By analysing in some detail the debates which Némirovsky’s novels provoked in the cultural press of the inter-war period, this chapter explores the ways in which Némirovsky’s literary success resulted from a series of complex social relations in the inter-war literary field. As Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés argue, the study of reception is an important aspect of the ‘storytelling project’ that is literary history:
Such an approach is justified both by Némirovsky’s own approach to the task of being a writer, and by the aims of this book. Némirovsky was a novelist who actively managed her relationships with her publishers and her critics, and there is good reason to suppose that her choice of literary themes was at least in part a response to the critical discussion her fiction was generating. Her case thus supports Bourdieu’s view that ‘on ne peut faire dans la science des æuvres deux parts, l’une consacrée à la production, l’autre à la réception’ (‘all this means that one cannot divide a science of works into two parts: one devoted to production, the other to perception’): production and reception of the literary text are locked into an iterative relation-ship.4 Whilst this book is focused on the work of a single author, it seeks to view that author through a wide-angled lens, such that the entire literary field of inter-war France comes into focus. It is through the analysis of the reception of individual works that it is possible to reconstruct the properties of the field and thus eventually, understand the complex phenomenon of the work of art.5 The approach taken throughout this book to the study of Némirovsky’s fictional output, and of French inter-war literature more generally, is firmly grounded in a belief in the importance of reception for an understanding of texts and their contexts. A literary review can both demonstrate the state of the contemporary literary field, and change it; the issues a reviewer raises in relation to a new text necessarily arise out of the current literary-critical status quo (there is no tabula rasa) but might also modify the literary-critical environment by raising a new question or by posing an existing question differently. The ‘meaning’ of a text and, not least, its ideological significance, is determined in relation to the literary field which produced it and is in significant measure a function of the ways in which that text is represented by its critics.6 We return to the construction of literary value, celebrity, and success through the media in Chapter 6 in order to understand the phenomenon which has in part motivated the writing of this book—the success of Suite française in France in 2004 and in English translation in 2006. Here though, the rules of the game will have changed somewhat, since we shall observe the reception of a text in a literary and historical environment very different from that in which it was produced, or which produced it.
Before turning to a closer analysis of the construction of Némirovsky’s celebrity and subsequent reputation as a novelist, it will be useful to have in mind an overview of the entirety of her output. Before the success of
David Golder in 1929, Némirovsky had already published four short works in the subscription series
Les uvres libres: ‘Le Malentendu’ (February 1926); ‘L’Enfant génial’ (April 1927); ‘L’Ennemie’ (July 1928); ‘Le Bal’ (Febru-ary 1929).
7 Les uvres libres, launched by the publishing house Fayard in June 1921, was a monthly publication offering a selection of unabridged and previously unpublished stories by various authors in a single volume.
8 Two of the works Némirovsky published here were immediately reissued in book form in 1930 in the wake of the success of
David Golder: ‘Le Malentendu’ by Fayard and ‘Le Bal’ by Grasset. These early texts treat the themes which were to occupy Némirovsky’s literary imagination for the first half of the 1930s: Jews; the world of business and finance; Russian emigration; love. The order in which I present these themes is not coincidental: Némirovsky frequently pairs Jews with money and Russians with love. These early stories also depict the sometimes complex, sometimes frivolous relationships between love, money, and pleasure which developed as the
années folles began to shade into the Depression. Between 1929 and 1935, Némirovsky drew on her personal history to produce a series of novels in which Jewish and Russian themes dominated. It is particularly in the early texts, notably
David Golder (1929),
Le Bal (1930), and
Le Pion sur l’échiquier (1934) that we find stereotyped portrayals of Jewish characters, although the later novel
Les Chiens et les loups (1940) is not exempt from this problem.
David Golder and
Le Bal recount very different stories of Jewish immigrants making a life in France: Golder is a
successful and powerful financier, whilst
Le Bal’s Alfred Kampf struggles to raise his social standing to match his newly acquired wealth. In
Le Pion sur l’échiquier, Jewishness and money are again associated in the portrait of the businessman Beryl. That Némirovsky ceased to write about Jewish themes after 1933 is hardly surprising; she would however return to the theme of Jewish emigration in
Les Chiens et les loups where she opposed the Eastern immigrant Jew to the assimilated European Jew in the context of the politics, economics, and society of inter-war France. This work offers a more nuanced account of Jewish identity than is to be found in the novels of the early 1930s. The theme of Russian emigration dominates
Les Mouches d’automne (1931) and
Le Vin de solitude (1935). The earlier text recounts the collective history of a land-owning family who flee the Rus-sian Revolution and take refuge in Paris; the later novel focuses on an individual female protagonist, Hélène, who is Russian but adores France, and eventually fulfils her dream of making a life there.
L’Affaire Courilof (1933) tells the story of a Russian anarchist hired to assassinate a government minister in the early years of the twentieth century. The scenario of this text anticipates those of Sartre’s
Les Mains sales and Camus’s
Les Justes. These six novels might be taken as a first phase of Némirovsky’s writing project, with the mid-point of the decade as a turning point. In 1936 Némirovsky published
Jézabel, a novel in which her ability to create narrative suspense and intrigue come to the fore. This novel is a psychological drama which explores mother-daughter relationships and the problems of ageing for women, themes which had already surfaced in her earlier texts. In the second half of the decade, Némirovsky turned her attention away from the problems of Russian emigration and the Jewish diaspora and toward those of inter-war France.
Le Pion sur l’échiquier and
Le Vin de solitude might be seen as transitional texts insofar as both anticipate what seems to have been a growing desire on Némirovsky’s part to write in detail about France of the inter-war period.
Le Pion sur l’échiquer (1934),
La Proie (1938) and
Deux (1939) analyse the effects of the First World War and the Depression on two generations of French men.
Le Pion sur l’échiquer and
Deux deal with the difficult re-integration of young war veterans into the changed economic and political environment of France in the 1920s and 1930s.
La Proie considers the fate of their sons who...