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As a reporter for Radio France Internationale, Olivier Rogez has become known as a novelist with his first book, The Drunkenness of Sergeant Dida (The Passage), published in 2017. With The Uncertain Men , he signed a novel this time. Russian inspiration, whose action takes place between Siberia and Moscow. Interview.
RFI: After the " drunkenness " of the African elite, which you told in your first novel, you train us into the turmoil and turmoil of the dying Soviet Union with your second novel, The Uncertain Men . What does this title mean ?
Olivier Rogez : Uncertainty is the one that surprises us or falls on us when our world collapses. And that's a little bit what I tried to tell in this second novel. We are in the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, the period when everything will switch for the Soviets and Muscovites.
And against a backdrop of political struggle, I wanted to bring to life the emotions, the contradictory feelings and the crossed destinies of characters who will witness their world in upheaval. Some of these characters feel it, while others are taken aback by this revolutionary or counterrevolutionary collapse of the Soviet Union.
In this historical background, you evolve your protagonists, who are two in number and who are called Yuri and Anton. Who are they ? What brings them together ?
To sum up the book, we are in Moscow in 1989 and arrive in the capital a Siberian, Anton, a young man in his twenties, who lived in Siberia until now. Anton dreamed only of one thing: to go to Moscow. His dream ends up being realized.
In Moscow, he is greeted by his uncle Yuri Nesterov, who is a senior official of the KGB. He is a powerful man who has climbed the ladder. His mission is to follow closely the political struggle between Boris Yeltsin, leader of the Democratic camp, and Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the communist camp. The two men clashed at the time for control of the apparatus and for power.
It is in relation to this struggle, which has not been ideological, that the protagonists are in the foreground. Anton, with his 20 years, obviously represents the future, that is to say that Russia will be born, while Yuri represents the Soviet Union, which is endangered. Their destinies will cross.
Around these central characters evolves a multitude of secondary characters, the most spectacular of which is undoubtedly the one that you name " Starets ", of its real name, Volodia. The man is more like Rasputin than the harsh communists who are embodied by someone like Yuri. Who is Starets ?
Starets is a somewhat timeless character, a sort of mystic monk, endowed with an astonishing ability of clairvoyance. It is he who will predict to his friend Yuri the inevitable disappearance of the USSR and the seizure of power by Elstine. But this man is not only a mystic, he is also an essential element of the Russian military-industrial complex. It goes through all the times and all the environments. The power it exerts comes from the fact that it is at the junction of several systems of values that oppose, those of ancient Russia, new Russia, Soviet Russia or even democratic Russia.
In the twilight Soviet Union that you stage, clairvoyance, divination skills and mysticism are valued. What does this return of mysticism imply in a Soviet Union believed to be ruled by reason and the dialectic of classes ?
This need for clairvoyance is the very symbol of an uncertain time when values themselves have become uncertain and fragile. The religious spirit, the belief, the faith are replaced by superstitions and quackery, just as the desire for enrichment has turned into a kind of voracious overconsumption. I wanted to symbolize this general derailing of values by the increased demand for mysticism and prophecy. This addition of the irrational is, moreover, constitutive of Russian culture, not to speak of the Russian soul. All Russian political leaders had a seer or clairvoyant at their service, from Stalin to Brezhnev to Boris Yeltsin. They consulted the seers to try to read the future. In this period of extreme upheaval in the years 1989-1991, the misunderstanding of the future was such that Rasputin became necessary to continue making decisions and moving forward.
Women do not have the beautiful role in your novel. Your female characters are sexual partners or housewives. Why not put women in the foreground, fully participating in the social and political construction, as is happening in Russia today ?
No, I do not quite agree with your analysis. Women play leading roles in my story, like Helena, for example, the lover of Yuri. It symbolizes independence and freedom in the face of a man who is not used to having in front of him women or men who stand against him. If, in my novel, it is the men who make the law, it is also because that is how it happened in the Russian society of the time. If you look at the map of the Central Committee or the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, you will see that there is not a single woman. Finally, the only woman of this period whose name is remembered is that of Mrs. Gorbachev. But even Raissa Maximovna Gorbacheva was important because of the influence she exerted on her husband. She was not a leader, but a woman of influence. That's how we saw her. There is also, in my novel, a retired person, very dignified and who does not have his tongue in his pocket. This is Anastasia, who watches over Yuri, but does not hesitate to remind her of her history of trade union activist, passed by the gulag. No, my female characters are not all submissive women or sex objects of men, far from it, but their representation is the measure of the era that was eminently masculine.
How would you define your novel? Is it a historical novel, a political novel, or a social comedy ?
I would say that it is a historical fiction, but that is not without recalling our own actuality. What made me decide to write this novel is the realization that this incredible upheaval that was the collapse of the USSR, is also echoed in our contemporary era. We are not quite 'dubious men', but we are very skeptical of our development model, and we doubt the future of the planet because of global warming. Finally, we doubt our values: are they right, are they good or bad? In fact, the events of the USSR confirm what we already knew: Sic transit gloria mundi (" Thus passes the glory of the world "). But it is also the realization that no nation disappears totally, it changes, it evolves, it reinvents itself. And ours, too, is changing, as happened thirty years ago for the Soviet Union. It has undergone a profound and radical upheaval that is emerging today in this nation that it is today, in full awakening or in full rebirth.
You are not the first French novelist to take an interest in Russia. From Alexandre Dumas to Emmanuel Carrère, Russia has had a great fascination with French writers. How can this French literary russophilia be explained?
First, because Russia is a fascinating country, which is at the crossroads of several cultural and political universes. In Russia, we are at the crossroads between Europe and Asia. What has always surprised me in the recent and modern history of Russia and the Soviet Union is that this people had in a few decades gone from serfdom and backwardness to a nation capable of sending the stars the first cosmonauts. There is a fierce desire among the Russians, when they are behind a collective project, to get there. There is also a capacity among this people to forget the individual for the benefit of the collective, even if it sacrifices in passing several million people. There are many things, I think, in Russia, that challenge us and question us, we who are located at the other end of the continent, in a universe finally very different and much more human in every sense of the term. Russians do not have the same human dimension as us. When you walk in Moscow and look at the ladder to which the buildings are built, you can see that this ladder is still huge. It's as if the Russians were all 2, 50 m tall. The first floors of buildings a little majestic on the Red Square, as the Goum for example, whose first floor must rise to 7 or 8 meters in height!
You were an RFI correspondent in Russia, from 1992 to 1998. Twenty years later, you tell this country beautifully, we feel in these pages to follow you in the streets of Moscow. Did you have to go back to write this novel, or the notes taken 20 years ago were enough ?
I did not go back to Russia. I wanted to keep the impressions of the time. To do this, I read a lot about the time. I read especially the novels of Ludmila Ulitskaya. I also read the authors of the years 1980-1990, as Alexander Zinoviev. I saw the films of Pavel Lounguine, for example, Taxi Blues , whose action takes place in Moscow ... Finally, I documented myself by plunging myself back into the old maps of Moscow at the time, before 1991, since the street names for the most part changed after the collapse of the USSR. I revisited my memory. I nourished him with those remains of the time I still had in me. And with all that, I tried to reinvent my feelings and reinvent my memories.
The uncertain men , by Olivier Rogez. Publishing Pass, 2019, 392 pages, 19.50 euros. (Released August 22nd)