Emmanuel Carrère

Emmanuel Carrère (1957), the French author of The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, Yoga and V13 tells his own family history in his new book Kolkhoz, which will be published at the end of September. Four generations, a century and a half, and a family that repeatedly finds itself in the middle of European history.

Carrère begins with his parents. His father Louis, who liked to open speeches with ‘Tonight, we improvise’, spent years researching the family genealogy. His mother was Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, a leading Western expert on Russia and the Soviet Union, who died in 2023 at the age of 94. She was born in Paris, the daughter of a Georgian father and a German-Russian mother, into a family that had lost everything after the Russian Revolution. She would later devote her own life to the country her family came from and become the first woman to head the Académie Française.

In Kolkhoz, Carrère goes back to Russia and Georgia, to the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russians who fled to Europe. He follows his family through two world wars, the Soviet Union and its collapse, all the way to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But amid all that history are simply his parents, grandparents and great-grandparents: love affairs, marriages, arguments, secrets, people who disappear and stories that take on a life of their own within a family.

That search for what really happened, and what you then make of it as a writer, runs through much of Carrère’s work. For The Adversary: A True Story of Monstrous Deception, he wrote about Jean-Claude Romand, who spent eighteen years pretending to be a doctor before eventually murdering his wife, children and parents. For V13, Carrère spent months in the courtroom during the trial over the Bataclan attacks of 13 November 2015 in Paris. In Kolkhoz, for once, he does not have to look to someone else for his subject. His own family is enough.