Kolkhoz
Oct 2026 · Sold by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Ebook
416
Pages
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Eligible
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About this ebook
Winner of the Prix Médicis
The award-winning literary nonfiction writer turns to his own family’s archive and unlocks a century of war, obsession, deception, and truth.
The day Emmanuel Carrère is set to fly to Russia for the film adaptation of his book Limonov, a “special military operation” begins in Ukraine. Unease ripples across the world. Nevertheless, Carrère goes and, finding himself called to report on the unfolding events and revisiting fond family memories, extends his stay. One century before, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, his ancestors made the reverse journey. As Carrère roams the Hotel Ukraina, increasingly perturbed by the face of Russia that the war reveals, he wonders about the one he had been raised to know.
Just after the Second World War, Louis Carrère d’Encausse, a young Bordeaux bourgeois, and Hélène Zourabichvili, a poor stateless young woman from a shattered Georgian-Russian lineage, married in Paris. Zourabichvili would make a career of the terrain she had left behind, becoming France’s preeminent Russian authority. Drawing on her work and on his father’s obsessive family records, Carrère writes a “true novel,” one his mother would never have wanted, spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and taking us right up to the war in Ukraine.
Clear-eyed, alert to the absurdity of truth, and alive to every shadow in a portrait, Carrère does what only Carrère can do: he turns genealogy into narrative velocity, archives into suspense, grief into an engine of thought. At once intimate and geopolitical, tender and ferociously intelligent, Kolkhoz is Carrère in full command: the master of the moral double take and the deceptively simple sentence.
The award-winning literary nonfiction writer turns to his own family’s archive and unlocks a century of war, obsession, deception, and truth.
The day Emmanuel Carrère is set to fly to Russia for the film adaptation of his book Limonov, a “special military operation” begins in Ukraine. Unease ripples across the world. Nevertheless, Carrère goes and, finding himself called to report on the unfolding events and revisiting fond family memories, extends his stay. One century before, fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution, his ancestors made the reverse journey. As Carrère roams the Hotel Ukraina, increasingly perturbed by the face of Russia that the war reveals, he wonders about the one he had been raised to know.
Just after the Second World War, Louis Carrère d’Encausse, a young Bordeaux bourgeois, and Hélène Zourabichvili, a poor stateless young woman from a shattered Georgian-Russian lineage, married in Paris. Zourabichvili would make a career of the terrain she had left behind, becoming France’s preeminent Russian authority. Drawing on her work and on his father’s obsessive family records, Carrère writes a “true novel,” one his mother would never have wanted, spanning four generations, a century of Russian and French history, and taking us right up to the war in Ukraine.
Clear-eyed, alert to the absurdity of truth, and alive to every shadow in a portrait, Carrère does what only Carrère can do: he turns genealogy into narrative velocity, archives into suspense, grief into an engine of thought. At once intimate and geopolitical, tender and ferociously intelligent, Kolkhoz is Carrère in full command: the master of the moral double take and the deceptively simple sentence.
Winner of the Prix Médicis
The award-winning literary nonfiction writer turns to his own family’s archive and unlocks a century of war, obsession, deception, and truth.
The day Emmanuel Carrère is set to fly to Russia for the film adaptation of his book Limonov, a “special military operation” b...
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About the author
Emmanuel Carrère is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of V13, Yoga, 97,196 Words, The Kingdom, Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Other Than My Own, which was awarded the Globe de Cristal for Best Novel in 2010. For Limonov, Carrère received the Prix Renaudot and the Prix des Prix in 2011 and the Europese Literatuurprijs in 2013.
John Lambert has translated Monsieur, Reticence, and Self-Portrait Abroad by Jean-Philippe Toussaint, as well as Emmanuel Carrère’s V13, Yoga, 97,196 Words, The Kingdom, and Limonov.
Emmanuel Carrère is a novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and film producer. He is the award-winning, internationally renowned author of V13, Yoga, 97,196 Words, The Kingdom, Limonov, The Mustache, Class Trip, The Adversary (a New York Times Notable Book), My Life as a Russian Novel, and Lives Ot...
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