Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was a distinguished historian of Russia and, until her death in August 2023, the perpetual secretary of the Académie Française, the august body of forty ‘immortals’ originally set up by Cardinal Richelieu to protect the French language from outside incursions. In a speech delivered in the courtyard of Les Invalides to celebrate Hélène’s life, President Macron referred to her, rather poetically, as a ‘granddaughter of the steppes … orphan and tsarina’. Her family had fled the Russian Revolution. Born in 1929, she spent her late childhood in Bordeaux, where her Georgian-born father, Georges Zurabishvili, worked for the Germans during the war. He was arrested in September 1944 and never seen again. 

‘No one knows when or how he died,’ writes Emmanuel Carrère in this candid but loving portrait of his mother. Georges was the subject of Carrère’s masterly work of biographical fiction A Russian Novel (2007); the book caused his mother great unhappiness – mother and son didn’t see each other for several years after its publication, which he describes here as having been a ‘nightmare’ for her. 

In the huge apartment on the Quai de Conti that came with her position at the Académie, the framed photographs of dignitaries included one of Vladimir Putin (they had met in the year 2000, in the early days of his first presidency). A regular television commentator on Russian affairs up