Literature Review

Moscow kisses from Isabelle Cornaz

4 reading minutes

écrit par Sandrine Rovere · September 26, 2023 · 0 commentaire

Les bons baisers de Moscou d’Isabelle Cornaz

In her first book, the journalist from French-speaking Switzerland makes a poetic, dreamlike declaration of love to her beloved Moscow, which she had to leave when war broke out in Ukraine.

It's a small 80-page book with a red cover, as in the heyday of the Soviet Union. French-speaking journalist Isabelle Cornaz was a correspondent in Russia for Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) for four years. She had to leave the capital, which she says she «loved deeply», and was unable to return because of the war in Ukraine. And yet, the memory remains. So it's a declaration of love in due form that she addresses the Russian megalopolis in her first book La Nuit au pas, published at the end of August by Editions La Baconnière.

This is not a novel, but rather a collection of fragmentary memories and impressions, entangled by the passage of time. Almost like a dream, it combines journeys to the Russian Far North, childhood memories and summer storms on Moscow streets. «There comes a time when familiar places enter our dreams. They become haunting, untouchable», says the young forty-something, who wonders: «how much attraction do you have to have for these fields, these houses, these skies, these street corners so that one day, they don't let you go?»

The author paints a Moscow unknown to tourists, a city of backyards, byways and dandelion beds. But it's a city that has changed profoundly in recent years. «What I loved has disappeared,» laments Isabelle Cornaz.

She explains that Moscow has become «sweet»: «Failing to offer urban youth a democratization of the country (...), we offered them a Westernization of urban space, the attributes of a globalized world, as if this were enough to mask the traces of an authoritarian style. In the hope of satisfying it, or putting it to sleep.»

«Can Moscow morally survive war?»

The unconditional love that shines through on almost every page does not prevent Isabelle Cornaz from questioning what Russia has become today, and how it came to be the way it is. It's an immense country, but one where everyone lives in cramped conditions, «for lack of space in which to live with dignity». A country where you have to «take land to look strong (...) Not knowing what to do with the land you already have.» A country built on the blood and sweat of its inhabitants, like those scientists sent to the far reaches of the Soviet Union to work on secret nuclear projects, whose descendants are still there, as if imprisoned in cold and ice.

Above all, the author wonders what will become of this city after the conflict in Ukraine. «Can Moscow morally survive war?» asks Isabelle Cornaz, as if the capital had become a being of flesh and blood.

Read also | | The open wounds of mourning between Moscow and Siberia

What probably touches you most when reading this story is the author's nostalgia and sadness, tangible as physical pain. «I haven't been to Russia for three years now, even though it was my home,» Isabelle Cornaz laments modestly. At the same time, memories are fading. «Moscow is gradually disappearing. The details are fading, even though that's all the city is made of.» And the Frenchwoman hopes that these lived moments, «like the remnants of the previous summer's fires that survive under the snow, resisting the night, burrowed in the darkness», may one day «be reborn as a life force».