Overview

Can it be ever possible to write about war in a work of fiction? asks a protagonist of one of Makine’s strongly metafictional and intensely historical novels. Helena Duffy’s World War II in Andreï Makine’s Historiographic Metafiction redirects this question at the Franco-Russian author’s fiction itself by investigating its portrayal of Soviet involvement in the struggle against Hitler. To write back into the history of the Great Fatherland War its unmourned victims — invalids, Jews, POWs, women or starving Leningraders — is the self-acknowledged ambition of a novelist committed to the postmodern empowerment of those hitherto silenced by dominant historiographies. Whether Makine succeeds at giving voice to those whose suffering jarred with the triumphalist narrative of the war concocted by Soviet authorities is the central concern of Duffy’s book.

Full Product Details

Author:   Helena Duffy
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   419
Weight:   0.666kg
ISBN:  

9789004362314

ISBN 10:   9004362312
Pages:   328
Publication Date:   26 April 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

Preface Acknowledgments Author’s Note Abbreviations of the Titles of Andreï Makine’s Novels Introduction: Andreï Makine, the Great Fatherland War, the Historical Novel and (Russian) Postmodernism 1 Andreï Makine’s Novels as Historiographic Metafictions  Introduction: from Architecture to Metafiction  The Orphans of History: The Good German, the Kind Ivan and the Virtuous ‘Mobile Field Wife’  Historicity, Rewriting and Nostalgia  Can It Ever Be Possible to Write about War in a Novel?  Veracity vs. Verisimilitude  The Textuality of Knowledge, the Limits of Cognition and the Role of Documents in Historical Inquiry  ‘The Presence of the Past’  The Politics of Andreï Makine’s Fiction 2 The Hero of the Soviet Union: From Victor to Victim  Introduction  The Soviet Union Is No More — Its Heroes Live On  The Intelligible Body  Ivan’s Childhood  Fathers, Mothers and Sons  Ivan in the Mirror  Ivan’s War(s)  Speak, Memory  From Berlin to Beriozhka  Conclusions 3 The War Invalid: The Samovar, the Kommunalka and the Docile Body, or the Dialectic of Fragmentation and Plenitude  Introduction: ‘The Heroic Flotsam and Jetsam of History’  Written on the Body  The ‘Ugly Vestiges of the War’: Sasha Semyonov and Pyotr Evdokimov  The Amputee and the Fragmented Narrative  The Poetics of Fragment: Archaeology and Fresco Painting  The Common Places: The Communal Apartment and Courtyard  Charlotte, Put the Samovar on  Requiem for the Lost Empire  Conclusions 4 The Jew: Between Victimhood and Complicity, or How an Army-Dodger and Rootless Cosmopolitan Has Become a Saintly Ogre  Introduction  The Holocaust as a Non-Event and Russian/Soviet Anti-Semitism  The Jew as the Postmodern Other  There Are Jews in Makine’s Oeuvre but There Is No Jewish Question  The Kholokaust and the Grey Zone  ‘Jews Are Fighting the War in Tashkent’  The Jew’s Redemptive Phoria  From Superfluous Man to Homo Sovieticus  Conclusions 5 The Blokadnik: A Saintly Prostitute or a Heroic Defender of Leningrad?  Introduction  Taking the Piss out of the Blockade  The Homo Sacer: Steadfastness, Solidarity, Sacrifice, Sostradanie and Serenity  Leningrad’s Saintly Prostitutes  The Siege as a Gendered Experience: Heroic Fighters and Holy Blockade Women  ‘All for One and One for All’  The City of Culture or the Uncanny City  No One Is Forgotten  Conclusions Conclusions. Writing History of World War II as a Prophet Bibliography Index

Reviews

Helena Duffy refute l'appartenance de l'oeuvre de l'ecrivain au post-modernisme puisque dans ce meme contexte la Seconde Guerre mondiale est consideree sous un angle tout a fait different voire oppose (pp. 284-285). Duffy reussit a demontrer l'incongruite genante entre la poetique makinienne, generant l'emotion du lecteur par la beaute litteraire, et le message politique qu'elle sous-tend, cette incongruite faisant partie d'une strategie litteraire manipulatrice. - Isabelle Dotan, Bar-Ilan University, Israel, H-French Review, vol. 19 (May 2019), no 73.

Author Information

Helena Duffy, MSt (Oxon), PhD (Oxford Brookes), is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Senior Lecturer in French at the University of Wrocław in Poland. She has published widely on non-native French novelists, contemporary cinema and cultural representations of the Holocaust.

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