Review of The Wine of Solitude

Review of The Wine of Solitude by Irène Némirovsky.

I have already reviewed two books by Irène Némirovsky, texts of which were found by her daughter long after she had died tragically in Auschwitz (1942), a victim of Hitler’s “Final Solution,” or programme for the extermination of a whole race along with many despised minority groups. Némirovsky is best known today for these two novels, posthumously published as a diptych under the title Suite Française. These two stories were only discovered in the late 1990s when Némirovski's older daughter, Denise, who had kept the notebook containing the manuscript for Suite Française for fifty years without reading it, thinking that it was a journal or diary of her mother's. See HERE for my review of Suite Française.

However, now I wish to review one of her earlier and widely-praised books, The Wine of Solitude (Éditions Albin Michel, 1935). Irina Lvovna Nemirovskaya (1903 –1942) was a novelist of Ukrainian Jewish origin who was born in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire. She lived more than half her life in France and published only in French.  The translation is rendered finely and seamlessly into English by Sandra Smith, who has translated all of this author’s novels available. My edition of this book is Vintage, 2012.

I have quoted the much-loved novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch before with respect to the movement we call existentialism, namely that it is “a philosophy that is lived in.”  In other words, it is a philosophy that cuts to the quick of life.  Again, the Wine of Solitude is exactly that, an existentialist or “lived in” account of the actual experience of a young woman growing to maturity during the First World War and the Russian Revolution.  The countries against the background of which this novel takes place are Ukraine (Kyiv), Russia (St Petersburg), Finland and France (Paris). 

Némirovsky captures well the mood of the times and evokes the historical setting with consummate skill of each of these countries in turmoil, especially Ukraine and Russia.  Essentially, this novel recounts a coming-of-age story of a young girl growing up from early to late adolescence and young adulthood during these troublesome times.  The young Hélene, who in many respects reflects much of Nemirovsky’s own personal experience, is a troubled young girl.  She is neglected by her self-absorbed mother, who is more interested in her extra-marital affair with her lover, Max.  Her father, who loves her dearly, often neglects her through his business, banking and investment commitments, as well as his gambling addiction.  She longs for love and for freedom from the sheer lack of concern she finds at home, which never seems to be rooted in any one place or country, but freedom and love are promised in Paris, France, at the end.  The only source of love for the young, sensitive girl while growing is her French governess or nanny, Mademoiselle Rose.  As the Great War and then the Russian Revolution rage in the background, Hélene grows from a lonely, unhappy child into an angry young woman intent on revenge.  Nemirovsky analyses the tangled web of relationships in one very dysfunctional and unhappy family with consummate and bold skill, while evoking the places of her childhood with equal clarity. 

There is an interesting continuity with the Russian authors Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, namely the French connection.  Both these writers spoke French  and used some dialogue in that language to illustrate the nobility of some of their characters.  The Karol family are a rich family with many lucrative investments.  They have homes in both Kiev and St Petersburg and spend a period in Paris every year; their nanny is French, and Hélene prefers to speak French to Russian.  Before Alexander Pushkin, “well-read” meant in French only.  A lot of the upper class were avoiding speaking Russian, which they would have seen as the “language of the serfs.”  In short, fluent French was a prerequisite for high society in nineteenth-century Russia.  This reflects much of Némirovsky’s own life: her father Léon was a self-made banker and one of the few Jews to be persona grata at the Imperial Court of St Petersburg. Irène was brought up speaking fluent French in a posh household where balls and excursions to the Côte d'Azur were commonplace.   The Karols in the novel, and the Nemirovskys, lie clearly within a continuation of that high society which is beginning to crumble as the Russian Red Revolution takes hold, and they eventually flee Russia through Finland and thence to Paris.  Boris Karol, Hélene’s father, is a Jew, while her mother Bella is a Christian.   Helene is scathingly resentful of her mother’s indifference to her and her complete selfishness, and this reflects Némirovsky's painful relationship with her own mother - a distant, and ultimately reviled, figure. "That is why," says Carmen Callil, writer, critic and publisher, "you'll find more unsympathetic women in her books than unsympathetic Jews."  Helene “nurtured in her heart a strange hatred of her mother that seemed to increase as she grew older. (p. 41 – 42).  Furthermore, the young Hélene also realises as she matures that there is a widespread misogyny in her own society against which she instinctively rebels and which even her father exemplifies as he tells her to explain his error after he had forgotten all about her when he had left her in the lobby of the gambling casino: “You wouldn’t understand.  You’re too young.  And you’ll never understand.  You’re just a woman.”  (p. 69)

The strong point of any of the novels I have read by Némirovsky is her ability to draw the reader into the text with great skill.  As a result, we feel we are actually in the very situation depicted, whether it’s that of Ukraine: “A hazy, reddish light lingered low in the sky; the wind brought the smell of the Ukrainian plains on the city, a mild and bitter scent of smoke, cold water and rushes that grew along the riverbanks” (p. 3) or St Petersburg which reflects much of what Dostoevsky would have written about that city, especially the chapter where Mademoiselle Rose and Helene get lost in the fog which totally disorients them and is a prelude to the governess’s imminent death; “In the darkness they could smell the rancid odour of the canals; nobody had bothered to clean them since the October Revolution; no one bothered to repair their stones; the city was crumbling beneath the weight of water, slowly disintegrating, becoming a city of smoke, illusions and fog, retreating into a void.” (p. 112 – 113)

Not only does the author conjure up such wonderful descriptions of places, but she also creates associated moods as expressed in the immediately previous description of St Petersburg.  We instinctively realise the lostness of both Rose and the young Helene, their utter confusion, anxiety and sheer trepidation about their future.  The illusions, the fog and the void are also in their minds, in the minds and hearts of Helene’s mother and father (Boris and Bella Karol) and all other adults portrayed in this novel, especially Max.  They have pinned their hopes on temporal wealth, which is a constant in this novel: investments in gold mines in Siberia, shares in the stock market and so on, with eventual rampant inflation where the cushions of the divans are stuffed with paper money.  The old wealth is inexorably being swept away by the overwhelming and imminent revolution.  Helene is, as is Irene, a caustic, analytical and shrewd critic of such ephemerality, and we suspect she has a deeper spiritual foundation to her character.  When we read Nemirovsky, we are sucked into the story and experience an existential nearness to her finely-painted characters as if they were sitting beside us.  A thoroughly fine novel, The Wine of Solitude is to be savoured as a good wine which will allow the truth to be told and the masks of pretention and deception to fall away as a scab might before a wound is fully healed.