Irene Nemirovsky's The Wine of Solitude

After reading The Mirador, a "fictional autobiography" of Irene Nemirovsky by her daughter, I felt compelled to tackle those Nemirovsky's novels that touch upon her early years in the Russian Empire. The Wine of Solitude is such a book, and clearly provided her daughter with much of the inspiration for the early chapters of The Mirador.  Like many of her books, it features a wicked, self-absorbed mother, and a wealthy father.  Like the author, the non-observant Jewish protagonist, Helene, grew up in the Ukraine.  She described her childhood hometown thus: "The silence of the sleepy provincial town, lost deep within Russia, was intense, heavy and overwhelmingly sad."  Later, Helene moved as  St. Petersburg, but it equally depressing, introducing the famous capital city accordingly: "How harshly it blew, that day, the biting north wind, and what a sickly odor of filthy water rose from the Neva." Soon, Helene was displaced again, and this time by the Revolution.  Moving briefly to Finland, she ultimately found her way to France, which she already knew from a series of earlier vacations.

The book's chief virtue is that it's told from the point of view of youth, but lacks any sense of condescension.  While young, Helene is perfectly capable of maintaining her own intellectual vitality, and equally capable of offering the reader an uncompromising critique of the adults in her life.  While the novel doesn't dwell on the Revolution, it does demonstrate the extent to which the Revolution could serve as a plot point in the psychological development of Russians.  The Revolution was both a social fact and an individual one.  The Revolution led Helene into exile but, unusually for the time, did not diminish the wealth for her family.  It did however appear as a sad or even tragic event, somehow mirroring Helene's own bitterness about her family situation.  Great events, like great cities, could be experienced as new forms of tragedy. Without sentimentalism, the author introduces the twentieth century's most influential political convulsion with deliberately minimal commentary.  "The February Revolution came and went, then the October Revolution.  The city was distraught, buried in snow."

The Wine of Solitude is a deeply personal novel, somehow describing the personal pain of the protagonist and the universal pain of entering the inhospitable world of adulthood.   However, the novel is also a commentary on Russia, which forced Helene into exile.  The Revolution did not bring joy to people like Helene. Instead, it brought a new level of chaos, decay, and disorder.  In fact, its chief visual legacy for Helene was garbage.  As the author remarks:  "In the darkness they could smell the rancid odor of the canals;  no one had bothered to clean them since the February Revolution;  no one bothered to repair their stones;  the city was crumbling beneath the weight of the water, slowly disintegrating, becoming a city of smoke, illusions and fog, retreating into a void."

The chaos of post-revolutionary Russia soon led to exile, which often entailed new forms of confusion and anxiety, if not also delusion.  Where should exiles go if they could no longer live in their homeland?  "They talked about Shanghai, Tehran, Constantinople.  They had to leave.  But where should they go?  Danger was everywhere, but since everyone was in the same boat it seemed less urgent;  it would pass."  Helene ultimately landed in France, physically safe and still relatively rich.  But of course even safety can be experienced as trauma if one's father remains psychologically distant, and one's mother is your rival rather than protector.


A few quotes from the book: 

...she was always sad, complaining, anxious: everything was an excuse for her to sigh, to lament. "Life is bad," she would say.  "God is terrible.  Men are harsh..."

Take my time, my care, my blood, my flesh...she seemed to be saying as she stared at them with her soft, dead eyes.

Her entire life was scarred by the marks of misfortune and unhappiness;  she had experienced poverty, illness, the death of people she loved;  her husband had cheated on her, betrayed her;  she felt that her daughter and her husband could barely stand her.  She had been born old, anxious, weary, while everyone around her was overflowing with vitality and passionate desires.  But her main affliction was a kind of prophetic sadness;  she seemed more included to fear the future than weep for the past.

A rush of anguish suddenly ran through the child, making her shudder;  she sat in a corner holding a book, quiet and alone;  she felt as if she could sense the solitude of the grave;  the room became hostile and frightening;  beyond the narrow circle of the light from the lamp, darkness reigned;  the shadows slithered toward Helene, rising to engulf her;  she strained to push them away, like a swimmer pushing back the water with his arms.

It was late autumn and the children were confined to the safety of their room, to protect them from the cold air that Russians feared as if it were a plague.

On one side of her was her husband, who wore glasses and had cold, pale hands;  on the other her long-standing lover, who was even older, fatter, and balder than her husband.

"Your hair's no naturally curly, is it?" Her lips were so pursed that they words came out in a kind of soft whistle, like the sound of a flute.
"Jealous bitch," thought Helene.

"Did you also know Safronov senior when he was at the height of his success?" asked Madame Manasse.  "When I came to live here he was already old."
"Yes, I did know him.  He squandered three fortunes:  his mother's, his wife's and his daughter's, who had some money left to her by his wife's father.  Three fortunes..."

Oh, how she hated Mademoiselle Rose.  It was a shy hatred, but a profound one.

"Live with the dogs, not like them," he sometimes told Karol, since Karol loved gambling, wine and women.

"What is in the interest of Russia," Chestov said harshly and looked around him, haughtily scrutinizing everyone as if to remind them all that he was the representative of the government and had the right to look deep into their hearts and souls in the name of the Emperor.

"What am I complaining about?" she thought. "I'm no different from anyone else.  Of course, everyone's house has an adulterous wife, unhappy children, and busy men who think only of money.

Elisabeth Gille's The Mirador

Elisabeth Gille's book, The Mirador, is a beautiful alloy:  it's both a creative work of fiction, and an imaginative biography of her mother, whom she lost when she was very young.  With insight from  extensive historical research, Gille wrote a fictional memoir of her mother.  The book is beautifully written, and tells the story of Nemirovsky's childhood in Kiev, coming of age in St. Petersburg, exile in Paris, and eventually doom in the Nazi-occupied French countryside. It's themes revolve around Nemirovsky's Jewish ethnicity, even though she had few if any religious beliefs.

Born into great and constantly increasing wealth, Nemirovsky was nevertheless constantly threatened by anti-semitism.  In the Ukraine, she was the witness to deadly programs.  In St. Petersburg, she remained acutely aware of the tsar's anti-Semitic legal regime.  Fleeing the Revolution, she easily reestablished herself in Paris, and eventually parleyed her perfect French into a highly successful literary career, before fleeing the Nazi invasion and falling victim to Vichy France's cruel anti-Jewish regulations.  

Gille's book operates on several levels.  It is one the one hand the story of a young woman's attempt to make her way in the world in the shadow of a powerful if malevolent mother, whose sexual and class vanity apparently new few bounds. On the other hand, it's the story of a woman who is constantly being defined by her Jewish background. In fact, by the story's conclusion, one starts to feel as if Gille was telling the whole story of the European Jews when she discussed her mother's fate. While Gille always admits that her mother was not prescient about French or European anti-semitism, she goes out of her way to demonstrate the extent to which her mother's life was circumscribed by bigotry.  From the Black Hundreds of Russia to Action Francaise, no European Jew living in the first part of the twentieth century could possibly escape some level of persecution.  Even before Hitler's rise to power, Jewishness--in all of its religious, cultural, and allegedly biological dimensions-- was deeply problematic for a great part of European Christians.

 The book, of course, ends with Nemirovsky standing at the brink of deportation to Auschwitz.  In some ways, the demise of the brilliant French writer, Nemirovsky, in the holocaust demonstrates one more dimension of the horror of Nazism.  As hard as Nemirovsky sometimes seemed to have tried to assimilate, and as privileged as she was at every state of her life, there was simply no escaping Europe's inability to come to terms with difference. Gille's book demonstrates the original appeal of Zionism.  Whether you were in Russia or France, whether you were rich or poor, and whether you embraced your religion or ignored its rituals, your continued existence was, in the end, an open question.

 The sadness of Gille's book reminds me of Gershom Scholem's biography, From Berlin to Jerusalem:  Memories of My Youth, where the great Jewish thinker reminded readers that Zionism would have meant something very different if such a large part of the Jewish people had not been destroyed. Whatever Israel is now, its cultural vitality and generosity of spirit would have been many times richer if European Jewish culture had remained on its nineteenth century trajectory.  Whether Jews like Nemirovsky fled to Israel, or stayed alive in Europe, they would certainly have made Israel a better place.

Some favorite quotes from the book:

In the spring of 1918, everyone had an opinion, a story to tell, a picture to paint, or a poem to declaim.

Because of the Bolsheviks, I never celebrated my fifteenth birthday.

The opening of the play may have marked the moment of my true rupture with my mother.  I had not yet forgiven her for her terrible reaction to my announcement that I was pregnant two years earlier, when she had begged me, on her knees, to have an abortion.

Have I changed so much, once deliciously and exotically Slavic, now an unrecognizable Yid?