ABSTRACT
It is a function of the way in which literary success is created that most readers do not read a contemporary author’s fi ctional output in the order in which it was written. Readers generally begin with the work which made the author’s name, and only then, if their interest has been captured, do they go back and attempt to retrace the imaginative and intellectual journey which led to the author’s later reputation. This tendency is present in its most exaggerated form in the recent success of Suite française: since it is Némirosky’s very last novel which has made her reputation in the twenty-fi rst century, most readers have approached her fi ction in reverse chronological order. For this reason, they have found aspects of her 1940s writing diffi cult to understand; Némirovsky’s literary and political predicaments under the Occupation are only fully comprehensible in the context of an appreciation of the development of her literary career through the 1930s. Similarly, most of the fi rst readers of David Golder were unaware that it was the culmination of a literary journey which had begun well before the explosion of critical interest in Némirovsky in January 1930. Némirovsky had already published ‘Le Malentendu’, ‘L’Enfant génial’, ‘L’Ennemie’ and ‘Le Bal’ in Les Œuvres libres. Le Bal, which contemporary readers took to be Némirovsky’s second novel, was in fact written before David Golder was fi nished, and Le Malentendu was already four years old when it appeared in book form in 1930. Even Les Mouches d’automne, Némirovsky’s third published novel, was partly based on a story written in the early 1920s.1 Thus L’Affaire Courilof (published in 1933) was the fi rst text Némirovsky originated entirely after the success of David Golder. An understanding of these early works is important for an appreciation of Némirovsky’s subsequent literary career, as it is here that we fi nd evidence of the sort of position-taking which would contribute to her location in the literary fi eld of 1930s France. We already have established that the novels Némirovsky published in the fi rst half of the 1930s were a response to the literary debates of the 1920s: her stories published between 1926 and 1929 provide an aperture through which we might observe the development of her perspective on the literary environment surrounding her. My focus in this chapter then will be on the part of Némirovsky’s fi ctional production which predates David Golder.
