The Encounter
Since the French publication of Suite française in 2004 and its translation into multiple languages, the fame and talent of Irène Némirovsky have been undisputed among readers, critics and scholars around the world. Personally, I first came across her name early on. I was living in Paris, it was 2004 and Suite française had just been published. I remember walking into bookstores to find, at the entrance, tables filled with copies of the book, her photograph on the cover and the classic red slip around the lower half, marking in big letters “Winner of the Renaudot Prize.” Despite the curiosity that all this talk about her had awoken in me, it took me a few more years to read her novels: Les Chiens et les loups (1940. The Dogs and the Wolves) followed by Suite française were first. Némirovsky did not immediately become a favourite of mine, like others had. Still, there was something disconcerting about her oeuvre, something almost repulsive yet incredibly appealing that kept me going back to read more. After multiple readings, her style, which at first seemed too comme il faut, showed all its intricacies, and her linear plots started to interlace in serpentine pathways. For a lover of all things French and Russian, her story proved compelling, her idiosyncrasies a challenge: a Russian émigré living in the cultural capital of the interwar period, but mostly disengaged from the émigré intelligentsia;1 a stateless Jew in Occupied France, who left her destiny in the hands of a Christian God.2
Against the backdrop of the history of the first half of the twentieth century, and doubting the apparent disconnect between Némirovsky and her Russian cultural heritage, I sensed a need for a thorough investigation of her relationship with the literature of her native country. Not only were there archival notes that justified my perception of this correspondence, but as a reader and student of Russian literature I also suspected that it had been a source of great influence on her work. The names of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov came naturally and were chosen either for their consistent presence in the manuscripts (Tolstoy), for incidental but evocative references (Dostoevsky), or for published evidence (Chekhov). Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov’s influence on Némirovsky vary, and yet it speaks directly to the cultural foundations of her work and to her practice.3
Creative Reception and the Ethics of Influence
The notion of influence is at the heart of my analysis of Némirovsky’s relationship with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. In this book, I use the term influence to indicate the capacity of Russian literature to have an effect on Némirovsky as well as to affect her, and in that sense I call it creative. I originally articulated this notion after coming across Brigitte Le Juez’s (2014) suggestion that the study of influence should be revived as “creative reception,” which implies the acknowledgment (sometimes reluctant) that at the basis of creative production there are artists who act as “sources of inspiration and sometimes influence.”4 Le Juez summons as examples of such inspiration/influence excerpts from Martin Amis, Gustave Flaubert, Elizabeth Bowen and Oscar Wilde in order to show how, instead of proving a lack of talent or imagination, “following in others’ footsteps” is a common and transparent practice and nothing to be ashamed of. She highlights that time and again writers have openly expressed gratitude to their predecessors, and she notes that in their tributes “[t]he language used by writers to discuss the question of their reception of others tends to indicate an emotional response. Their own understanding of what moves them into creative action can be vague or at least difficult to articulate” (emphasis added). And she continues: “[i]t is therefore the role of the comparatist to attempt a critical appraisal of such a fundamental, artistic phenomenon as the continuously innovative meeting of artistic minds” (emphasis added). This book intends to do precisely that: to propose a critical appraisal of the “meeting of artistic minds” that took place in interwar Paris between Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. It attempts to show the ways in which the Russian masters came alive in Némirovsky’s mind, how being their reader nurtured her writing, but also wishes to find a critical dialogue with the inherent challenges of defining what “moved her into creative action.” That is, this book foregrounds the role of imagination in criticism as a creative and playful mode of constructing new meanings. Therefore, alongside Le Juez, this book suggests that, indeed, the comparatist needs to play an active role and that such a role would bring more fruitful results if she allowed herself to be part of such “creative meeting.” Under these premises, the term “influence” is a “temporal operator” (Brewer 2013: 12) that maps the relations between texts and between texts and subjects—writers, readers, and researchers, as expressed in this chapter’s subtitle.
The phenomenon of reception presented by Le Juez uncovers feelings “of intimacy and of lineage” that know no boundaries (geographical, temporal and cultural), no hierarchies and no bias, and which, as Flaubert had it, “give birth to an eternal family among all human beings” (letter to Louis Colet 19/02/1854, qtd. in Le Juez 2014). Le Juez’s initial emphasis on hard-to-explain ties that are oftentimes based on affective impetus and emotive affiliations opens up a new dimension for articulating these connections. Her accent on “the reader’s sensitivity and experience” implicates a critical appraisal that should, indeed, remember that the writer is a reader with her sensitivity and set of experiences. However, I suggest that we should also account for the reader embodied in the writer-researcher, who has her own sensitivity and experience, and therefore is subjected to her own “creative impetus.” To emphasize the departure from Le Juez’s “creative reception,” therefore, I use the term creative influence, which includes the process of the writer’s reception, the ensuing response that moves her into “creative action,” and finally the reading practice and creative response operated by the (reader-writer-) researcher in her own writing. Surely the noun “influence” and the adjective “creative” do not give full justice to the complex relations implicit in my formulation, but at least they set apart “creative reception” from creative influence. In this specific case, creative influence describes not only the meeting of Némirovsky with her predecessors, but also the meeting with readers of Némirovsky, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. Thus, my concept accounts for ever-expanding hermeneutic possibilities that allow the scholar, or indeed any reader, to articulate a creative encounter of her own. Therefore, where the word influence is concerned, my understanding of creative influence goes beyond the simple confluence of influence with both “source study” and “reception,” and instead it encompasses and blends processes of intertextuality, aesthetic reception, cultural transfers, artistic and critical creation in ways that bring together authors, readers and writers. This combination of approaches is far from being what may be called a “negative eclecti...