David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn & The Courilof Affair (2008) Read Free Page A

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