Irene Nemirovsky was a
novelist of Jewish origin, who was murdered by the Nazis in Auschwitz, in 1942.
A popular and prolific writer, Nemirovsky had published several successful
novels in the decade prior to the German occupation of France. Banned from publishing
her books because of her Jewish origin, Nemirovsky went into hiding in the
small village called Issy-l’Eveque, together with her husband (a banker who was
banned from working) and two young daughters. There, she began writing what she
planned to be a five-part epic (inspired, according to some experts, by
Tolstoy) even though she was banned from publishing. In July 1942 she was
arrested and interred as a ‘stateless person of Jewish origin’—despite being a
successful author Nemirovsky, whose family hailed from Russia (her father, a
successful banker, had fled Russia after the Bolshevik revolution), was denied
French citizenship—in Pithiviers concentration camp, from where she was
immediately deported, along with a thousand other Jews, to Auschwitz, where she died a month later,
whether of Typhus or at the hands of the Nazis is not clear. Her husband, who
tried frantically for his wife’s release upon her arrest, was himself arrested
in front of his daughters, and was transported to Auschwitz where he was gassed
to death. The two daughters owed their lives to a French Gendarme who asked
them to grab whatever they could and run, when he came to arrest their father.
The eldest daughter, who was 13 at the time, took a suitcase of her mother
‘because I knew it was important to her’. The daughters survived the war, and
the suitcase remained in possession of the elder daughter for the next sixty
years, unopened, as the daughter could not bring herself to go through what she
believed was her mother’s personal diary. What the suitcase in fact contained
was Irene Nemirovsky’s unfinished novel—she had managed to complete two of the
five parts she had in her mind—which was published to great acclaim in France,
and soon became international bestseller. It was inevitable that, in the wake
of its success, Nemirovsky’s earlier novels would be re-issued, and, in due
course, a slew of them arrived, one of which was The Courilof Affair,
first published in 1933.
The backdrop of The
Courilof Affair is the turbulent times in the Russian Empire that
eventually led to the 1905 revolution and the establishment of the State Duma
and the Russian constitution. The narrator of The Courilof Affair is
Leon M—not his real name, we are told—who has kept a journal. In the journal, written
almost thirty years after the event, Leon M tells of his part in the
assassination of Valerian Courilof, the dreaded and much hated Minister of
Education in the court of the Tsar Nicolas II. Leon M is a revolutionary, as
were both his parents. Both his parents die before Leon M is ten—her father in
prison, her mother in Geneva, of tuberculosis—and he is raised by the
revolutionary party. Leon M does not tell the name of the party, but drops more
than enough hints that he belonged to the revolutionary party that believed in
the Marxist-Leninist doctrine and aimed to destroy the House of Romonovs.
Keeping in with the philosophy of end justifying means the party approved of
violence and killing as legitimate weapons against the oppressor. The assassination
of Courilof, who is nicknamed ‘Killer Whale’ because of his brutality, is part
of the party’s strategy to strike terror in the hearts of Imperialists. Towards
this end, his assassination must take place in a public place and a very
dramatic manner. Leon M is the person chosen to kill the ‘Killer Whale’.
Using false Swiss
passport and identity, Leon M infiltrates Courilof’s inner circle and becomes
his junior physician. He spends several months in the house of the Minister of
Education, and discovers that the man he must kill when the final go-ahead
comes from the party via his contact—a Jewish woman called Fanny—is dying. His
liver is failing; the cancer, as Courilof himself describes at one stage, is
eating him from inside as a crab. The minister can be irritatingly pompous and
hypocritical at times, but he is a troubled soul. The intrigues in the court of
the Tsar Nicholas II are at their peak, and the ministers are backstabbing each
other to advance their careers and curry favours with the emperor. Courilof’s
position has become precarious because of his second marriage to a French woman
of low repute (of whom the Tsar disapproves), the love of his life, with whom
he has had a long-standing affair before the death of his first wife. The more
Leon M is made privy to the private world of Courilof, the more he comes to
realise that the man who is depicted in the revolutionary circle as some kind
of tendentious chimera is, in real life, an insecure, troubled, even pathetic,
man, who, like his other colleagues in the ministry, is in thrall of the Tsar,
and who, far from being nonchalant, is deeply upset by the deaths of young
students who are agitating for political reforms and establishment of
constitution. Leon M is therefore secretly relieved when in a palace coup
Courilof is removed from his post by the Tsar, and is no longer the
high-profile representative of the establishment whose very public killing
would further the revolutionary party’s political goals. However, Leon M’s
relief does not last long. In the intrigue-leaden world of the Tsar Nicholas II
where there are more coups and countercoups than you or I have hot meals
Courilof’s successor is soon removed from the post, and the Killer Whale is
reinstated. In one last desperate bid, Leon M tells his party superiors very
clearly that he no longer wishes to kill the Minister of Education seeing as he
would not be living for more than a few months anyway because of his cancerous
liver. Leon M’s request is denied and the novel moves inexorably towards its violent
ending.
The Courilof Affair is not a thriller, even though it reads like
one at times. Indeed, the entry of Leon M into Courilof’s inner circle, the
event which helps to move the novel forward, is described unconvincingly, as
are the descriptions of Leon M’s secret meetings with other revolutionaries as
well as his contact. What Nemirovsky seems to be interested in is the study of
human nature and character. When people are driven by ideas, they find it easy
to view the world in black and white. The moment you start dealing with the
human beings behind the ideas shades of grey begins to seep in. As Leon M
wisely remarks (wisdom, no doubt, afforded by hindsight) ‘Each of us has
weaknesses . . . One cannot even say with certainty whether a man is good or
evil, stupid or intelligent. There does not exist a good man who has not at
some time in his life committed a cruel act, nor an evil man who has not done
good . . .that’s what gives life its diversity, its surprises.’ Thus, while
Leon M, sees no reason to give up his ideological opposition to what Courilof
and his ilk represent, he comes to see the futility of the assassination.
Valerian Courilof is
not an endearing character. He is a pompous and vain man who is addicted to
power, although he always couches it in a grandiose talk of serving his country
and his emperor. That is the reason why he stays in the country after he is
removed from his post, even though he knows that he has only a few months to
live and his second wife is begging him to live in France, and successfully
machinates to reclaim his position. However, he is also capable of surprising
his detractors by having qualities such as loyalty, courage, and even empathy:
when faced with the choice of standing by his second wife or incurring Tsar
Nicholas’s displeasure, he chooses the former, even though he knows that it
would spell doom for his political ambition. When his wife asks him to do what
he can for the mother of a sixteen year old Jewish boy who has been denounced
by an agent provocateur, and put in prison where he dies, Courilof gives the
woman monetary aid, in the full knowledge that his detractors at the court
would use the gesture as a handle to beat him with.
The Courilof Affair is a densely atmospheric novel that is
translated extremely well. In few, but effective, words Nemirovsky conveys the
darkly sinister atmosphere that surrounds Courilof, which adds to the intended
oppressive tone of the novel.
Irene Nemirovsky has
been criticised by some as a ‘self-hating Jew’. Her stereotypical and unsympathetic
portrait of the Jews in her debut novel, as also her decision to convert to
Roman Catholicism in 1939 and publish stories in right wing journals with
anti-Semite tendencies, are cited as examples supporting this theory. Her most
famous novel, Suit Francoise, does not have any Jewish characters. The
Courilof Affair has one Jewish character, Fanny, Leon M’s contact. It
is Fanny who would eventually kill Courilof. This is how Nemirovsky introduces
Fanny: ‘She was a young woman of twenty with a stocky built and black hair
pulled over her cheeks like great side-burns; she had a long straight nose, a
strong mouth whose lower lip drooped and gave her an obstinate, scornful
expression. Her eyes were unique to women in the Party, eyes whose harshness
and determination was inhuman . . . she was the daughter of a watchmaker in
Odessa and sister of an extremely wealthy banker in St Petersburg who financed
her education and wanted nothing more to do with her. Because of this her
hatred of the wealthy classes took the concrete form of this little Jewish
banker with his fat stomach.’ Fanny hates her brother not because he is Jewish,
but because she feels abandoned by him. As for Nemirovsky’s conversion to Roman
Catholicism in 1939, it can be seen as an attempt by an increasingly insecure
woman to safeguard the future of her family rather than a sine qua non of her hatred towards the religion of her birth.
The Courilof Affair, according to the translator’s afterword, is
based on an historical event: in 1901, a student named Karpovitch assassinated
the former Russian minister of Education, Nicolai Bogoliepov. There were some
other high profile killings around the time. Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus
wrote a novel and a play respectively on the same theme, years after The
Courilof Affair. By that time Nemirovsky was dead and her novels
unavailable. It would remain forever a matter of conjecture whether Sartre, who
would have been 28, and Camus, who would have been 20, when The
Courilof Affair was published, were aware of the novel, and if so, were
influenced by it. Probably not, as neither made a mention of Nemirovsky, and
their treatment of the subject was different from that of Nemirovsky.
It is interesting how
the same subject matter, in the hands of different artists, is treated
differently. Though written more than seventy years ago, The Courilof Affair approaches
the matter of terrorism, idealism, and the attendant moral issues, in a manner
that will resonate with the modern minds.
