novus. Vi si trova un angelo che sembra in procinto di allontanarsi da qualcosa su cui fissa lo sguardo. Ha gli occhi spalancati, la bocca aperta, e le ali distese. L’angelo della storia deve avere questo aspetto. Ha il viso rivolto al passato. Dove ci appare una catena di eventi, egli vede una sola catastrofe, che accumula senza tregua rovine su rovine e le rovescia ai suoi piedi. Egli vorrebbe ben trattenersi, destare i morti e ricomporre l’infranto. Ma una tempesta spira dal paradiso, che si è impigliata nelle sue ali, ed è così forte che egli non può più chiuderle. Questa tempesta lo spinge irresistibilmente nel futuro, a cui volge le spalle, mentre il cumulo delle rovine sale davanti a lui al cielo. Ciò che chiamiamo il progresso, è questa tempesta. Walter Benjamin, Tesi di filosofia della storia,1940   Polarità

La vita di Irène Némirovsky, brevissima e crudele come la vicenda del secolo trascorso, si condensa in una serie di date e di luoghi che rifiutano di trasformarsi in geografia del passato e continuano a segnare il nostro comune vivere e sentire. Come se la ruota della storia vi si fosse inceppata.   1903, 11 febbraio, Kiev, Ucraina: nascita. 1913: trasferimento a San Pietroburgo.  1918, gennaio: fuga dalla Rivoluzione russa. Soggiorno in Finlandia, poi a Stoccolma.  1919, luglio: trasferimento in Francia.

1942, 13 luglio: arresto. 1942, 16 luglio: deportazione. 1942, 17 agosto, Auschwitz, Polonia: morte.   Tre strappi precoci, subiti. Al seguito di un padre banchiere, ricco e assente, e di una madre fatua e “distratta”. Infine, imprevista e definitiva, la rottura che la consegnerà “in quanto ebrea” – nonostante il successo di scrittrice, il vantaggio di classe, la conversione al cattolicesimo nel 1939 – alle mortifere contabilità dei purificatori nazisti e del complice governo di Vichy. Quest’ultima lacerazione, la più straziante, la più insensata, la separa da due figlie bambine e dal marito per proiettarla nell’orrore dello sterminio di massa che, come tante e tanti, non ha saputo o voluto prevedere, intuire, immaginare per sé. In mezzo, a fare da sfilacciata trama connettiva alla sua vicenda biografica e autoriale, una serie di polarità.  Il bilinguismo perfetto, che le permette di scrivere non nella lingua materna, il russo, bensì nella lingua d’adozione, il francese (la lingua della governante, stabile tenera madre sostitutiva), e di essere considerata a pieno titolo una scrittrice di Francia.  Il bilico spericolato tra Oriente e Occidente, tra strade e angiporti, palazzi e bazar delle favolose città che di lì a poco diventeranno parte dell’impero sovietico – Kiev, Odessa, San Pietroburgo, Mosca – e gli “ordinati” boulevard parigini e i grandi alberghi nizzardi della patria d’elezione.  La matrice ebraica, che non assume mai una valenza religiosa o spirituale, ma si palesa come una spietata conoscenza “dall’interno” della propria gente e spesso si fa ripugnanza, rifiuto, rigetto della propria origine o forse di una parte di sé. L’incerta e fluttuante vicenda di un privilegio di classe che, generato dalla ricchezza, è in balia delle alterne sorti del capitale e non può sedimentarsi se non nell’instabilità e nell’inquietudine, nell’affannoso e vizioso circolo accumulazione-perdita-accumulazione.  Il cosmopolitismo forzato, vale a dire l’obbligo di sentirsi a casa ovunque sapendo di non avere casa, perché la casa è ciò che la forza centrifuga della storia sottrae, nega, carbonizza, costringendo a vivere nel movimento, a un continuo partire.  Un’asimmetrica, funesta coppia parentale che spingerà l’autrice a tornare e ritornare – letteralmente a inchiodarsi – sul luogo di una scena primaria dove amore, sesso, potere, violenza sono un unico, inestricabile grumo di attrazione, odio, dipendenza, abuso. Il padre amato e lontano, procacciatore di beni e di bene, troppo presto perso; la madre rivale e nemica. Figura protettiva il primo; abisso di disamore e ostilità la seconda. L’immagine di sé che la figlia va costruendosi e il rapporto che stabilisce con i due sessi si plasmano su questa contraddizione, su questo irrevocabile apprendistato sentimentale che si riprodurrà diegeticamente in libri sempre più spietati. La scrittura come sfida furente al “destino femminile”, come alternativa al mestiere e al ruolo assegnati alle donne. Al lavoro a tempo pieno della “femmina” – madre, moglie, amante, mantenuta –, ingegnosa usuraia di se stessa e del desiderio che sa provocare e alimentare negli uomini, si contrappone l’opera della narratrice che indaga con sguardo fermo e bisturi affilato i vizi pubblici e privati della borghesia faccendiera, rapace, spregiudicata in cui è nata. Un successo editoriale e di pubblico che, nei primi anni Trenta del secolo scorso, la trasforma in femme célèbre e, nell’arco di pochi mesi, l’inizio di una cancellazione che ben presto la risucchierà in un cono d’ombra. Ne uscirà – grandiosamente, ma solo a distanza di oltre sessant’anni – grazie alle due figlie, Denise

Epstein e Élisabeth Gille, pazienti instancabili custodi della sua memoria e dei suoi numerosi inediti.   Macerie

Da/su questa biografia estrema, impastata di storia, geografia politica, economia e bloccata in una sorta di destinale impasse analitica, Némirovsky, poco più che ventenne, comincia a narrare. La sua è una scrittura che sembra farsi da sola, come se scaturisse da una vena creativa quasi fisiologica, e il suo talento di tessitrice di storie ha l’irruenza di un fenomeno di natura, la stessa inesorabile determinazione. Tra il 1923 e il 1942 redige un numero sterminato di pagine – romanzi, novelle, lettere, diari, schemi preparatori e appunti per opere in corso o a venire – e ovunque la sua mano è implacabilmente precisa, non può non esserlo. I materiali, le situazioni, i personaggi che trafigge con la penna e morde con le parole sono infatti variazioni su un unico tema: il disfacimento del patto sociale e dei legami d’amore, d’amicizia, di fiducia e l’instaurarsi (o il perpetuarsi?) di una barbarie che non prevede esenzioni.  Al centro delle sue narrazioni ci sono, come nelle favole, alcune situazioni fisse, dei veri e propri archetipi: una madre/matrigna che odia la figlia, per età destinata a rimpiazzarla sul mercato della carne e della seduzione; una figlia che la ricambia con altrettanto odio, non per invidia ma per desiderio di vendetta; un padre, spinto dalla sete di denaro, forse dalla bramosia che ne hanno le donne, disposto a dare la vita in cambio di quello che, modernamente, potremmo chiamare “potere d’acquisto”; una disperata, cupa corsa alla sopravvivenza e all’uscita dal fango della povertà e un simmetrico progressivo immiserirsi dei sentimenti. Nell’universo fantastico di Némirovsky non ci sono vie di scampo. I suoi libri nascono a ridosso di una voragine, in cui storia familiare, vicenda storica e invenzione letteraria si intersecano fino a confondersi. L’autrice, che potrebbe essere uno dei personaggi scaturiti dalla sua stessa penna, scruta quel baratro con assoluto disincanto, come se la lente di cui si serve non prevedesse la messa a fuoco della pietà, della solidarietà, della speranza.    Viene da lontano, dall’infanzia. Credere con tutto il cuore che la vita sia popolata da mostri [...]: una mischia orribile. 1

  È notte, nei suoi testi. Perfino la luce, il bianco della neve, è un abbagliamento di cui si muore. Il suo è un mondo strutturalmente in guerra, dove non possono esserci né vincitori né vinti, ma solo belligeranti, perché gli esseri umani, uomini e donne, sono contaminati e contaminanti.  Finanche i bambini sembrano avere subìto un contagio originario che non ammette perdono: testimoni non attoniti, già consapevoli, pronti a entrare nel gioco allo sterminio imbandito dalle famiglie. Bambini-mostro, intenti a preparare la vendetta-assassinio degli adulti che li hanno deturpati con il loro disamore. L’educazione è educazione a offendere, tradire, mentire, ingannare, sfruttare, abusare, approfittare.Mors tua vita mea.  La natura medesima, i luoghi, le città sono come appestati dai traffici degli umani, dalla loro ferocia, dalla loro incapacità di agire se non in base a un impulso hobbesiano alla sopravvivenza individuale.   

Nel buio saliva l’odore velenoso dei canali, che nessuno, dopo la rivoluzione di febbraio, aveva pensato a ripulire [...]. Sotto il peso delle acque la città si disintegrava, affondava lentamente: città di fumo, di sogni e di nebbia, che tornava al niente 2.   Ma se l’uomo teorizzato nel diciassettesimo secolo dal filosofo inglese Thomas Hobbes è una creatura egoista, pericolosa, bramosa di potere, un homo homini lupus, che tuttavia condivide con i propri simili l’interesse a deporre le armi per stipulare un contratto sociale che gli permetta di godere e non solo difendere i suoi beni, in Némirovsky sembra disattivata anche l’ipotesi mediatrice del patto sociale gestito da una forma-stato al di sopra delle parti. L’etica dei suoi personaggi è racchiusa in un’immagine folgorante:   A ciascuno la sua preda: secondo la sua astuzia e la sua forza 3.   Per i suoi «offesi» esseri umani i simili sono coloro «che si sono rotolati nella stessa melma» e l’unico legame vincolante è quello di sangue:   Non puoi cambiare il tuo corpo, non puoi cambiare il tuo sangue, né il tuo desiderio di ricchezza, né il tuo desiderio di vendetta 4.    È il sangue a determinare la vita delle passioni. Il cosiddetto libero arbitrio non è altro che l’ingannevole strumento del fato: ognuno va irresistibilmente verso la propria sorte credendo di sceglierla. La funzione dell’individuo, la sola che gli sia riconosciuta, è trovare e percorrere fino in fondo la strada che lo condurrà al suo destino, inscritto nel suo codice genetico. E il sangue e le relazioni di sangue sono fatali.   Soffriamo solo a causa del nostro sangue: di quello da cui proveniamo, o della carne e del sangue che abbiamo generato... Le storie di donne, le storie di denaro, passano, si dimenticano, ma quando qualcuno dei nostri vi è implicato, quella sola goccia di sangue in comune avvelena tutto. [...]  Era l’eredità di Dario, quell’inquietudine, implacabile, quella febbre sorda mescolata alle ossa, al suo sangue 5.    Il vincolo di sangue, unica tossica eccezione alla legge economica del più forte, fa esplodere un’altra contraddizione: l’essere si contrappone al volere, i doveri della coscienza all’obbligo incestuoso dell’omertà.    Anche se avesse ucciso o rubato, anche se il mondo intero lo abbandonasse, il nostro dovere sarebbe di proteggerlo, di amarlo e di aiutarlo... 6.   È la madre a parlare del padre/marito al figlio che, con l’idealismo passeggero dell’adolescenza, le risponde di non poter soffocare la propria coscienza. Ma il sistema patrilineare non si basa forse sul sangue? La trasmissione ereditaria da padre a figlio maschio delle proprietà, del nome e dei titoli non è forse uno dei meccanismi che alimentano l’economia di rapina che il capitalismo neoliberista porterà a un punto di perfezione? Cosa può, la coscienza, là dove il figlio è destinato a essere meglio del padre, perché il denaro accumulato da questi gli permetterà di non sporcarsi le mani come lui ha dovuto fare?

Ecco perché i romanzi di questa autrice il cui cognome porta in sé il marchio dei “senza pace” sono magistrali racconti dell’orrore, claustrofobici incubi a occhi aperti, come se la storia – passata, presente, futura – fosse un cumulo di macerie e gli esseri umani un branco famelico di cani o di lupi pronti a sbranarsi tra loro.  Senza eccezioni. Perfino chi potrebbe essere scambiato per “vittima” è responsabile, anche solo per passività, acquiescenza, mancanza di immaginazione, di ciò che subisce. E “eroi” e “martiri” sono figure patetiche, la cui funzione narrativa è di mettere meglio a fuoco la crudeltà, il talento per la ferocia, di chi li uccide, di chi – eliminando quei simulacri grotteschi di bontà e di altruismo – ristabilisce l’ordine affermando la legge del più forte.  Vittime, eroi, martiri sono figure ancora più abiette degli irredimibili “mostri” umani che li rendono tali, perché innocenza, generosità, disponibilità al sacrificio in nome di un valore più alto non sono che il sintomo di un deficit di vitalità, di un insufficiente attaccamento alla vita, di un’inclinazione alla morte.   Prima di tutto, vivere! Al diavolo gli scrupoli, i vili timori! Prima di tutto, conservare il respiro, il cibo, l’esistenza, la moglie, il figlio adorato! 7.   Ce n’è tutta una stirpe, in me, di affamati; non sono ancora... non saranno mai sazi! Non avrò mai abbastanza caldo! Non mi sentirò mai abbastanza al sicuro, abbastanza rispettato, abbastanza amato, Clara! Niente è più terribile che non avere denaro! Niente è più odioso, più vergognoso, più irreparabile della povertà! [...] Ho bisogno di denaro. Per difendermi. Per vivere. Per farti vivere 8.   Disorientamenti

Sommersi e non salvati, i personaggi disegnati con maestria da Irène Némirovsky sono privi di cielo e di orizzonte. Profetica e ignara osservatrice del farsi e disfarsi della storia, della sua ineludibile ripetitività, lei li tratteggia con pennellate gravide e impietose: satolli o affamati, costretti costantemente in un interno, aggrappati a qualche bene materiale, costituzionalmente refrattari alla dissipazione della felicità, monodimensionali, ossessivi, luridi, senza riscatto.  Nelle sue pagine le grandi trasformazioni, i rivolgimenti politici, le guerre somigliano più a catastrofi naturali, alla mano del destino che si abbatte sugli esseri umani, che al prodotto di una volizione. Eppure Némirovsky descrive come pochi altri ciò che sta sotto quegli eventi solo all’apparenza “inevitabili”: la cupidigia e l’opportunismo di alcuni, la passività e la ristrettezza di visione di molti, la soffocante indisponibilità a cogliere l’impercettibile segnaletica del mutamento, lo scontento dei più che alla fine si agglutina in gesto disperato e/o rigeneratore. E in mezzo coloro che la scampano sempre: non i ricchi, ma i faccendieri e i cinici, chi sa volgere a proprio vantaggio le tragedie dei più, cadere in piedi e partire per nuovi lidi, lasciandosi alle spalle i beni immobili che paralizzano e uccidono. Chi sa che, quando il vento gira, «l’unico rimedio auspicabile» è «andarsene». Perturbante, oggi, leggere in sequenza questi tre brani:    Il soffio della rivoluzione, che disperdeva a suo capriccio gli uomini e le cose sulla faccia della terra, portò i Karol in Francia nel luglio 1919 9.   

Non riesco più a vedere un’anima umana senza cercarvi o scoprirvi delle tare e dei vizi. Mi restano così poche illusioni, Clara, su questo mondo dell’Occidente che ho voluto conoscere, che ho conosciuto, per mia disgrazia forse e per disgrazia degli altri 10.    Mio Dio, cosa mi combina questo paese? Dal momento che mi respinge, osserviamolo freddamente, guardiamolo mentre perde l’onore e la vita 11.   L’iter è chiaro: all’illusione di appartenere alla patria/Francia, all’Occidente, Némirovsky sacrifica il suo ancestrale istinto alla fuga. Condannata al silenzio e all’invisibilità ancor prima che al campo di sterminio (le leggi antisemite varate nell’ottobre del 1940 dal governo di Vichy non le consentono più di pubblicare), con lucida determinazione trasforma la scrittura non in atto d’accusa, ma in sottile vendetta, in smascheramento. Come l’ignobile figura materna di tanti dei suoi racconti, sotto la sua penna il paese d’elezione resta senza trucco e belletto e si mostra nella sua oscena decrepitezza. Dietro l’eleganza e il savoir faire dei francesi, sotto il loro habitus culturale, appaiono meschinità, volgarità, grettezza, lo stesso gelido attaccamento alle cose che la scrittrice ha vivisezionato nella sua fiction.    Leggendo i testi di Némirovsky, anzi divorandoli e facendosene divorare – tale è infatti il tipo di lettura cui essi inducono –, capita di provare uno smarrimento simile a quello che si avverte quando ci si perde in un bosco o ci si spinge incautamente troppo al largo durante una mareggiata. Il paesaggio è familiare, eppure non ci sono più punti di riferimento. La natura ci circonda da tutti i lati, identica e potente. Impossibile uscirne, ma anche districarsi al suo interno. Ogni racconto, ogni novella, perfino i romanzi lunghi dell’autrice12 sono parte di un tutto molto più vasto, come l’albero o l’onda sono parte della foresta o del mare. Li si può guardare a uno a uno, nella loro singolarità, ma per capirli è necessario assumerli come insieme, ricostruire la loro unità e poi a poco a poco cercare gli spazi o intervalli che li separano. Alla lettrice e al lettore è richiesto un vero e proprio lavoro di individuazione e orientamento, indispensabile se non si vuole essere preda di un effetto di “impastamento” che impedisce di distinguere un personaggio dall’altro, una storia dall’altra, una temporanea disfatta o rinascita dalle successive. La teoria di figure immobilizzate nel movimento create da Némirovsky è infatti la visione caleidoscopica di un dramma privato e pubblico realmente attraversato e da cui è impossibile prendere distanza se non attraverso la ripetizione. Le sue avariate coppie coniugali o adulterine e i suoi tycoon sono modellati sulla falsariga di persone che hanno sbrecciato e corroso la sua esistenza, costringendola a costruirsi un’identità in negativo, un’identità-contro. I suoi piccoli Edipo-Elettra vendicatori somigliano a un autoritratto e la scrittura, la professione di scrittrice, a una personale, affilatissima, vendetta.   E la bambina era tornata al suo tavolo, e aveva ricominciato a scandire alla pallida fiamma della candela: «Racine descrive gli uomini come sono, Corneille come dovrebbero essere...» 13

  Némirovsky sceglie di stare dalla parte di Racine, ma lo fa con un accanimento che a tratti la acceca. Per vedere «gli uomini quali sono» bisogna amarli almeno un po’, forse semplicemente rispettarli, e innanzitutto accettarsi nella propria umana imperfezione. E invece lei, ebrea e donna, ha dei conti in sospeso con entrambe queste

sue identità: le ripugnano come una malattia ereditaria, una tara del corpo, una vergogna originaria.   Destino

Nei confronti del popolo ebraico, che osserva da agnostica, senza alcuna adesione alla sua tradizione religiosa e spirituale, l’autrice è spietata. Raramente si sono lette pagine più frementi di orrore per alcune presunte “caratteristiche ebraiche”: il gusto per gli affari, la capacità di risorgere continuamente dalle proprie ceneri grazie a una spregiudicata attitudine ai traffici, agli scambi, ai negozi, la paura della morte. Gli “ebrei” di Némirovsky sono addirittura riconoscibili dalle loro fattezze e dal loro vocabolario corporeo: hanno lineamenti rapaci, mani-artiglio leste ad afferrare e arraffare, corpi perennemente in movimento, svelti, furtivi, pronti a intrufolarsi nelle smagliature del sistema e a ricavarne ogni possibile vantaggio. Gli uomini trafficano e le loro donne (il loro destino) sono le uniche in grado di capirli, accettarli, accoglierli per ciò che sono, con una pienezza della passione e dei sensi che di per sé equivalgono a un “segno” identificativo, a una caratteristica cui non si sfugge.   [Fischl] Era in piedi sulla soglia della porta, un ebreucolo grasso, dai capelli rossi e la pelle rosa, l’aria comica, ignobile, un po’ sinistra, con gli occhi che brillavano d’intelligenza dietro gli occhiali sottili dalle stanghette dorate, la pancia, le gambette gracili, corte e storte, le mani da assassino che reggevano tranquillamente, incollato al cuore, un barattolo di porcellana pieno di caviale fresco 14.   Come era cambiato... Non aveva mai avuto quell’aspetto prima, pensò: enorme, ricurvo, sembrava un vecchio usuraio ebreo... E quella carne flaccida, tremante, con quell’odore di febbre e di sudore... 15.    Vestito con una vecchia palandrana grigia, il collo avvolto in una sciarpa di lana e in testa un vecchio cappello nero, consumato, assomigliava stranamente a un robivecchi ebreo di un qualche villaggio ucraino. A volte, camminando, sollevava la spalla con un movimento istintuale e stanco, come se si issasse sulla schiena un pesante fagotto di stoffe o di ferraglia 16.   «Sei un bruto! [...] Un bruto!... Una bestia! Non sei cambiato!... Sì, sei rimasto l’ebreuccio che vendeva stracci e ferraglia a New York con il fagotto in spalla. Te lo ricordi?». «E tu, ti ricordi di Kišinev e della bottega di tuo padre, l’usuraio, nel quartiere ebraico?... Non ti chiamavi Gloria, a quei tempi, eh?... Havké!... Havké!...» 17.   Con il suo ebraico terrore per la morte. [...] Ma è colpa mia se in tanti anni non ha saputo mettere insieme abbastanza denaro da morire tranquillo? 18.   Il vecchio ebreo Soifer, diffidente nei confronti del denaro che guerre e rivoluzioni possono trasformare di colpo in carta straccia, converte il suo capitale in gioielli, diamanti, perle, smeraldi: beni mobili che, in caso di necessità, possono sparire nell’orlo di un cappotto e fare tutt’uno con il corpo del fuggitivo. Alter ego di David

Golder, la sua filosofia è che «la miseria conserva l’ebreo come la salamoia l’aringa» 19 e    era di un’avarizia che sconfinava nella follia [...] Per tutta la vita aveva camminato sulla punta dei piedi per far durare di più le scarpe. Da qualche anno, siccome aveva perso tutti i denti, mangiava solo pappine, passati di verdura, per evitare la spesa di una dentiera 20.   Gli ebrei di Némirovsky non sono un gruppo unito da una fede religiosa, non sono una chiesa e neppure una comunità. Il loro credo sono gli affari e il loro volubile dio è il denaro, che incessantemente si disfa e si ricrea, cui nessuno può resistere, di cui tutti hanno bisogno. Dalla distanza siderale creata dal baratro della Shoah queste pagine paiono oggi un’intollerabile, temeraria espressione di «antisemitismo» (così lo si definirebbe se a praticarlo fosse un non-ebreo) o di «odio di sé» (così, invece, lo si chiamerebbe se a manifestarlo fosse un ebreo). Ai nostri giorni nessuno oserebbe, se non per aberranti ragioni politiche, scrivere frasi di questo tipo. Tuttavia sarebbe fuorviante e del tutto scorretto accusare Némirovsky di avere prestato la propria penna alle ragioni del nazismo e attribuirle una sorta di miopia storica21. Prima, quando l’inimmaginabile era inimmaginabile, era perfettamente legittimo che un artista dicesse la sua pur scomoda verità. Ecco perché è importante, oggi, contestualizzare l’opera di Némirovsky e non sottoporla col senno di poi a una sorta di ideologico revisionismo critico.    Maternale

Nei confronti delle donne – le “madri” – Némirovsky prova un vero furore. Odia la loro leggerezza, fatuità, vanità, la loro incapacità di amare, il loro bisogno di conferma e di protezione, il loro narcisismo. La figura femminile per eccellenza è la moglie adultera mantenuta nei lussi da un marito assente che tutto le concede: la “donna-fallo” da esibire, alla quale non si chiede nulla in cambio, neppure di amare i propri figli. Il suo tratto distintivo è l’apatia affettiva, una sorta di opacità dei sentimenti. Rare le eccezioni. La purezza, nell’universo di Némirovsky, non esiste e neppure l’onore. Sono in pochi a salvarsi, ad agire non in base a un proprio interesse o tornaconto, a scegliere di dare invece di prendere e pretendere: Maurice e Jeanne Michaud in Suite francese; più ambiguamente Tatjana Ivanovna, la balia di Come le mosche d’autunno, inchiodata per classe a un ruolo oblativo; Mademoiselle Rose, contraltare positivo della madre cattiva, in Il vino della solitudine.  In che posizione può collocarsi la donna-figlia rispetto a questa madre onnipotente, eppure dipendente dall’uomo? Il loro, per l’autrice, è un rapporto che non prevede reciprocità e condivisione e neppure complicità, ma solo concorrenza e esclusività.    Credimi, non si ama un uomo per lui stesso, ma lo si ama contro un’altra donna 22.   Tuttavia, per chiosare Luce Irigaray, l’une ne bouge pas sans l’autre e venire a patti con la propria madre equivale a negoziare – forse fare pace – con se stesse, attraversando la penombra o la terra desolata della preistoria femminile. Per farlo non basta avere accanto uomini innamorati o cavalieri serventi: va ristabilito il rapporto di

fiducia, si potrebbe dire “politico”, tra donne. Una storia appena iniziata, impensabile negli anni in cui Némirovsky affonda la penna in quel coagulo di pena originario.    Autobiografia

Come è capitato a quasi tutte le grandi artiste – scrittrici, pittrici, scultrici, musiciste, interpreti teatrali e cinematografiche – anche per Némirovsky la biografia è punto di accesso all’opera. Non solo perché, quando l’artista è donna, i critici tendono a ridurla alla dimensione esistenziale, ad attraversarne l’opera osservando dallo spioncino della vicenda privata. Ma perché le migliori artiste di sesso femminile non hanno mai separato l’opera dalla vita se non attraverso il formidabile atto del dare forma. Basti pensare ad alcuni nomi celebri: Artemisia Gentileschi, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Louise Bourgeois.  Sarebbe ingenuo tuttavia confondere opera e vita. Significherebbe trascurare o sottovalutare la potenza e l’unicità del gesto artistico, leggerlo come mera traduzione. Némirovsky, che non ha mai detto di sé in forma diretta, si espone provocatoriamente attraverso una serie di doppi e di maschere, femminili e maschili. Il suo genio consiste proprio nella capacità di non farsi divorare dalla realtà, di governarla attraverso regie narrative di confezione impeccabile, esplosive come piccole bombe avvolte in nastri di seta.  L’autobiografia – quella vera, quella di cui si è al contempo autrici e protagoniste, soggetto e oggetto – la scriverà, a oltre cinquant’anni dalla sua morte, la figlia minore, Élisabeth Gille che, nata nel 1937, l’ha conosciuta appena e quasi non la ricorda.  Guardando dalla torre del tempo – il “mirador”23 che dà titolo al suo libro – Gille va alla scoperta di Némirovsky perlustrandone i diari, le lettere, i testi ossessionati da una duplice macchia originaria. Donna e ebrea, mascolinizzata e arianizzata dal successo letterario, la madre che si mostra alla figlia sembra ignorare che non può esserci salvezza individuale. Che, come scriveva Fëdor Michajlovič Dostoevskij nel 1879, «se non si salvano tutti, a che vale che si salvi uno solo?». La figlia ricostruisce la biografia della madre con la forza dell’immaginazione e dell’empatia. Immedesimandosi in lei senza mai fondersi in lei, creando quella distanza che sola permette di vedere e di amare, di non prendere l’altra per una parte di sé, alternativamente adorata o odiata, ma inchiodata a sé come un doppio, un’ombra, da cui non ci si può separare. Attraverso un atto di vertiginosa, emozionante, mutuamente salvifica identificazione, la figlia scrive al posto della madre, facendola parlare in prima persona. E quell’«Io» in cui madre e figlia si incontrano è un fragile, titubante atto di ricomposizione, il tentativo di comprendere le ragioni dell’altra, di farsi madre della propria madre, spezzando la catena dell’odio e della competizione che condanna le donne a un’infanzia perenne.   La valigia

Immaginiamo ora la valigia di Némirovsky, quella che le figlie bambine porteranno con sé in una fuga di mesi, da un nascondiglio all’altro, per sottrarsi alla “soluzione finale” che tra l’agosto e il novembre del 1942 le ha lasciate orfane di entrambi i genitori. Dentro ci sono le fotografie della madre, i suoi manoscritti, i diari e i taccuini su cui, con calligrafia minuta e chiarissima, ha vergato i suoi racconti e annotato le sue

osservazioni: la narrazione su una pagina e le note a margine sulla pagina accanto. Un inferno ordinato, limpido, per tentare di dare risposta a un semplice, durissimo interrogativo: «Come mai, raggiunto un certo grado di tragico orrore, la mente umana, satura, reagisce con l’indifferenza e l’egoismo?».   MARIA NADOTTI       1 Irène Némirovsky, Il signore delle anime. 2 Ead., Il vino della solitudine. 3 Ead., Il signore delle anime. 4 Clara in Il signore delle anime, ma anche Ada in I cani e i lupi. 5 Irène Némirovsky, Il signore delle anime. 6 Ivi. 7 Ivi. 8 Ivi. 9 Irène Némirovsky, Il vino della solitudine. 10 Ead., Il signore delle anime. 11 Dalle pagine del diario. 12 Si vedano i romanzi Il vino della solitudine (1935), I cani e i lupi (1940) o Suite francese. Quest’ultimo, un’opera incompiuta scritta febbrilmente nel 1940-41 e pubblicata in Francia solo nel 2004, riunisce i primi due atti di un’ambiziosa «sinfonia in cinque movimenti» che doveva narrare, quasi in presa diretta, il destino di una nazione, la Francia, sotto l’occupazione nazista. Il modello, come scrive l’autrice nei suoi taccuini, è Guerra e pace di Tolstoj. 13 Irène Némirovsky, Il vino della solitudine. 14 Ead., David Golder. 15 Ivi. 16 Ivi. 17 Ivi. 18 Ivi. 19 Ivi. 20 Ivi. 21 Si veda Edward Rothstein, Ambivalence as Part of Author’s Legacy, in «The New York Times», 20 ottobre 2008. La polemica scoppia a seguito della mostra Woman of letters. Irène Némirovsky & Suite française, tenutasi dal 24 settembre 2008 al 30 agosto 2009 presso il Museum of Jewish Heritage di New York. 22 Irène Némirovsky, Il vino della solitudine. 23 Élisabeth Gille, Mirador. Irène Némirovsky, mia madre, a cura di Cinzia Bigliosi, trad. it. di Maurizio Ferrara e Gennaro Lauro, Fazi, 2011. Presentazione

  Pubblicato dall’editore Albin Michel nel 1935, Il vino della solitudine è il primo romanzo palesemente autobiografico di Irène Némirovsky, di certo il più personale. Ne è protagonista – e indiretta voce narrante – Hélène, figlia unica di Bella e Boris Karol, prototipo delle tante nefaste coppie coniugali e parentali con cui la scrittrice ha inciso le pagine dei suoi libri. In apertura la vediamo, bambina di otto anni, seduta a tavola

con i genitori, i nonni materni e la signorina Rose, la governante francese. Nel «silenzio di quella sonnolenta città di provincia, sperduta nel cuore della Russia», la sala da pranzo è l’ambiente ideale per mettere in scena da subito l’acuminato triangolo edipico che dà forma all’intero romanzo. Bella, che non è «nata per fare la brava mogliettina borghese placida e soddisfatta», è una madre-matrigna, algida, fatua, cattiva. Mentre Boris, un «oscuro ebreuccio» che diventerà miliardario all’ombra della Grande guerra e della Rivoluzione d’ottobre, è un padre tenero, ma assente, troppo innamorato della moglie per schierarsi dalla parte della figlia, troppo preso dalla sua unica vera passione – non il denaro, bensì il rischio, il gioco in sé – per proteggerla. La mite signorina Rose, personaggio chiave da cui Hélène impara ad amare e a lasciarsi amare, appartiene a ciò che può sparire da un giorno all’altro e non tornare più. E per i piccoli la speranza che le persone amate e perse ricompaiano può trasformarsi in tortura. La vita della bambina, «mutevole, instabile, malcerta… in balìa della madre», scorre parallela ai profondi rivolgimenti storici dell’epoca. Nell’estate che precede la guerra Hélène compie dodici anni. In quei mesi, mentre il padre fa fortuna in un giacimento d’oro siberiano, vive a Nizza con la madre e la governante. La Francia è già diventata il suo luogo d’elezione, la sua «oasi di pace», l’antidoto a un «paese barbaro» in cui non si sente del tutto a casa. Eppure di lì a poco, nell’autunno del 1914, viene riportata in Russia, a Pietroburgo, dove il padre è adesso in affari. Sono anni beati per chi considera la guerra un’occasione. Tutto è in vendita e tutto è rivendibile, perfino i ritratti di inesistenti antenati o una partita di cannoni spagnoli del 1860. Si tratta di comprare il comprabile e poi di piazzarlo con le armi della persuasione o della corruzione. Le pagine in cui Némirovsky descrive questo demi-monde di faccendieri, ministri e uomini d’affari sono pervase di un’ironia irresistibile. Il montaggio di scene e dialoghi assume il ritmo frenetico e esilarante di una commedia dove non ci sono vittime e neppure colpevoli, ma solo fameliche, sguaiate maschere dell’ingordigia. Un indemoniato balletto spastico, che l’autrice contrappone sfrontatamente all’altra commedia che si consuma sotto gli occhi dell’ormai adolescente Hélène: l’adulterio della madre nella casa del padre, quasi un rituale d’epoca. Allo scoppiare della rivoluzione, la famiglia – allargata ad accogliere anche Max, l’amante di Bella – fuggirà in Finlandia e da lì, nel 1919, definitivamente in Francia. Il ménage à trois tra la madre, il padre e Max sarà il terreno su cui si completerà l’apprendistato sentimentale e emotivo di Hélène. La sua “vendetta”, che potrebbe esprimersi nella semplice riproduzione del modello materno, troverà altre vie, più originali e impervie. E la scrittura si rivelerà uno strumento salvifico, che dà leggerezza e agilità al pensiero, trasformando le lacrime in fiori di ghiaccio.   M.N.