Five things to know about Andrei Makine, a new member of the French Academy – Europe1

We now know the new occupant of the chair number five of the French Academy. The writer of Russian origin Andrei Makine was elected Thursday at the prestigious institution, a consecration for this novelist long shunned by publishers who had to fight to obtain French nationality. The author of 58 years was elected in the first round by fifteen votes of 26 voters. The writer succeeds the Algerian novelist Assia Djebar, who died in February 2015. He will wait for at least a year before putting green coat and being officially received under the Dome. Who is the new immortal of this institution almost four hundred years old? Europe1.fr draws his portrait in five points.

He invented an imaginary translator. When he arrived in Paris from his native Siberia, Andrei Makine has nothing other than a mythical vision of France, transmitted, along with language, by his grandmother of French origin. The reality he discovers is not the myth. But that does not discourage the contrary. He scrapes, writes and sends his manuscripts, even if publishers of refusal are linked. To edit his first two novels, The daughter of a hero of the Soviet Union (1990) and Confessions of a flagship fallen (1992), he made to believe they were translated from Russian by inventing an imaginary translator.

He received three awards for the french will . Author sixteen books under his name and four under the pseudonym Gabriel Osmonde Andrei Makine managed the feat in 1995, to be crowned by the Goncourt prize, Goncourt high school and Medici for his novel the French will . It is this work which brings the consecration. In 2005, the novelist has also received the Prince Pierre de Monaco for all of his work and in 2014 the World price of the Simone and Cino del Duca Foundation-Institut de France.

He obtained French nationality in 1995. His first French citizenship application in 1991 is also denied. “It was humiliating for me, who am steeped in French culture. But I will not complain. I had no fixed residence or work. They were probably right,” he analyzed later. The French will opens the doors of fame. The following year, Andrei Makine finally obtained French nationality.

It abhors slang. “It is natural that I write in French, and since my arrival in France “in 1987, remembered Andrei Makine in a rare interview published in Le Figaro in early 2000.” the French always bathed me and encouraged, stimulated my love for French literature, “said the novelist, defending a rigid conception of language, neither bearing the “slang” or the rough grammar.

It is concerned about the self-denigration of French. His latest novel, the country of Lt. Schreiber (2014) tells the story of Jean-Claude Servan-Schreiber, a french officer and resisting Nazism but fell into near oblivion. How is it possible, asks that Makine, like academics Alain Finkielkraut and Max Gallo, worries of a possible disintegration of French identity and a loss of collective memory. He had already had occasion to address this issue in The France we forget to love (2006) where he lambasted the French tendency to self-denigration.