Andrei Makine's "Prisoner of the Scarlet Dream": Russia's Call

Prisoner of the Scarlet Dream

by Andrei Makine

Grasset, 414 p., €23

The great labyrinthine organs of the novelist Andreï Makine this time accompany the trajectory of a worker from the North of France, born in 1918, who left in 1939 to tread the homeland of socialism in which he had faith. But this Lucien Baert, during the organized trip where everything is a masquerade, is taken against by the official guide for being too curious. The visitor is then forgotten on the way, before living a Stalinist ordeal. Here he is in a camp, then, to redeem himself, a soldier cannon fodder when the Red Army contains the German invasion of 1941. He gets out of it thanks to a macabre stroke of luck, experiences relegation until 1957, then settles near Arkhangelsk, sheltered from the system; in one of these Soviet crevices where Makine has camped so many of his characters for thirty-five years.

In this godforsaken place, in the 1990s, a French team arrives with a view to a necessarily predatory report. The director's frenetic vulgarity breaks its teeth. Having missed his prey, he runs away, forgetting his translator on the spot. The latter discovers the life of Lucien Baert as he has recorded it in notebooks. And what a life!

Decadence

From 1967 to 1974, the outcast managed to return to France, where he published his testimony, a sort of missing link between Kravchenko's I Chose Freedom and Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago . But the Soviet antihero cannot stand the irresponsible cowardice of the French revolutionaries in rabbit skins. He returns to the USSR, witnesses its collapse and then the mafia horror that is unleashed under Yeltsin – the novel stops prudently before Putin's arrival, while letting us understand that someone was needed to restore order...

Andrei Makine is at his best in the Russian side, so romantic is it to paint with empathy "lives torn apart, fabulously complex and teetering on the edge of final erasure" . Stigmatizing the spoiled children of the decadent West offers fewer literary outlets. However, the author does not content himself with shaking up the French greasy pole. He pleads for a transcendental altruism, which only the old, worn-out Russia has been able to preserve.

The novel, which plays on all registers of memory, is also traversed by the question of languages ​​and what they carry of the intimate. So much so that one wonders what a fiction by Andreï Makine on eternal France written in Russian would give.