When memory becomes a project
At the closing event of Festivaletteratura 2026, Gabriele Romagnoli confronts Emmanuel Carrère with a series of probing personal questions, setting the tone for a conversation that is as intimate as it is demanding. The discussion revolves around the themes of Carrère’s latest autobiographical undertaking, Kolchoz, his family history and his relationship with his mother. But also geopolitics, Putin’s Russia and the war in Ukraine. These themes are more closely linked than they appear, as Carrère’s mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse (née Zourabichvili) was a renowned historian of Soviet and Russian history and Perpetual Secretary of the Académie Française from 1990 until her death in 2023.
As Romagnoli put it, the book is an attempt at “turning memories into a project at an age (68) when one has more memories than projects.” These are both firsthand and secondhand memories, passed down as links in a chain, exploring the “vertical axis” of an individual’s relationship with the world. Using writing as a means of inquiry, Carrère came to know his parents. He confessed that, until their deaths, he would never have imagined becoming interested in writing his family saga.
The unexpected is one of the principles guiding Carrère’s work. In this sense, he inverts Truffaut's maxim. While for Truffaut success lies in minimising the gap between the film on the screen and the one you first imagined, Carrère is happiest when the two are as far apart as possible.
Fiction, then, can inadvertently become a tool for uncovering the “transgenerational unconscious." Years after writing a novel about a man who shaves off his moustache and unravels when no one notices, Carrère discovered that one of his mother’s most traumatic memories was her last glimpse of her father. He was a collaborator with the German occupation and he shaved off his moustache to evade the authorities. Hélène could not recognise him. When Emmanuel later shared this parallel with her, she replied: “Frankly, you've taken psychoanalysis a bit too far...”
The conversation touched on the more affectionate sides of their relationship, like her habit of gifting him expensive cashmere sweaters as a way of “keeping him warm”, as well as their political differences. His mother tended to overlook Putin’s more extreme statements. A week before the invasion of Ukraine, she still believed him a rational actor who would never take such a step. Carrère, by contrast, despite being “easily influenced, wary of his own opinions, and a priori inclined towards nuance", makes an exception here for there is “a clear aggressor and a victim, an imperfect democracy and a dictatorship.” “Tolstoy’s masterpiece has been given a new title: Special Military Operation and Peace,” he jokes.
In times of geopolitical turmoil, in Ukraine and beyond, Carrère opens Kolchoz by asking what the point of writing even is. Romagnoli, haunted by the same question, puts it to him directly. Carrère responds by citing Ian McEwan on optimism as a duty or rather pessimism in one's thoughts, optimism in one's actions. Collating his family saga is as an act of optimism, then, turning memory into a project.
