'Back in the USSR': The Prose of Andrei Makine and Antoine Volodine

Looking east to Russia and on beyond the Ural mountains was a feature of Enlightenment and Romantic literature in French before becoming, in the first decades of the Soviet era, the preserve of fellow-traveler writers. The fall of the wall in 1989 was a key factor in the reconfiguration of the landscape with which this volume is concerned, giving access to archives and vistas that reveal a very different East today. To what extent do the forests of Siberia continue to offer the solo writer a loss of self in the grandeur of the world? What does the ‘Russian novel’ written today in French owe to the great predecessors of the nineteenth century? And what does this fiction know and see of the strife of continental trade in primary materials, and most notably human labour? (Makine, Carrère, Rolin, Kerangal, Tesson…)