What is a home? Face to face with Emmanuel Carrère on his latest book, Kolchoz

The apartment at the Institut de France is too large for two people and too official to truly feel like a home. “I certainly wouldn’t have liked living there,” Emmanuel Carrère tells Domus as we sit together in Rome at Caffè delle Arti. The French writer arrived only a few days ago and says he wants to learn Italian. Without much nostalgia, and with the same disenchanted clarity that runs through all his work, he describes the “official residence” temporarily assigned to his mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse—historian and academic—when she became secrétaire perpétuelle of the Académie française. It is from this monumental space, emptied after his mother’s death, that Kolchoz, the author’s new book published in Italy by Adelphi, begins. The act of clearing out the apartment sets in motion a family investigation spanning generations, countries, and political systems.

More than a straightforward memoir, Kolchoz takes the shape of an emotional geography. Rooms, corridors, hotels, country houses, and public swimming pools become points on a map through which Carrère reconstructs both his family’s history and that of the twentieth century in which it unfolds: Russian emigration, the Soviet Union, institutional France, rural provincial life, the rituals of power, and those infinitely more fragile rituals of domestic existence. The places that populate this book are narrative devices, revealing who its characters truly are and the deeper nature of their relationships.

“It was something of a mausoleum,” Carrère says of his parents’ apartment. He went there out of filial duty rather than pleasure. His children, by contrast, loved it: “There was this enormous living room—it was like a football field to them.”

Carrère describes an almost theatrical interior: “Beyond the various reception rooms, each of them had their own study.” His mother’s was “huge, majestic, with windows overlooking the Seine.” His father’s, at the far end of the apartment, looked out onto “a rather dark street, with dark wallpaper.” The architecture itself reflected his parents’ relationship: they lived essentially separate lives. “My mother’s study was yang; my father’s was yin.” In this sense, Carrère tells Domus, the apartment was “the mechanism of their life together.”

For him, however, the very meaning of “home” is inseparable from relationship itself: “It’s inevitably tied to family, or at least to being part of a couple. Being single and having a home are almost antithetical conditions.” Rather than the grand apartment on the Seine, he prefers ordinary spaces: “I really like working in cafés, going out in the morning to write. I do it here in Rome as well,” where he is temporarily staying in a friend’s apartment.

This is why, for Carrère, a “real home” is the one belonging to his uncle Nicolas, described in meticulous detail in Kolchoz as a “cocoon there’s no need to leave.” After years spent in temporary rooms, his uncle eventually settles in the suburbs, in a house that feels like the opposite of his mother’s mausoleum: a warm space filled with books, photographs, and accumulated traces of life, where he lives with his partner. “It’s like a dacha,” Carrère says. “And I feel very comfortable in that dacha.”

If the Institut apartment symbolizes power, his paternal grandmother’s house in Cazères, near Toulouse, represents its absolute opposite. “It was tiny and awkwardly laid out, but it was a real home. That’s where we were a family.” In Carrère’s memory, the house preserves the image of a provincial France still shaped by simple rituals and a shared sense of closeness. Idealized perhaps, but for him it holds the memory of a world “that was, despite everything, less harsh—a world in which one could look to the future with greater confidence.”

It is also in Cazères, at the municipal swimming pool with its “blue ceramic steps,” that one of his most significant childhood memories takes place: himself as a child learning to swim under his mother’s joyful gaze. He had already recounted this episode in My Life as a Russian Novel, but in Kolchoz it becomes the starting point for a broader reflection: at a time when the world may be “facing the end of democracy […] is it really appropriate to write about one’s own small life?” We ask him this once again in the garden of Caffè delle Arti. Carrère answers with a method rather than a theory: “I tried to tell the story of my parents’ and grandparents’ lives by placing them in relation to the great historical events passing through them.” It is the leitmotif of his entire literary production.

If the French homes tell the intimate story of memory, Hotel Ukraina conveys its geopolitical dimension. Carrère first stayed there as a child, accompanying his mother to the Soviet Union for a conference. The daughter of Russian émigrés, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse maintained a profound connection to that world. The building is one of Moscow’s famous Stalinist skyscrapers—the Seven Sisters—an emblem of the socialist classicism Stalin made his own. Carrère devotes no fewer than four chapters of Kolchoz to Hotel Ukraina, at different moments in the narrative. He describes it as a place that felt like “Batman’s Gotham City.” In his memories, the hotel is the USSR rendered as architecture: “majestic, threatening, overwhelming, absolute. It was meant to be luxurious, yet its comfort was inferior to that of a motel in Arkansas.”

Today, transformed into the Radisson Royal Hotel, it strikes him as utterly changed: immaculate and Westernized, but stripped of the symbolic density that once made it unique. Like the GUM department store, now “turned into a mall,” the hotel’s transformation reflects that of Moscow and Saint Petersburg—cities which, over recent decades, “have become terribly Westernized, and therefore banalized.” Outside the metropolises, however, he says little has changed: “Deep Russia has changed very little… In places like Perm or Omsk, people are still mired in a kind of Soviet poverty.” There, he says, people’s character has remained almost unchanged over time: “a mixture of brutality and sentimentality.”

Kolchoz was born from intensely concrete materials: archives, dossiers, and genealogical records his father had gathered over decades and kept in his study at the Institut de France—that secluded space where, Carrère says, “no one quite knew what he did.” Much of the research needed to reconstruct the family story was already there, waiting. As though the book itself had been waiting for years. But when the conversation turns to his own way of inhabiting space, Carrère lets go of all certainty.

“As an adult, I’ve moved around a lot. In the end, every place I’ve lived has turned out to be temporary.” The very idea of a definitive home seems foreign to him. When asked how he experiences the city and how he moves through it, Carrère gives the answer of a disciplined flâneur. Waving the map he bought for his temporary stay in Rome, he says he still prefers “walking at random,” for the simple pleasure of getting lost. At the end of our conversation, when we ask what form his inner space would take, Carrère smiles and replies: “A space with variable geometry.” And yet, when he thinks of the most important place in his life, his mind returns to that small house in Cazères.

    Emmanuel Carrère (Paris, 1957) is a French writer, screenwriter, and filmmaker. Widely regarded as one of the most important voices in contemporary literature, he is known for works that blur the boundaries between reportage, autobiography, and literary invention. His most significant books include The Adversary, My Life as a Russian Novel, Limonov, The Kingdom, Yoga, and V13, all published in Italy by Adelphi. Carrère has received numerous international honors, including the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, and the Prix Médicis, as well as the Prix de la langue française for his body of work. As a screenwriter, he has worked on several major projects, including The Wizard of the Kremlin (2025), directed by Olivier Assayas and adapted from Giuliano da Empoli’s novel. He has also been involved in film adaptations of his own books: Limonov was adapted into the eponymous feature film directed by Kirill Serebrennikov (2024), which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. With Kolchoz, Carrère returns to exploring his family genealogy and the relationship between private history and European history. In Italy, Emmanuel Carrère will present Kolchoz at Milan’s Teatro Dal Verme on May 4, 2026, and at the Turin International Book Fair on May 15, 16, and 17.