ABSTRACT
Andreï Makine and the Limits of Domestication, focuses on four works by Andreï Makine, three novels that constitute a thematic trilogy and an essay. Le testament français is the story of a recent Russian immigrant to France who reconstructs his Russian childhood and adolescence with an emphasis on his relationship with Charlotte, his francophone grandmother. The other two novels in the trilogy are Requiem pour l’Est and La terre et le ciel de Jacques Dorme. All three establish narrative links between the Soviet Union, Russia and France while also featuring multilingual characters who have lived in several countries and have thus had to navigate diverse cultural environments. Most importantly they chronicle the progressive stifling of the marginally estuarine space that Charlotte was allowed to create in Le Testament français toward an utterly hypoxic stratification in Cette France qu’on oublie d’aimer, a reactionary essay about the 2005 French riots. Charlotte’s ability to inhabit two worlds by maintaining the tension that never allows one to ontologically shift into the other while making mutual enrichment possible is no longer valued in a text that reads dissidence, productive silences and uncomfortable feelings of isolation in the face of new coexisting multiple identities in reductive, almost dystopian terms.
