The Russian historical and literary context of the novels by Guillaume Musso and prose by Marina Tsvetaeva

Tsaregorodtseva Svetlana Sergeevna ORCID: 0000-0002-2510-2324 PhD in Philology Associate Professor of the Department of History of Journalism and Literature, Moscow State University named after A. S. Griboyedov. 111024, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, shosse Entuziastov, 21 alatas@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Pinaev Sergei Mikhailovich ORCID: 0000-0001-7064-7510 Doctor of Philology Professor of the Department of Russian and Foreign Literature, Peoples' Friendship University of Russia 117279, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Miklukho-Maklaya, 6 serpinaev@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Musso is currently one of the most popular writers in France. According to Figaro, in 2010 he occupied the second place in the ranking of French fiction writers after Marc Levy with his books "On the first Day" and the sequel "On the first Night" ^[1], and for the next 11 years Musso was the first in the list of the best-selling writers of his country ^[2].However, monographs and dissertations on his work have not yet been written. Most scientific articles in Russian are devoted to language and style, the most exhaustive literary article is "The features of metarmodernism in G. Musso's novel "The Paper Girl"" (T.V. Nuzhnaya, R.R.Rustamov). No special research has been conducted on the Russian historical and literary context in Musso's novels before.   

In Musso's novel "Paper Girl" there are quite a lot of Russian realities, for example, the favorite picture of the main character of the writer Tom Boyd is often mentioned - "Blue Lovers" by Marc Chagall, which is described in the text of the work in several strokes: "Blue Lovers" passionately embraced like two schoolchildren during a first date in an open-air cinema" ^{[3, p. 9]}.

It can be assumed that Musso chooses this particular canvas from a series of paintings by Chagall: "Pink lovers", "Gray lovers", "Green lovers", appealing to the symbolism of the blue color. In Russian iconography, blue is the color of the Mother of God, which combines everything heavenly and earthly, it symbolizes the infinity of heaven, eternal peace. Given the general influence of iconography on the work of Marc Chagall, the "choice" of the painting "Blue Lovers" is understandable. The painting by the Russian artist in Musso's novel embodies the all-consuming, selfless love that Tom Boyd is capable of, but his beloved Aurora, "a woman exuding the scent of sand, with a body flexible like a vine, marble skin and silver eyes" ^{[3, p. 55]}, is not capable. It combined "the mystery of Marlene Dietrich, the seductiveness of Anna Netrebko and the sensuality of Melody Gardot" ^{[3, p.231]}. Tom Boyd was aware of the ruinous nature of passion for such a woman, he knew novels about fatal love-passion well and took them as a warning. These are the novels of Stendhal, "The Love of the Lord" by Albert Cohen and "Anna Karenina" by L. Tolstoy. The heroine of this novel, according to Tom Boyd, threw herself in front of a train after "sacrificing everything for the sake of a loved one" ^{[3, p.232]}.

  After breaking up with Aurora, Tom can't write and doesn't want to live. But he has devoted friends, thanks to whom the "paper" girl Billy appears in his life – a fictional character from his novel. Thus, in one meta–text, the real and virtual (novel) world collide - a fairly frequent creative technique in the technique of Musso's literary narration. Thanks to Billy, Tom regains the ability to create. When Tom and Billy are forced to flee and Tom seems to have lost all his fortune, Billy saves the painting "Blue Lovers" by Marc Chagall as one of Tom Boyd's special affections. Musso introduces the commercial evaluation of this painting into the novel. It is given by the "pawnbroker of the stars" Yoshide Matsuko from Beverly Hills. He is ready to buy a painting for only 28 thousand dollars, knowing about the plight in which the writer found himself. At the same time, he makes a rather cynical comment: "From my point of view, it will cost even forty times more at the Sotheby's auction in New York, in two or three years, when the new Russians will again have the desire to part with money" ^{[3, p.151]}.

In the last pages of the novel, Musso creates the image of a new Russian Oleg Morozov, who makes a major real estate deal and chooses a gift for his mistress, a Dutch model. Oleg Morozov is a billionaire, the owner of one of the largest fortunes in Russia. He made a career in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where he first taught philosophy, and after perestroika and Yeltsin's reforms "found contact with business people who were very suspicious, but who managed to help him take advantage of the policy of privatization of state-owned enterprises" ^{[3, p. 391]}. Oleg Morozov, having become a millionaire, "did not show external signs of wealth": he drank coffee from paper cups, did not drive a limousine, and his guard, staying nearby, was invisible. But the main thing is that "Oleg did not look "businesslike" by nature, and his opponents often fell for the bait of a dreamy and harmless appearance, under which a reinforced concrete and indestructible will was hidden" ^{[3, pp. 391-392]}.

Oleg Morozov is 44 years old, he has all the benefits of life: real estate in London, New York and Dubai, a yacht, a private jet, a professional basketball team and a Formula 1 stable. Oleg's prototype is obvious – Roman Abramovich, the details in his biography have only been slightly changed: the geography of his activities, and instead of the Chelsea football team, there is an unnamed basketball team.  However, Musso retained the main thing: a psychological portrait (external charm and iron will), political ties between real and "romantic" billionaires, high-profile love stories. The age of Musso's character and his Russian prototype coincides: the action of the novel "Paper Girl" takes place in 2010, when Roman Abramovich was 44 years old.

In Musso's novel, billionaire Morozov is a real "new Russian", he has already got rid of any uncomfortable friendship, is divorced and is dating Dutch top model Marike Van Eden, who is 20 years younger than him. She never leaves the covers of glossy magazines. It is for her that Oleg Morozov is looking for an unusual gift and finds Marilyn Monroe's autograph in a small bookstore, buys it, without haggling, for $ 3,500. And then suddenly he sees Tom Boyd's book "The Trilogy of Angels", decides to buy it too, since it is Marike's favorite writer. However, the book was postponed and was about to be picked up. The buyer insists on buying, he says that, in his opinion, everything is for sale and everything has its price. It was unconvincing for a bookstore clerk.:

- This is too cynical a view of human nature, don't you think?

- And what, in your opinion, can not be bought? Oleg asked a provocative question.

- You know this very well: friendship, love, dignity...^{[3, p.394]}

It is not known how this dialogue ended, but the Russian billionaire did purchase the book, but failed by and large. When he arrived on a private plane with a gift for his beloved girl without warning, wanting to make a surprise, opened the door of his 17th-century mansion on the Bourbon embankment, he trivially caught a top model with another. Oleg tried to hide his shame from the driver, but could not resist and threw the book into the Seine.

Oleg Morozov was no longer mentioned in the novel "Paper Girl", but the dispute about the true values in the life of a millionaire and a bookseller played a big role in the ideological conception of the novel. 

  You can try to make an assumption about the "origin" of the new Russian surname. It is quite possible that Musso "borrowed" the surname for the Russian hero from the merchant and collector I. A. Morozov, in whose collection there was a painting by Albert Marquet "Paris in winter. Bourbon Embankment", and the patronymic of Ivan Abramovich Morozov directly refers to the surname of the prototype. Russians Russian oligarchs are directly expressed in the text of another novel by Musso, where he calls a flock of sheep speculators, stock trailers, founders of hedge funds, Chinese nouveau riche, and this series includes Russian oligarchs who are ready to pay fabulous sums for paintings by the artist Lorenz (the hero of the novel), who turned an easel into "his own printing press "...", three brush strokes on the canvas - and a whole herd of sheep obediently pours out millions" ^{[3, p. 227]}.(Daria Zhukova is considered to be the prototype of the model who is fond of art, to whom R. Abramovich gave fabulously expensive works of art that made up an impressive collection. One of her most expensive exhibits is the Francis Bacon triptych, purchased at Sotheby's in 2008 for $86.3 million. There are mentions of new Russians who collect expensive works in G. Musso's novel "Apartment in Paris").

Further in the novel "Paper Girl" Musso traces the fate of a book thrown by a Russian oligarch into a cold winter Seine, which was fished out to save the life of a man who tried to drown himself. The book changed the lives of all the people into whose hands it fell, and now it has become necessary to save Billy's "paper girl".  

When creating a montage composition of his novels, Musso often "mounts" articles about the events described in their text, SMS messages, exact quotes of emails indicating the senders' addresses, dates and time of their sending. This is how writer Tom Boyd receives emails from readers from different countries, including from Russia.

Well, the novel ends with a lightened finale: the meeting of two kindred souls who truly love, Tom and Lilly (Billy) talk about meaningless things, and the narrative stops at the interrupted phrase. As in life, true love has no end…

In the novel "The Girl and the Night", which takes place in 1994 and 2017, the Russian text can be identified at all contextual levels: vital biographical, literary, historical, cross-cultural. The plot of the novel is based on the detective story of the murder of one of the best students of the Lyceum of Saint-Exupery, Winky Rockwell.  The author encrypted the clue in the investigation in Marina Tsvetaeva's book "The Story of Sonechka". "It was a female being," Marina wrote, "whom I loved more than anything in the world. It was just love—in a feminine way." In 1918-1919, Tsvetaeva was admired by actress Sofia Golliday, and both of them at the same time were fond of actor Yuri Zavadsky, a student of Vakhtangov's studio. And Marina Tsvetaeva at the same time met with another "man of the theater" Vladimir Alekseev, who, according to the memoirs of his relatives, was distinguished by "a special chivalrous attitude towards a woman" ^{[5, p. 164]}. At the same time, she continued to love her husband Sergei Efron, and Sonechka Holliday loved her daughters, especially two-year-old Irina.

Tsvetaeva also wrote the poetry cycle "Poems to Sonechka", dedicated to the actress Sophia Holliday (1894-1934).  In one of the poems in this cycle, Tsvetaeva wrote about Sophia's years of study at the Mariinsky Gymnasium:

About how a rare plant

Bloomed in the brightest of the greenhouses:

In a high-society institution

For the noblest girls.

And in Musso's novel, a lot of attention is paid to the student years of the main characters, realities are introduced that bring the work "The Girl and the Night" closer to the genre of the university novel.

In the finale of Tsvetaeva's previously quoted poem, there is another overlap with the text of Musso's novel:

And as a fisherman on the far coast

I found two shoe tracks…

Here's an old story for you,

And for me, two tears for the song.

The poems of the cycle about Marina Tsvetaeva's Sonechka smack of tragedy: "where love retreats, there comes death-the gardener." They contain a feeling of transience, ephemerality, a premonition of the end of love-passion, and sometimes life. Tragic intonations also prevail in Musso's novel.

Both Sonechka Holliday and Vinka died young. Both girls were always in the spotlight because they were very unusual and beautiful. In The Story of Sonechka, Tsvetaeva writes: "She was different to everyone, talented, bright, helpless... They didn't like her in the theater. Why? "Women — for beauty, men — for intelligence, actors — for a gift, both those and others, and others — for specialness, the danger of specialness" ^{[5, p. 227]}.

 Winka Rockwell is one of the most striking female images in the work of G. Musso, it is based on the charm of sin and the halo of mystery. "She was an unusual girl – educated, lively and cheerful. She had red hair, different colored eyes and delicate facial features "...", she was surrounded by a charming aura and some kind of mystery that attracted like a magnet and drove her crazy. There was something elusive about her, something that gave rise to a deceptive thought: if you manage to take over the Wine, then you will own the whole world" ^{[6, pp. 94-95]}. The main character of Tom Degole's novel "often thought that Winka had so charmed me, where did this painfully captivating dizziness come from, which I felt constantly. As from a drug" ^{[6, p.146]}.

M. Tsvetaeva writes very similarly about Sonechka: "In front of me is a living fire. Everything is on fire, everything is on fire. Cheeks are burning, lips are burning, eyes are burning, white teeth are burning incombustibly in the fire of the mouth, they are burning — they are curling from the flame! — braids, two black braids, one on the back, the other on the chest, as if one had been thrown by the fire. And the look from that fire — such admiration, such despair, such: I'm afraid! like this: I love you!" ^{[5, p.298]}.

Vakhtang Mchedelov, the director who discovered Sonechka the actress in Moscow, noted: "She is too much an exception, she cannot be used in an ensemble: only she is visible. Do you know Stanislavsky's "entering the circle"? So our Sonechka is too out of the circle. Or the same thing — a solid center" ^{[5, p. 327]}.

As in The Paper Girl, Marc Chagall is repeatedly mentioned in the novel The Girl and the Night, where one of the boarding schools in Saint-Ex is named after him.    In one of the photos, Vinck and Richard Degale (Tom's father) are shot against the background of the cemetery where the artist is buried. Winky's photographs were important documents in the investigation of Tom Degale, who was the same age and a close friend of Winky in 1994, and in 2017 became a famous writer. Tom loved Winky, after learning about her relationship with his father, the director of their lyceum, he suffered hard from the disclosure of this secret. The motif of love for the daughter of both father and son at the same time refers the reader to the story of I.S. Turgenev "First Love".  

When Vinka disappeared, "on her bedside table was a collection of poems by the Russian poetess Marina Tsvetaeva" ^{[6, p.145]} with an inscription from "Alexis". Toma at first thought that the book was given by a young teacher, Alexis Clement, whom he considered his rival.  And only at the very end of the novel, when Toma opened this book, he realized that this was not a poetry collection, but the prose of a Russian poetess. The key to the denouement of the detective story was the lines highlighted by someone in the book concerning the love of two women, on the basis of which Tom realized that Winky was in an affair with Alexis Deville, a young literature teacher. It was this connection that proved fatal and led to tragic consequences.  

The novel "The Girl and the Night" by Musso and "The Tale of Sonechka" by Tsvetaeva can be compared not only on an eventful, but also on a deeper meaningful level. Tsvetaeva writes about Sophia Holliday, an actress who became famous in the role of "Netochka Nezvanova", and "Sonechka" Tsvetaeva will inherit from little Katya from "Netochka Nezvanova" ardor and candor "..."burning eyes; the story itself borrows from Dostoevsky the love "aura" surrounding the heroines, the exaltation of adoration and delight" ^{[4, p. 164]}. It is likely that F.M. Dostoevsky's early romantic novel "Netochka Nezvanova" indirectly influenced G. Musso's novel "The Girl and the Night" through the "Tale of Sonechka" by M. Tsvetaeva.

It should also be taken into account that the "Tale of Sonechka" was written in France, where Tsvetaeva lived for 14 years, from 1926 to 1939, more often in the suburbs of Paris – Meudon, Vanve, Clamart, and the last two years – in Paris. In France, Tsvetaeva wrote the poems "From the Sea" (1926), "An Attempt at a Room" (1926), "Stairs" (1926), "Poem of the Air" (1927), "Perekop" (1939). Tsvetaeva wrote prose and translated Pushkin and Lermontov into French, Russian revolutionary songs of the past and songs based on the words of contemporary Soviet poets. Marina Tsvetaeva translated her poems into French. The most famous are "Where does such tenderness come from?" ("D'o? pareille tendresse", 1916), "Boris Pasternak" ("? Boris Pasternak", 1925), "Homesickness" ("La nostalgie", 1934), the poem "Well Done" (1934).

In 1932-1936 . Tsvetaeva also wrote prose in French: the lyrical and philosophical essay "Lettre ? l'Amazone" ("Letter to the Amazon"), in the epistolary genre "Letters to Teskova" - "Neuf lettres, avec une dixi?me retenue et uneonzi?me re?ue – et Posttace" ("Nine letters, with the tenth unsent and the eleventh received – and Afterword"); genre sketch "Le miracle des chevaux. Fait authentique" ("The miracle of horses. A reliable fact"), a cycle of short stories "Mon p?re et son Mus?e" ("The Father and his Museum").

"The Story of Sonechka" was written between 07/10/1937 and 09/20/1937. Much of the story (especially the pages about love) is written in French.

Russian Russian contemporaries in France did not appreciate these works: Tsvetaeva's translations and especially her artistic prose were permeated with "Russian intonations, because the Russian poet "controlled" the language, bringing into it the characteristic features of his artistic handwriting and poetic thinking. According to linguists studying her work, the underlying reason was that half a century ago, Tsvetaeva's time had not yet come; her European reader was only "growing up" ^{[7, pp. 81-82]}.

Undoubtedly, the young French writer Guillaume  Musso belongs to a new generation, he "grew up" on the prose and poetry of M. Tsvetaeva, and when he "developed" the image of Winky, he turned not only to the image of Sonechka from the story and poems of the Russian poetess, but also to the idea of the personality of Marina Tsvetaeva herself, whom S. Efron called "a man of passions." The fact that by the beginning of the XXI century a new generation of Frenchmen had grown up who would know Marina Tsvetaeva is also evidenced by the fact that in February 2015, after the renovation and re-equipment of the Municipal Library of the 13th Arrondissement of Paris, the library was named "La bibliotheque Glaciere Marina Tsvetaeva" on the initiative of the former mayor of Paris, Mr. Delanoe. At the opening ceremony, Bruno Julliard, cultural adviser to the Mayor of Paris, said: "Tsvetaeva belonged to an intellectual circle that created the history of world culture. Tsvetaeva is a courageous and complex personality, her life and work are inextricably linked with freedom of thought..."The fact that Tsvetaeva is "part of French culture, which is able to dissolve everyone who fell into her sphere of influence," noted philosopher and literary critic Tsvetan Todorov" ^{[8, p.42]}. In 2017 in France memorial plaques were unveiled on the houses where M. Tsvetaeva lived; this happened thanks to the activities of V. Losskaya and L. Mnukhin, the authors of the project "On Tsvetaeva places".

In 2017, the action takes place in the novel by G. Musso. Russian Russian poet It is very important that the most widely read author of France refers not only to the work of the Russian poetess, but also to many other Russian realities.  For example, Winky loved Tarkovsky's movies very much, the fifth part of the novel "The Last Days of Winky Rockwell" opens the epigraph from "Masha" by V. Nabokov. And in the novel "Life as a Novel" Musso calls Nabokov a Russian genius ^{[9, p.48]}.

Marina Tsvetaeva's poem "Yesterday I still looked into my eyes...", or rather one line from it "To live in fire", gives the title to the final chapter of G. Musso's novel "I'm coming back for you". The inner monologue of the main character Celine Peladino has obvious similarities with the text of this poem: "I live in fire, I move along the abyss, I dance on the edge of the abyss" ^{[10, p. 376]}.

Russian realities also play an important role in Guillaume Musso's "writer's" novel "Life as a Novel". One of the main problems of the novel is the relationship between the author and the hero. As in the novel "Paper Girl", here two worlds, fictional and real, are closely intertwined. From the first pages of the novel, the reader is drawn into a game where the fictional (novel) world is replaced by the real one. The heroes of these worlds – the famous writer Flora Conway from the novel world and the writer Roman Ozersky from the real world – meet and have philosophical conversations.  Moreover, in the book "Life as a Novel", the initiative belongs to the "paper" Flora: she insists on meeting with the writer who writes about her. Flora begs the author to change the plot, return her missing daughter to her and reproaches Roman Ozerski for the fact that his books are cold and merciless.  The disputes between Flora Conway and Roman Ozersky "refer" the Russian reader to the dialogues of the characters in F.M. Dostoevsky's novels "Crime and Punishment".  ("Crime and Punishment" are mentioned in G. Musso's novel "Because I Love You", "The Brothers Karamazov" - in Musso's novel "The Angel's Call". A quote from F.M. Dostoevsky's "Dead House": "Man is a creature that gets used to everything" is given in the novel "Apartment in Paris").

The novel "The Secret Life of a Writer" also contains a dispute about what real literature is, when Musso's characters talk about indifference in literature, about the danger of false emotions.

Writers Flora Conway and Roman Ozersky recall V. Nabokov's essay "Strict Judgments", where the "Russian genius" called his characters "convicts", slaves in a world "where he was an absolute dictator" ^{[9, p.148]}.

In Musso's novel, the writer Ozerski, for whom literature is a trick, a set of techniques for building intricate, intriguing storylines, stops writing.

Roman Ozerski believes that "the main thing in creativity is trial and error. When you reach the limit of what is possible, it is not necessary to keep traces of your attempts. This is true for any art. Pierre Soulage burned canvases by the hundreds, which he was not satisfied with. Pierre Bonnard sneaked into museums and covered up his own paintings, Chaim Soutine bought his paintings from dealers in order to rewrite them" ^{[9, p. 147]}. Chaim Soutine lived in Russia, studied at the Ivan Trutnev drawing school, and wrote in the "nationality" column of official documents: "Russian". After moving to Paris, he lived in the hostel of young artists "Beehive" (like Marc Chagall).

The denouement of the plot of the book "Life as a Novel" takes place in the Orthodox church of Alexander Nevsky, where the Russian community of Paris gathers for services. Musso writes about the impression that the cathedral has on his hero. "I knew about the existence of the Orthodox Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky, a historical place of attraction for the Russian community in the capital, but I have never been here. From the outside, the temple looked like a small pearl in the Byzantine style: five turrets with domes topped with gilded crosses looked like white-stone rockets aiming skyward to assert heavenly harmony. The cathedral attracted me like a magnet. Something–curiosity, hope, the promise of warmth-made me go inside."

Musset describes in detail the decoration of the Orthodox church: "an abundance of icons, a huge central dome, as if inviting to soar skyward, an indescribable combination of severity and dazzling gilding."

Roman Ozersky did not really know why he came here and faith was always alien to him, he "believed in the only god for a long time – himself." Musso explains that it was in the Orthodox Church that the writer Ozerski realized that he took himself for God, creating the world, "it took him not six days, but two dozen novels" ^{[9, pp. 229-230]}.

 In this church, the main character of the novel, writer Roman Ozersky, felt like a prodigal son and, realizing that the writer was a creator, turned to Jesus Christ with a request to return his son to him, and in return promised not to write, to stop being a creator. The theme – "the writer who stopped writing" – is more deeply developed in the novel "The Secret Life of a Writer".

"Life as a Novel" ends with an almost happy ending: evil is punished, the loving heroes of both the real and virtual worlds are reunited. In addition, the novel has an interesting afterword: a list of the works of art mentioned in the book. It can be assumed that the author is compiling it for researchers who will try to identify the intertextual connections of the novel. Musso makes this task easier for critics and gets involved in the game not only with readers, but also literary critics. There is a Russian writer on this list, Vladimir Nabokov. In the novel "The Secret Life of Writers" Vladimir Nabokov appears at the very end, in the epilogue, where Musso reveals some of the prototypes and pretexts of the novel. Revealing his creative laboratory, Musso admits that the second part of the novel is called "The Golden-haired Angel", since "Vladimir Nabokov called his beloved wife Vera by such a tender name in one of the countless letters to her. I thought about the beauty of these letters, as well as about the amazing correspondence between Albert Camus and actress Maria Casares, while composing the correspondence. and Nathan Fowles" ^{[11, p. 316]}.

       Summing up, it can be noted that the study of modern literature is always very difficult, but it is a fascinating process of observing the creation of new texts, their plot construction, intertextual connections with other works.  And first of all, questions arise: what to compare the text of a new novel with, how the main trends of modern literature were reflected in the author's work.

G.I. Lushnikova and T.Y. Osadchaya believe that one of the most important trends in literature in recent years is the fact that "the boundary between high and mass literature is blurring, there is a combination of realistic tradition, modernist experiments and postmodern poetics" ^{[12, p. 9]}. Many features of the poetics of Musso's novels are undoubtedly related to metamodernism, which replaced postmodernism at the beginning of the XXI century. (Linda Hutcheon names the exact date – 2002 ^{[13, p. 166]}), as well as with a "new sincerity", as Adam Kelly understood this phenomenon ^[14].

        These features of modern literature, explained by the transience of its state, are undoubtedly characteristic of the prose of Guillaume Musso, who is often called the French Pelevin, noting that they have a lot in common: the popularity of both authors, belonging to mass literature, some "closeness" for readers and journalists, a large number of quotations in their novels from works of literature and painting, films, song lyrics that are arranged in a complex hierarchy of contextual connections. 

          Admittedly, the geopoetics of Musso's novels is most often focused on large cities in France or the United States. The main characters of the novels are usually French. However, the Russian context occupies an important place in the artistic world of Musso. It is sympathetic to the fact that most Russian writers, artists, and musicians are mentioned by the author with respect and sympathy.  In one of the interviews given by Guillaume Musso during a visit to St. Petersburg, he noted: "Unfortunately, I don't know the work of modern Russian writers very well. If we talk about the authors of classical Russian literature, then I mostly read their works in my teens. And I can mention the book that was most impressive – this is the novel "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov. In it, I saw the topics that still concern me. I touch on some of them myself in my novels. First of all, these are questions of fate and destiny" ^[15]. Russians Russian historical and literary context in Musso's novels is most often associated with the Russian classics of the XIX century and with the era of the Silver Age. But it must be taken into account that the novels of this young French writer are published every year, and researchers still have a lot of work to identify and study the Russian historical and cultural context in his new works.