Patrick Besson – Dominique Fernandez, Soviet writer

Ihe most scandalous – and therefore the most poetic – book of winter 2022-2023: The Soviet Roman, a continent to discover (Grasset, €26). The author is not a Russian academician but a French academician: Dominique Fernandez (born in 1929). Perhaps he thought he was sufficiently protected by his green coat and bicorn hat to embark, in the midst of the global anti-Putin campaign, on an ode to non-dissident Russian writers of the Soviet era. The last person to be interested in this subject was Louis Aragon: Soviet literature (Denoel, 1955). Who was not an academician but a member of the central committee of the PCF, an organization less criticized at the time than the French Academy is today.

Fernandez, no doubt to pass the pill to Western intellectuals in…