CONTENTS
Introduction
Chronology
David Golder
The Ball
Snow in Autumn
The Courilof Affair
INTRODUCTION
“Each of us has his weaknesses. Human nature is incomprehensible,” muses the mysterious Leon M. , narrator of Irene Nemirovsky’s 1933 novel, The Courilof Affair. “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…. ” The complicated, often murky ironies of human interaction are the stuff of Nemirovsky’s fictions: no matter what her subject—and her range was considerable—her work is unified in its unsparing examination of the desires and feelings that lie behind the most apparently clear-cut scenarios.
In The Courilof Affair, Leon M. , in his retirement in Nice, pens his memories of his revolutionary days in Russia in the early years of the century and, in particular, of his assignment to assassinate the Tsar’s Minister of Education, Valerian Alex-androvitch Courilof, known as “the Killer Whale,” in 1903 (incidentally, the year of the author’s birth). In preparation for the attack, Leon takes on the identity of Marcel Legrand, a Swiss doctor, and becomes the personal physician to Courilof. Over the course of their time together, he is moved by a growing understanding not simply of Courilof, but of human frailty. Compassion and revolutionary terrorism are not easily compatible, and his new knowledge threatens Leon’s mission.
As he recalls of Courilof and his politically problematic French wife (and former mistress), Margot, “It remains impossible for me to explain, even to myself, how I could… understand these two people…. For the first time, I saw human beings: unhappy people, with ambitions, faults, foolishness. ”
This capacity genuinely and fully to see human beings, to acknowledge the tender humanity of their flaws, is one of the supreme gifts of fiction, both for the writer and for the reader. Nobody knew this better than Irene Nemirovsky, whose novels are fiercely preoccupied with the unveiling of her characters’ foibles but who, through that unveiling, provides her readers with a bracing, unnerving, and often moving vision of ourselves as we really are. This is nowhere more true than in her unfinished masterpiece, Suite Francaise, the relatively recent discovery and publication of which have brought Nemirovsky to the attention of a new generation of readers. Set in France under German occupation and written, extraordinarily, under the circumstances it describes, Suite Francaise moves between chilling satire of the petty selfishness of the bourgeoisie and a poignant evocation of the realities of village life under occupation—realities much like those of Leon M. , in which to recognize the enemy’s humanity is to compromise, or disable, a warrior’s hatred. In reading that novel—or, more properly, those two novellas, since the remaining three segments that would have completed the masterpiece were never written— this reader, for one, gained an understanding of what it meant to live in France during the Second World War that I had not had before, steeped though I was in books and films on the subject.
