Père-patrie / Fatherland – Jouanny

Information

Author:

Jean-Robert Jouanny

Date:

L'aube
August 2024

Author:

Additional Info

FATHERLAND

Rights Holder: L'aube
Original Language: French

Russia. He has read all the great authors, and even the lesser-known ones. He has traveled there, made friends there, speaks the language. In society, it makes him a bit of a sensation.

He tells himself about a future life that will be full of travel, reunions, discoveries and encounters. One foot there, the other elsewhere. Except that Russia invades Ukraine. And that is the straw that breaks the camel's back.

When you are French, European, how can you not put an end to this love affair with the executioner? What to do with this Russophilia that has become cumbersome? It is this heartbreak that is told to us, through the story of a young man - his childhood, special because his father was 60 when he was born, and he grows up with this worry of death lurking; his adolescence, troubled by a revelation - his brother is not their father's son; and this Russia, which has become an essential part of his identity – when his father’s death is announced, he is tossed around by the Baltic Sea, and like any self-respecting Russian, he drinks vodka. And then, of course, there is Olga…

Olga… Both a love letter and a farewell letter, even a condolence letter, this text is both moving and funny, and asks a thousand questions: why do we love foreigners? Foreign languages? Can a second homeland compensate for the fear of a father’s absence, then the absence itself? Can we forgive a country we have loved?

Jean-Robert Jouanny was a student of Sciences-Po, the Moscow Institute of International Relations and the ENA, and has taught post- Soviet civilisation. He published an essay on Russian foreign policy (Que veut Poutine? 2016) after a work on the legacy left by Jacques Chirac in the imagination of the French (À la recherche de Jacques Chirac, 2009).

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