GABRIELLA SAFRAN

ANDREI MAKINE'S LITERARY BILINGUALISM AND THE CRITICS

ANDREI MAKINE, WHO GREW UP in the Soviet Union but lives in France and writes in French, startled the public when his Le Testament français (1995) won three prestigious literary awards: the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Médicis, and the Goncourt des lycéens. The unexpected honor resulted in newspaper articles about Makine in France, Russia, and elsewhere. The novel prompted reviewers to formulate narratives explaining why a native speaker of Russian might write in French; in so doing they articulated broader ideas about the bilingual writer. Combining literary analysis with methods borrowed from sociolinguistics, this article considers the depictions of literary bilingualism in the novel and the criticism around it. Some social scientists distinguish four modes of acculturation: assimilation (one accepts the new culture and rejects the old); separation (one rejects the new and retains the old); deculturation (one is caught unproductively between cultures); and integration (one adds a new culture without losing the old). In the first third of the article, I show that many of the pieces about Makine published in France rely on the concept of assimilation, portraying him as liberating himself from Russian culture to embrace the more universal French language. Many Russian critics, in marked contrast, use separatist terms, suggesting that Makine’s seeming embrace of France conceals his true allegiance to Russia, while others lambaste him in the language of deculturation as a "literary basilisk," belonging fully to no culture. Makine himself indicated in a 1996 article that he prefers the paradigm of integration, seeing his writing as made possible not by the preeminence of French over Russian but rather by his access to – and, simultaneously, his estrangement from – both languages. In the article and the novel, he uses the terms of the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky to suggest that, because he experiences French as a foreign language, it gives him a new perspective, an innovative vision that makes art possible. In the second part of the article, I draw on the insights of Russian Formalism and its inheritors, including Mikhail Bakhtin, Lev Vygotsky, Yury Tynjanov, Roman Jakobson, and Itamar Even-Zohar, to explain the roles of French and Russian in Makine’s novel: first one, then the other, function as peripheral elements that can be infused into a dominant language, thereby rejuvenating it. The third section concerns the novel’s citations of French and Russian poetry. While one might read his interpolation of a poem by the Romantic Gérard de Nerval as a testament to his francophilia, I argue that he is instead claiming Nerval as, like himself, a bicultural artist whose work emerges from the effort to integrate own and other (in Nerval’s case literary models drawn from French medieval traditions and those that rely on classical forms). The poetic allusions, like the explicit discussion of language in the novel, celebrate the possibilities uniquely available to the bicultural writer, a point that Makine’s reviewers and interviewers seem for the most part to have missed.