Le Testament Research Articles

Quotidien et la guerre : adaptation et survie dans La vie d’un homme inconnu et Le testament français d’Andreï Makine

This article explores the representation of everyday life in contemporary writing as a survival mechanism in the face of traumatic historical events in the novels Le testament français (1995) and La vie d’un homme inconnu (2009) by Franco-Russian writer Andreï Makine.

Poti do literarne interpretacije: skica ob Francoskem testamentu Andreïa Makina

In the article an interpretive tool/framework is presented that attempts to aid in-depth reading. To illustrate this tool/framework, the article takes this year’s baccalaureate text, the novel Le testament français by Andreï Makine. Referring to this novel the article outlines the individual levels of interpretation and specifically addresses the analytical part of understanding texts, which, with slow, thorough reading, placement in a broader context and the determining of the theme through the structure of excerpts from the text, represents a framework for literary interpretation. Attention is drawn to the most important characteristics of the external construction of Le testament français (genre syncretism, the significance of the title and the introductory citations), the difficulty of determining the theme (of an excerpt) of the text (isotopy, topic, key words, principal and secondary themes) and certain evident formal characteristics (smaller units, the relationship between these units, lexicon, parts of speech, the use of verb tenses, tropes, means of verbalisation, narrative technique, the category of space and time, the narrator).

Diaspora and Trauma: The Exophonic Writing in Le Testament Français and Persepolis

Diaspora and Trauma: The Exophonic Writing in Le Testament Français and Persepolis

Conserving Africa’s Eden? Green Colonialism, Neoliberal Capitalism, and Sustainable Development in Congo Basin Literature

Starting with European colonization, African natural resources in particular and nature in general have been coveted and exploited mainly in the interest of Euro-American industrialized countries, with China as a recent major player from Asia. Interestingly, the incessant quest by some Western NGOs, institutions, and governments to protect and conserve African nature not only are inspired by ecological and climatic concerns but also often tend to propagate a false image of Africa as the last Eden of the earth in order to control Africa’s resources. Using literary texts, this article argues that some Euro-American transnational NGOs and some of their governments sometimes conspire with some African governments to spread global capitalism and green colonialism under the pretext of oxymoronic sustainable development as they attempt to conserve a mythical African Eden. Utilizing three novels and one play from the Congo Basin, namely In Koli Jean Bofane’s Congo Inc.: Le Testament de Bismarck (2014), Assitou Ndinga’s Les Marchands du développement durable (2006), Étienne Goyémidé’s Le Silence de la forêt ([1984] 2015), and Ekpe Inyang’s The Last Hope (2011), I contend that such Euro-American environmental NGOs and their governments sometimes impose and sustain fortress conservation (creation of protected areas) in the Congo Basin as a hidden means of coopting Africa’s nature and Africans into neoliberal capitalism. For the most part, instead of protecting the Congo Basin, green colonialists and developmentalists sell sustainable development, undermine alternative ways of achieving human happiness, and perpetuate epistemicide, thus leading to poverty and generating resentment among local and indigenous populations. As these literary texts suggest, nature conservation and sustainable development in the Congo Basin should not be imposed upon from the outside; they should emanate from Africans, tapping into local expertise, and indigenous and other knowledge systems.

Anthroponymes et toponymes dans Le testament français d’Andreï Makine

Having emigrated from France to Russia, Charlotte Lemonnier has survived the cruelties of the Stalinist regime and the Second World War. Maintaining great serenity of soul, she lives freely among the inhabitants of a small village in Siberia, conveying to her grandson Alyosha a vivid image of the freedom available in France as well as a feel for the French language. The adolescent tries to reconcile Charlotte’s tales with the Russian mentality and the hardships of life in Russia, but fails in his aspirations, particularly in the domain of eroticism. He eventually emigrates to France, where he seeks to overcome Anthroponymes et toponymes dans Le testament français d’Andreï Makine 125 his disappointment by writing novels in French. Through Charlotte’s posthumou letter, Alyosha realizes that he was born in a gulag as the fruit of a coercive sexual relationship imposed on an imprisoned female kulak.The present study is based on the hypothesis that poetonyms contribute significantly to the constitution of the meaning of literary texts. Despite the centrality of literary names in Makine’s novel, however, its poetonyms have not yet been studied in any detail. I will therefore analyse symbolic, etymological, historic, geographic, anagrammatic aspects, etc. of the most important anthroponyms and toponyms that occur in this novel (Alyosha, Charlotte, Pashka, Félix Faure / Atlantide, Boyarsk, Saranza, Stalinka …). By combining the different names and placing them in their French and Russian linguistic contexts, I will show that there is a movement from one cultural background to the other. Thus, through name configuration in particular, Dreams of My Russian Summers portrays a multicultural migration between France and Russia – between East and West. Dreams of my Russian Summers is a Bildungsroman that encompasses several issues: identity formation (what shall I be: Russian, French, cosmopolitan?); sentimental education (love, what is it?); disappointment; and, finally, awareness of reality.]

Transcending the Vernacular in Fictional Portraits of Translators

This essay examines depictions of translation in three novels by contemporary translingual writers: Andreï Makine’s Le testament français (1995), Michael Idov’s Ground Up (2009) and Olga Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt (2013). All three authors are native speakers of Russian who write literary works in a non-native language and thus belong to a growing number of translingual writers from the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union. In each of the selected novels the narrator-protagonist is an immigrant who reflects upon the translingual condition, i.e. the practical and existential challenges of speaking, writing and living in a non-native language. Translation is intrinsic to the plots, characterization and themes of these novels, all of which depict language-switching in various contexts. The Russian protagonist of Makine’s Le testament français writes in French and resorts to the subterfuge of a pseudotranslation in order to get his books accepted by a Paris publisher. Idov’s Ground Up chronicles the business failure of a Viennese-style café in New York along with the narrator’s failure to realize the cosmopolitan ideal that it embodies. Grjasnowa’s Der Russe ist einer, der Birken liebt portrays the challenges faced by a polyglot interpreter who aims for professional mobility in a globalized world. In each of the novels, translation is associated with performance and deception, serving also as a metaphor for translingual experience. Drawing on Alexander Beecroft’s concept of ecologies of literature – in particular, vernacular, cosmopolitan, national and global literary ecologies – the analysis considers how these novels depict translation and circulation in various contexts, including everyday communication, business ventures and literary markets. I argue the fictional characters’ ideals and approaches to language-switching can be understood in terms of vernacular, cosmopolitan and global modes.

The Digital Griotte: Bessora’s Para/Textual Discourses on Identity Politics and Neocolonialism in Contemporary France

This article examines Bessora’s literary and digital criticism of postcolonial France, particularly in her first novel, 53 cm, and on her website, Tendre peau de vache. Bessora’s use of digital media in particular allows her to chronicle unofficial discourses on immigration, migration, and identity politics in France as alternative textual productions to her printed novels. Since there is a gap in academic studies regarding author websites and their contents, this study aims to start a conversation on the discursive function of an author’s digital textual productions. Following Jean Baudrillard’s theory in The Spirit of Terrorism according to which a terrorist act is successful when it distances itself from the real and exalts itself in the realm of the symbolic, this article argues that Bessora’s digital discourses on the post-Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack effectively denounce the disappearance of the real in French culture in favor of ideals such as the #jesuischarlie movement. From the publication of 53 cm in 1999 to her commentaries on France’s alienation of the lowest socio-economic class in Le Testament de Nicolas (2016), the self-proclaimed griotte’s print and digital productions complement each other and bring the reader closer to an understanding of institutional neocolonialist practices in France.

Globalisation Discourse and Postcolonialism

This paper addresses the relationship between Colonialism and Globalisation as raised in In Koli Jean Bofane’s novel Congo Inc. Le testament de Bismarck . It draws upon the theory of decolonization by Achille Mbembe to investigate the way the novel represents Congo and its natural resources as the beginning, but also the result of colonial claims from Europe. The paper also questions the postcolonial relationship between Europe and Africa on the basis of the encounter between the young Congolese hero of the novel and the European Aude Martin and is consequently addressing the issue of colonial memory from a postcolonial perspective. It raises the argument that Bofane’s narration of an African present is the deconstruction of the topos of a postcolonial Africa caught in nostalgic cant, for it represents Isookanga, the Pygmy, as a perfect master of imagination in the sense Appadurai puts it.

L’Écriture en langue étrangère comme pratique et comme poétique: le cas de deux écrivains « francographes », Nancy Huston et Andreï Makine

This article examines the claims made by translingual writers Nancy Huston and Andreï Makine about the literary function of the foreign language, and also analyses how the poetic potential of foreign words is thematized in their fiction. It focuses on two novels which portray artistic trajectories in search of a language distinct from the imperfect words of everyday expression, be it through a nostalgically opaque language of childhood as in Le Testament français, or through an exploration of the meeting point of music and language as in Lignes de faille. While both writers emphasize the defamiliarizing function of the foreign language which, for Huston in particular, draws attention to its material form, their novels shift the site of linguistic defamiliarization from formal linguistic innovation to bilingual perception, which is likened to a ‘magic’ of words, an ‘optical illusion’ which serves to preserve childhood wonder and sensitivity.

Le Testament by Jean Meslier: the Pioneering Work of the Militant Atheism in France

Studia Historica Gedanensia » 2016 » Tom 7 (2016) » Le Testament by Jean Meslier: the Pioneering Work of the Militant Atheism in France A A A

Dying to Be Immortal: Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), a French poet and filmmaker, adapted the Greek myth of Orpheus and produced three movies centered on it, which are known as the Orphic trilogy: Le Sang d’un poete (1930), Orphee (1950), and Le Testament d’Orphee (1960). His films incorporate features of Neo-classicism and Surrealism to present the main themes of art, love, and death in the Orphic myth. Death, above all, turns out to provide him with the vigor of living as a poet because it is the way to maintain the real self, his unconscious. Hence, to Cocteau, death is transcendental. He created his personal myth by communicating between the public and the private spheres, through filmmaking and his unique artistic style in the hope to also break down the barrier between the living and the dead like Orpheus. What Cocteau yearned for was not the immortality of a conscious hero as that in the traditional myths, but of an unconscious poet, not confined by any rules.

Postwar Renoir: Film and the Memory of Violence

Colin Davis's second book-length study of Jean Renoir picks up chronologically where his excellent earlier work on the pre-war Renoir left off. Here he engages with a post-war Renoir, and with films that are ‘subtle, searching, complex works which have been underrated and understudied’ (p. 5). His focus on the Hollywood war years and beyond, including Renoir's international production Le Fleuve, the trilogy of ‘spectacle’ films, his work for television, and the novels of the final years proves a fascinating read. It is a very welcome, coherent study of the second — and too often judged lesser — half of Renoir's long career. Davis sets out to prove that the common criticism of these films' seeming silence on major political and ideological issues such as the memory of the Second World War and the Algerian War of Independence is misguided. Availing himself of trauma theory (in a broad sociohistorical sense), as well as Stanley Cavell's contention that films ‘know’ themselves and what they are doing, Davis offers a compelling series of interpretations that portray the post-war Renoir as ‘less serene, less humanist, more political and darker’ (p. 7). These works contain silences that entertain the ideological ‘prospect of traumatic collapse’ (p. 10). The disastrous reception of La Règle du jeu made Renoir wary of future audiences; the subsequent films knowingly protect themselves from such dangers. For example, French Cancan's showy and light-hearted surface is an indication that it knows ‘that a public can be bought only through a sacrifice of integrity’ (p. 6). Davis astutely uncovers evidence of social trauma in the films and novels while also exposing Renoir's lack of affection for his characters and loss of connection with his audience, an unthinkable situation in the pre-war films. In a chapter on murder in L'Étang tragique, L'Homme du Sud, and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre, he tracks the insidious progression towards the manifestation of covert violence in society, while the films themselves are wise enough to deliver up deceptively happy Hollywood endings. The depiction of social violence in Le Journal d'une femme de chambre takes a more symbolic turn in another ‘unsuccessful’ Hollywood film. The fractured failure, La Femme sur la plage, with a Second World War backdrop, is both a very personal and historically anchored representation of trauma, as the main character suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Davis contends that the film's greatness lies in its ‘accommodation with disaster’ — there is ‘neither cure nor closure’ (p. 50), a stance that seems to characterize Renoir's later work. The wealth of evidence in Davis's excavations of sociohistorical trauma should put to rest any notion of a somewhat passive, universalizing, and ‘humanistic’ post-war Renoir. For example, Le Caporal épinglé and the play Carola contain occluded references to torture in the Algerian War of Independence; Le Testament du docteur Cordelier alludes to a post-fascist world consumed by the ‘ongoing traumas of decolonization’ (p. 89). This study compels us to respond not as a frivolous public or as a dismissive critic, but to engage fully with the social, political, and historical import of Renoir's post-war œuvre.

Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre par Murielle Lucie Clément

the theory of Michel de Certeau and Gayatri Spivak and with frequent reference to works by Jacques Derrida, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Sigmund Freud, Bruyère uses case studies to explore the limits of theoretical fiction as a source of historical investigation. Recognizing the risks involved in mixing ethnography with history and literature, Bruyère is careful to focus upon self-reflective texts that are conscious of the process of their own production. The result is a thought-provoking (albeit perhaps overly dense and linguistically convoluted) study of historiographical invention and the importance of recognizing the very limits of historiography. Following a general introduction concerned with the place of Francophone studies among university disciplines, Bruyère examines examples from de Certeau, Spivak, Mudimbe, Derrida, and Marin in order to point to césures, or gaps, these works have in common, traces of past paroles, archives that are silent, absent bodies calling to be read—all stories of transfer involving substitutions of theoretical fictions which historians must ultimately recognize as inevitable and yet necessary. In the second chapter, Jean de Léry’s sixteenth-century travel narrative offers a point of departure for consideration of the silences of the colonial text and of the intrinsic fragility of the documentary impulse when faced with unstable manuscripts, gazes, and locations. The third chapter— arguably the strongest—examines visual representations of le sauvage (and ‘savage’ alterity), carefully reading différence in the anachronistic re-presentation that is mediated by the production of image and the retreat of the ethnographer from the scene. A chapter on Patrick Chamoiseau and the mal d’archive highlights the way in which fiction engages with bones, ghosts, and absent bodies and the imprints they leave behind. A final chapter on the film Allah Tantou examines apocryphal inscriptions and absent witnesses in the context of filial memory. This book is concerned with fundamental desires at the core of the study of history: desire for a speaking body, for presence, for contact with an Other, for transmission of knowledge, for an origin. Seduced by what is missing, the historian and the literary figure alike must recognize the fragility of the historical project, constantly re-interrogating the status of their own discursive intervention as being located somewhere between knowledge and invention, and remembering all that such a project has already forgotten. Marred by occasional typographical errors and repetitions, La différence francophone may nonetheless offer future fields of research within the discipline of literary history even as it calls into question the very notion of that discipline. Sonoma State University (CA) Suzanne C. Toczyski Clément, Murielle Lucie. Andreï Makine: l’ekphrasis dans son œuvre. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. ISBN 978-90-420-3403-7. Pp. 158. $41. Makine, born in Siberia in 1957, has been living and publishing in Paris since 1987. He gained international attention with his fourth novel, Le testament français (1995), 218 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 219 which won the Prix Goncourt. Most of Makine’s writing is autobiographical, a creative blend of life in Russia and France. In his efforts to write about and capture Soviet life, Makine weaves in descriptions and commentaries considered“non littéraires”: photographs , films, and music (7). In approaching Makine’s texts, Clément works with the idea of ekphrasis, as theorized by Mitchell and Genette: “une représentation verbale d’une représentation visuelle” for photographs and films and “une représentation verbale d’une représentation auditive” for music (20). Following Bal as well, Clément argues that ekphrasis is “un point de focalisation dans les textes. [...] un point de concentration dans lequel Makine focalise le sens de ses romans” (20). This book is divided into three chapters: les ekphraseis photographiques, les ekphraseis filmiques, and les ekphraseis musicales. Within each chapter, Clément examines several functions of ekphrasis,which at times overlap.The first chapter on photographs and the final chapter on music are arranged similarly by function (psychological, structural, rhetorical, and ontological). Clément’s second chapter is, however, a series of descriptions of films, both real and imagined, as well as her discussion of their various functions. The rhetorical function can be seen in Makine’s...

“La simultanéité du présent”: Memory, History, and Narrative in Andreï Makine’s Novels Le Testament français and Requiem pour l’Est

This article examines the theme of memory in Andrei Makine’s novels Le testament francais (1995) and Requiem pour l’Est (2000). Drawing upon Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology of memory in La memoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000), the article identifies two distinct modes of memory reflected in the novels. The first mode entails a conscious attempt to remember a past event; the second mode comprises a narrative evocation of the past. The article argues that in depicting different modes of remembrance, the novels privilege intersubjective, narrated memory, representing it as capable, when coupled with imagination and aesthetic experience, of recreating the past.

La Belle est la Bête: Cocteau's Hybrid Human-Animals

Within Jean Cocteau's varied æuvre, we find a number of hybrid characters: the Sphinx and a centaur-like horse/man first appear in the plays “La Machine Infernale” and “Orphée” respectively and then reappear in Cocteau's final film, Le Testament d’Orphée. But his most famous hybrid creature manifests in La Belle et la bête: La Bête is alternatively human and animal. Animal ferocity masks la Bête's inner beauty, much as an elaborate mask conceals the physical beauty of actor Jean Marais. La Bête, perhaps Cocteau's best-known creation, exists in a liminal state that inspires first fear, but later affection and even love. As in the original narrative by Madame Leprince de Beaumont, when la Bête transforms into Prince Charming, Belle is confused and perhaps even deceived; she loves the animal, not the human who appears before her. After examining early depictions of human-animal figures in his theatrical works and films, this paper focused on Cocteau's imagining of la Bête as a profound depiction of hybridity. Ultimately, these hybrid creatures underscore a theme that pervades Cocteau's æuvre: a true love relationship is all but impossible in this life because of myriad obstacles; the hybrid condition serves as yet another barrier to be overcome.

Cent vies et des poussières by Gisèle Pineau

PINEAU, GISÈLE. Cent vies et des poussières. Paris: Mercure de France, 2012. ISBN 978-27152 -2951-8. Pp. 290. 19,80 a. Pineau’s novel is a logical development in the trajectory of her prolific oeuvre and yet surprises at moments with its audacity. While several of this Guadeloupean writer’s better-known works, notably Un papillon dans la cité and L’exil selon Julia, have dealt with the alienation of exile and immigration, this eighth novel takes on the grim realities of a poor urban community, Ravine claire, which spills over with challenges and sadness in a postcolonial, postmodern world. As in her earlier works, Pineau’s protagonists are women of several generations living under one roof, narrating their stories from varying temporal and psychological vantage points, but intersecting in the precarious space of the Guadeloupean case, or shack. Gina Bovoir lives with her ailing mother and her seven children, all by different fathers, and experiences no greater joy than when she is expecting. The churning cycle of childbirth that is represented in the microcosm of Gina’s home has become, in essence, another addiction in a ghetto that is filled with countless addictive manifestations—drugs, alcohol, sex, and consumerism , to name a few. Her mother fading into dementia, her eldest children disappearing into prison and prostitution, her youngest past the point of infant dependence, Gina constantly longs to escape into the sweet promise of a newborn . Sharon, Gina’s adolescent daughter and the novel’s other protagonist, wishes her mother dead rather than see her further ensconced in this grotesque version of maternity. Sharon longs for the time when she will be able to leave her family behind and turns her attentions to the nation to the north that is about to inaugurate its first black president. At the same time that the women’s narratives evoke the struggles of everyday life in postcolonial Guadeloupe, their lives are also infused with the legacy of slavery, racism, and the exploitation of the plantation economy. Pineau’s tendency to incorporate temporal shifts and overlapping narratives in order to remind her readers of the present’s debt to the past finds its central metaphor in the family home itself, which has been built on the site of a maroon massacre. Space and chronology are collapsed; the bones of runaway slaves emerge from the foundation of Gina’s case and the novel’s contemporary narrative thread is interrupted by the ghostly voice of a maroon slave woman. Pineau’s works, such as L’espérance Macadam or the nonfiction essay collection Femmes des Antilles, typically trouble the distinction between Guadeloupe’s present and past. With Cent vies, Pineau reveals a frenetic Guadeloupe wound so tight from the pace of globalization that it can no longer afford to juxtapose stories of the suffering of enslaved ancestors with the problems of the present without asking if its contemporary consumerist pursuits dishonor this legacy of resistance. At the heart of Cent vies are the themes that have made Pineau’s fiction so relevant for scholars of contemporary Francophone fiction; maternity, genealogy, memory, witnessing , and the psychological conditions of postcolonial communities are woven together in another of Pineau’s intricate tapestries. Absent from this novel are her preoccupations with immigration and transcultural identities forming in the space between France and Guadeloupe. In this urban, exclusively Guadeloupean novel, urgency and despair seem far more pronounced than in her earlier works, yet this distress is communicated in Pineau’s usual lyrical, often incantatory prose. It is unfortunate that her editors did not afford her language the same careful attention— Reviews 1299 the last half of the novel contains a surprising number of typographical errors that detract, if only slightly, from the quality of the novel as a whole. Rhodes College (TN) Laura Loth PROPHÈTE, EMMELIE. Impasse Dignité. Montréal: Mémoire d’encrier, 2012. ISBN 978-2923713 -71-7. Pp. 203. $19,95 Can. Pour José, personnage principal de ce troisième volet—après Le testament des solitudes (2009) et Le reste du temps (2010)—de la trilogie de Prophète, le temps se décline autrement. Il n’aurait donc pas vraiment besoin...

Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture by Sara E. Melzer

Bernardet of the one-act La voix humaine, is followed by Hélène Laplace-Claveries’s more readable and more illuminating examination of how in his Arguments chorégraphiques , Cocteau is less a librettist than a ‘choréconteur’ and how he privileges a choreographic present tense in these texts for dance. For her part, Bénédicte Gorrillot ploddingly and painstakingly traces the myth of Orpheus, specifically the influence in Cocteau’s works of “un fonds orphique de nature religieuse, associé à une parole mythique (d’ordre métaphysique), antérieur aux reformulations de l’Empire romain” (116). Roberto Zemignan points in his reading of Le testament d’Orphée to the inherent tension between the linearity of action and the disruption of deductive logic, as dramatized , indeed “parasitée” (6), by dream. In the last contribution of the first section, “Comment Cocteau raconte quand il parle,” Pierre-Marie Héron examines the interplay between the spirit of conversation and the appeal of narration in the writer-poet’s public talks, radio broadcasts, and newspaper contributions. Hardly revelatory, Héron’s conclusion, like many of the‘findings’by the authors before him, is surprisingly banal: “Cocteau parle et raconte en variant la manière et l’allure de son propos, avec un sens sûr de ‘l’exactitude’ du style selon le public et le genre” (182). The contributions in the second part of the volume do little to increase its usefulness. They include two articles on stage works, a study by Marianne Bouchardon of “les ficelles du théâtre” (187) in Cocteau’s ‘poésie au théâtre’ and his ‘poésie de théâtre’ and one by Ariane Martinez of the creator’s “arguments chorégraphiques” (207); a piece by Évanghélia Stead on the short-lived Schéhérazade, founded by Cocteau with François Bernouard in November 1909, and which was simultaneously a“revue de poésie,”“revue de belle typographie,”and“revue mondaine”(238); and Alex Callebaut’s more inspired reading of the paradoxical preface of the 1954 poetic collection Clair-obscur, in which he shows the genetic tension between the definitional and the metaphorical.All things considered and given the other unremarkable contributions preceding it—which hardly provide the “perspectives larges et variées” (7) that Linares promises in his foreword—it is probably the most interesting and original essay. California Polytechnic State University Brian G. Kennelly Melzer, Sara E. Colonizer or Colonized: The Hidden Stories of Early Modern French Culture. Philadelphia: UP of Pennsylvania, 2012. ISBN 978-0-8122-4363-5. Pp. 320. $75. Boileau and the discourse of colonialism? Early modern French letters and thought as a bridge to understanding France’s mindset and history as a colonial power? Sara Melzer makes that case. She does not treat as merely humorous Boileau’s denunciation of Perrault and the Modernes as a bunch of wild Indians—“Hurons” and “Topinamboux”—or Rouen’s celebration of the 1550 royal entry of Henri II and Catherine de Médicis with the tableau vivant of a Brazilian village that included fifty 230 FRENCH REVIEW 87.1 Reviews 231 natives of the country brought to France for the occasion, but she asks instead what these unconventional episodes and events reveal about how early modern France saw itself. In so doing, she calls into question a standard view of French Classicism as a moment when,by imitating the Ancients,French writers and thinkers sought to elevate their own country’s culture to the same level as that of their models in the pantheon of cultural greatness. René Girard, whose work is cited in the bibliography and seems always to hover at the edges of this study, would not be surprised to learn that imitation , even of so distant a model as the Ancients, brings with it troubling implications. All may well have started with the Gauls, as some late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers tried to establish, by way of liberating French culture from the Frankish-Trojan ancestry that so tightly and uncomfortably attached it to Ancient Rome. Although ultimately successful, these writers encountered two irksome facts: the Gauls had been colonized by the Romans, who considered them barbarians...

»Druga materinščina« ali zakaj so nekatere stvari »neprevedljive«

The article discusses the issues of bilingualism and cross-culturalism as they are revealed in the fate of the principle Romanesque heroes Bubi in Lojze Kovačič’s novel Prišleki (Part 2) and Alex in the novel Le Testament français (Dreams of My Russian Summers) by Andreï Makine. In so doing, it seeks junctures and divergences in the two writers’ acceptance and understanding of the »intermediate position« between two nations. Particular emphasis is placed on their reflection on the »second mother tongue« or the »old mother tongue« and their consequent seeking of an appropriate literary language.

Écrivains franco-russes ed. by Murielle Lucie Clément

the protagonists. Adnen Jdey discusses this same novel in terms of temporality, probing the nature of waiting. For the woman in love, such as Vera, waiting can be seen as both an interior esthetic and as a suspension of time. Arnaud Vareille studies sound in order to explain how acoustics metaphorically influence the development of the hero and his choice to become a writer in Confession d’un portedrapeau déchu. Ewa Malgorzata Wierzbowska and Murielle Lucie Clément consider the musicality of Makine’s novels. Wierzbowska discusses the rhythmic nature of the prose in La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme; whereas Clément addresses the importance of feminine voices and song in Au temps du fleuve Amour. Maria Margherita Mattioda’s article explores the opposite of sound and music by pointing out the importance of silence in Le crime d’Olga Arbelina and La femme qui attendait. Mattioda posits that the reticence and silence of Olga and Vera contribute not only to the poetics of the prose, but also to defining these women for other protagonists in the novels. Thierry Laurent and Agata Sylwestrzak-Wszelaki consider the historical and geographical contexts of Makine’s novels. Laurent assesses the history of Russia moving from the Stalinist period of the Soviet Union through the democratization of the 1990s. Sylwestrzak-Wszelaki continues this discussion with the assessment of France and Russia as chronotopes in the lives of Makine’s heroes. The relative importance of one or the other country grows or diminishes within the spatiotemporal context. In articles by Stéphanie Bellemare-Page and Juliette Pétion, literary texts and genre are the focus of study. Bellemare-Page analyzes metatextuality in Makine’s novels and Pétion scrutinizes the inaccuracy of assigning the term autobiography to Le testament français. The final three articles examine Makine’s most controversial novel, Le crime d’Olga Arbélina. Tomasz Swoboda, Olga Wronska, and Ali Chibani address the incest and murder in the novel from psychological, judicial, and medical perspectives. The variety of approaches taken in this collection will, as Clément states in her introduction, open “des pistes inédites de recherche future” (7) in the study of Makine and his work. University of Wisconsin, La Crosse Leslee Poulton CLÉMENT, MURIELLE LUCIE, éd. Écrivains franco-russes. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008. ISBN 978-90-420-2426-7236. Pp. 236. $63. Much has been written on African and Caribbean Francophone literature, yet little critical attention has been given to the rich literary production of Eastern European Francophone writers. In this collection of essays—one of the first of its kind—editor Murielle Lucie Clément successfully represents the extensive history of Franco-Russian literary traditions. Clément has written extensively on Andreï Makine, which perhaps inspired her to edit this survey of writers with Russian origins who chose to write in French, having immigrated to France under diverse circumstances relating largely to political, social, and religious persecution . Although Franco-Russian relations originate in the eleventh century, the authors of this volume concentrate on Franco-Russian literature dating from the nineteenth century to the present. Clément and her colleagues treat a diverse range of texts from children’s literature, travel literature, and fiction to science fiction from Henri Troyat, Vladimir Nabokov, Nathalie Sarraute, Irène Némirovsky, Andreï Makine, Zinaïda Volkonskaïa, la comtesse de Ségur, Pierre de Tchihatchef, 352 FRENCH REVIEW 85.2 Serge Charchoune, Michel Matveev, Elsa Triolet, Joseph Kessel, Arthur Adamov, Romain Gary, Alain Bosquet, Piotr Rawicz, Luba Jurgenson, and Iegor Gran. Naming plays a significant role in the works of these writers who struggle to establish émigré identity. Some assume pseudonyms and heteronyms, such as Vladimir Nabokov who first wrote under the name of Sirine, or Michel Matveev and Romain Gary who employed heteronyms. Still others changed their names in an attempt to assimilate within the French social order, such as Henri Troyat (Lev Tarassoff) and Romain Gary (Roman Kacew). The instability of naming as a means by which to indicate identity is reflective of these authors’ own deracination , as Rafaelle Zanotti suggests in her insightful discussion on naming and émigr é identity in relation to the author of...

Jean Cocteau. Trilogy about Death, or Between Dionysius and Apollo

The article is devoted to three films made by Jean Cocteau - Le Sang d'un poиte, Orphйe, Le Testament d'Orphйe, that form a trilogy of a kind. The author analyses the main image system of the trilogy in Apollonic and Dyonisic terms and comes to certain typological conclusions about Cocteau's mythology. Beside exploring the "modern" myth of Poet and Death, the article describes the cultural context around each of the mentioned ilms