Pass It On
Vladimir Volkoff’s La Grenade

4,827 words

Vladimir Volkoff
Die Handgrenate 
Karolinger Verlag, 2021

In 2021 a small Austrian publishing house, the Karolinger Verlag, published a German translation of Vladimir Volkoff’s short story La Grenade (The Hand Grenade), neither the publisher nor the writer being very well known in the German speaking world. That this particular publisher chose to publish one of Volkoff’s works is no coincidence. The German Wikipedia page on the Karolinger Verlag quotes from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that the Karolinger Verlag “rejects the spirit of the times”, presumably the newspaper’s euphemism for what is considered reactionary and/or right-wing.

The publishers’ lack enthusiasm for “the spirit of the times” is borne out however by their own information on their website that the name “Karolinger” was chosen to reflect a commitment to the spirit of a supranational Europe, a commitment inspired by the Carolingian empire. Publishing one of Volkoff’s works in German would be consistent with such a commitment. The Carolingian Empire covered an area which today is represented by Germany, the North of Italy and France. The Carolingian dynasty was born with the symbolic anointment of King Pepin the Short by Saint Boniface, son of Charles Martel and father of Charlemagne, in 751. He was the first anointed king of the Franks.

Volkoff’s works also express antipathy towards “the spirit of the times” and reflect a nostalgia for a Europe with a strong sense of identity, religious cohesion and quite possibly with its cultural nexus in France. Volkoff’s own involvement with France was emotional, cultural and biographical. He was born in France and died in France, he wrote all his novels in French and he served in the French army. Konrad Markward Weiß, the translator of this short story, who also wrote the preface in this edition, had previously translated Jean Raspail’s La Hache des Steppes –die Axt aus der Steppe (The Axe out of the Steppes) for the same publisher. Jean Raspail wrote a tribute to his friend Volkoff when he died in 2005. (At the time of writing, neither La Hache des Steppes nor La Grenade has been published in English.)

Volkoff’s mother and father had fled Russia after the revolution and met in in exile in Paris. All their lives they remained very conscious of being Russian, not French, and both hoped to be able to return one day to Russia. The Volkoffs were descended from Tartars and Vladimir expressed a strong sense of Russian identity all his life. He named Dostoyevsky as the writer who most influenced his own writing, and as with Dostoyevsky, his strong Christian faith was Russian Orthodox, not Roman Catholic. It is therefore a moot point whether one should call Vladimir Volkoff a French writer of Russian origin or a Russian writer who wrote in French.

So it is that Vladimir Volkoff, like Joseph Conrad, was a successful author who wrote and had works first published in a language not his mother tongue, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say in Volkoff’s case, not in the “the language of his mother”. Volkoff’s parents were both Russian, but Volkoff himself was born, raised and went to school in France. The language spoken at his school and by all his friends was French, the language spoken by his parents at home was Russian. Volkoff has been described as bilingual in French and Russian. Although people are often referred to as “bilingual” who are in fact no such thing, true bilingualism being extremely rare, Volkoff had a natural gift for languages, he translated works from English into French. He also grew up with both French and Russian constantly around him, so he may really have been bilingual.

Given his biography and the fact that he wrote his many novels in French, was France not Volkoff’s natural homeland? Yes and no. According to Florence de Baudus (Le Monde de Vladimir Volkoff, The World of Vladimir Volkoff) Volkoff frequently stressed the fact that the Russian language had two words for “homeland”: pодина rudina -homeland by birth, by passport, by citizenship, and отечество. Atchitzva, signifying homeland by blood, by ancestry, the fatherland. Volkoff often remarked that France was his rudina and Russia his atchitzva, so in different ways, he regarded both France and Russia as homelands, but as a writer he is generally regarded as French and not Russian. Volkoff was awarded the Prix Jean Giono in 1995, a high honor and an apt one, given the fact that Jean Giono’s own novels bear witness to a world view of attachment to land and people which Volkoff entirely shared.

Volkoff the Russian, Volkoff the French writer: an emotional double identity underscores the characters of the man and is present in his writing, which is characterized by themes of dual loyalties, loyalty and betrayal and recurring paradoxes of attachment and commitment within the framework of reverently held beliefs and attachments.

For twenty years Volkoff was also a resident of the United States (Georgia) where he taught languages at Agnes Scott College. The American experience is reflected in a collection of stories entitled Nouvelles américaines (American Tales), which was published in France in 1986. Unlike Marguerite Yourcenar, however, another European writer in exile in the United States, Volkoff did not become an American citizen and he returned to France to spend the rest of his life there.

Volkoff enrolled for military service in 1957 and volunteered for the marines in Algeria in the same year. He was promoted to the rank of officer in 1958 and was appointed to the 22nd Colonial Infantry Regiment and posted to the Moroccan border, where he held a responsible position guarding the frontier, the strategy of the French army at the time being to deprive the FLN (National Liberation Front, the name of the Algerian independence movement) of the fresh men and supplies that were crossing the frontier into Algeria. On the strength of his knowledge of languages and his keenness for action, Volkoff subsequently found a place in the RAP (French military intelligence). From 1958 to 1959 he worked for the CCI, the French equivalent at that time of the American USSOCOM, responsible for overseeing combined military operations. He was subsequently appointed to the SAS, not in this case the British military unit, but the French Section administrative spécialsée, which was an initiative which sought to support local groups, clubs, services offering social assistance and promoting a sense of identification with the French state, perhaps with ulterior political motives comparable to those of the American Peace Corps. Volkoff’s commitment to the cause of France and the French Empire was thus very real and included physical engagement. His experiences in Algeria during the war gave him the material and inspiration for the short story La Grenade.

In his writing, Volkoff stresses the necessity of action to life and to the affirmation of values, hinting that war is a natural part of life. The words of the American poet Robinson Jeffers come to mind: “Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.” One might expect that such admiration for the power of the deed, and the idea he once expressed that a gun is “an ultimate argument”, would bring Volkoff close to a writer like Ernest Hemingway, but Hemingway was a friend of Castro and Volkoff’s abhorrence of communism was without repeal. The twentieth century novelist whom he most admired was Lawrence Durrell. In his book on Lawrence Durrell, entitled pointedly Lawrence le Magnifique (Lawrence the Magnificent), Volkoff iterates his extreme admiration for Durrell, going so far as to state that “Dostoyevsky is the only writer I owe more to than to Lawrence Durrell” and writes “Durrell seems to me not only to be one of the greatest writers living but in addition, one of the guarantors (auctores) of the future.” (p. 11)

Volkoff’s deep admiration for the author Lawrence Durrell may seem odd at first glance. After all, Lawrence Durrell was a poetical, very elaborate writer, whose novels depict landscapes, atmosphere and characters in a manner closer to music, without moral conclusion or direction.

A thoughtful comparison of the two writers reveals many similarities, however. Volkoff and Durrell both traveled widely, spoke several foreign languages, and were fascinated by other cultures, and spent most (Lawrence) or all (Volkoff) of their lives outside the homeland to which they were deeply attached and whose national character they in many ways embodied. They were both very conscious of being writers in exile. Their literary works are preoccupied with themes of betrayal, identity, and the relativism of values, although Volkoff, who battled with the conundrum of what was essentially evil or good, unlike the agnostic Durrell, was a lifelong practicing Christian.

Both writers were concerned with the world of spies and intrigue, and so another writer who has been compared to Volkoff is Graham Green. Volkoff actually became well known in France as a result of the success of his espionage fiction: Le Retournement, (The Reversal), published in English as The Turn around) in 1979; Les Humeurs de la Mer (The Moods of the Sea) in 1980, a four-part novel; and Le Montage (The Set-Up) in 1982.

Durrell and Volkoff’s France was la vielle France of emotional literary expression, old rambling houses, fine cuisine, high respect for writers, elegant, hierarchical, predominantly rural and still religious. Both spent their later years to live and finally die in remote areas of rural France. Volkoff died in the Dordogne, a very rural and scenic department of the Perigord and for many years a popular redoubt for British ex-pats escaping from hectic modern Britain. In their attachment to traditional rural France both writers are akin to Jean Raspail. Perhaps the old professor in Jean Raspail’s novel Le Camp des Saints, the aficionado of good food and drink, with his large library of old books in his comfortable very old house, who shoots the hippy who has broken into his home, was modeled on Raspail’s friend, Vladimir Volkoff. Of both Durrell and Volkoff it can be said without hesitation that they “rejected the spirit of our times.”

The style of writing in Die Handgrenate seems to owe little to Lawrence Durrell, however. It is stark, brutal, direct. The scene is the Algerian war of 1954-1961. That war is commonly described today as a “war of liberation” against European colonialism. During the war, most of the French left-wing, including leading left intellectuals like Jean Paul Sartre and, famously, the psychologist Franz Fanon (who ultimately joined the FNL), denounced torture practiced by the French army, yet were entirely silent about torture and atrocities carried out by the rebels. To this day the public in the Western world has a very one-sided, left-wing created image of the Algerian war, one of idealistic anti-colonial freedom fighters nobly struggling against a cruel, torturing, neo-fascist French military. But the rebels were no strangers to the practice of torture themselves and their ruthless terrorism (which included bombing and the use of grenades) spared neither woman nor child. In fact, it was aimed at terrorizing the French civilian population into leaving the country.

The Algerian war was experienced by Volkoff at first hand in different ways: on the front line, behind a desk, and working for French Military Intelligence. It was Volkoff’s view, one shared by many others, that the war could and should have been won, in fact was on the point of being won, but was lost through betrayal. The prime treachery in this case was committed, so Volkoff believed, by that icon of la grande nation, Charles de Gaulle.

Churchill, Lincoln, and de Gaulle are three nationalist leaders who still enjoy a quasi mythical status in the hearts and minds of the patriotically minded in their respective countries. The names of public places, memorials, monuments, airports are named to honor them, their faces adorn postage stamps and bank notes, they are regularly quoted. Challenging the reputation of these grandees in their respective countries would be to invite political nemesis. All three are said to have been gifted with an almost supra-human prescience in their time, and each of them, the narrative runs, was “called in” to save their nation from defeat and disintegration in its hour of greatest need. The reputations of this trio are still so high that even the most radical groups in their respective countries often seek to co-opt them as “fellow travelers” in spirit, in order to be in line with mainstream patriotism. A dispassionate consideration of the consequences of the historical roll of each of them, however, discloses a more problematic narrative. For his part, Volkoff regarded de Gaulle’s decisions on Algeria as the worst imaginable treachery.

De Gaulle, who gave the impression of being steadfast about a French Algeria, had no intention, as he subsequently admitted himself, of prolonging the war to keep Algeria French. On the contrary, De Gaulle peremptorily abandoned French Algeria to the FNL at the very time when the French army believed it was close to conclusively defeating the rebels. In the Evian Accords, which were the documents drawn up at the end of negotiations, the FNL was offered everything it had been demanding without any concession on its part, at a time when it was at the very least in the weaker position. That was not all. De Gaulle, having granted independence to Algeria abandoned the Algerians who had been loyal to France, some half million of them, to their fate, and that fate as often as not was death, often death through torture. The left-wingers who were outraged by harsh treatment meted out to rebels by the French army, fell completely silent about the fate of the Algerian collaborators. Much the same could be said of the attitude of the left towards the anti-apartheid movement years later. The Apartheid government was criticized and denounced by the entire left on a regular basis, but that same left was utterly indifferent to atrocities committed at the time and subsequently by the ANC and its allies.

Volkoff felt the betrayal of the harkis very keenly. He loathed communism and the Evian Accords were not only a national surrender, but also a surrender to communism. In addition, the breaking of trust, such as the trust broken by de Gaulle in Algeria, was for Volkoff a quintessentially godless act. Volkoff’s parents had been welcomed by France as refugees from a far-off land, but French Algerians who had been loyal to France and been brought up to believe they were in fact French, were denied French citizenship and the right to live in France and were left to meet the fury of the revolutionaries alone. That was their reward for loyalty. Volkoff was deeply marked by these events, the betrayal of the army, the betrayal of the common soldier, the betrayal of the loyal Arabs. He expressed abhorrence of de Gaulle for the rest of his life.

The translator in his introduction makes the salient points about the independence movement in Algeria:

The Marxist nationalist Islamist Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) focused on terror acts against the French civilian population from the very beginning, acts which soon reached the capital, resulting in hundreds of dead and wounded. French reprisals, the parachutist General Massu’s victory in the following year, the so-called “Battle of Algiers”, thanks to the harshness of the methods, cemented for good opposition in mainland France to the war…..In 1959 General Challe’s massive offensive brought the rebels to the brink of collapse. Within a few months the FLN had lost half their fighting force, a force which could not be replaced thanks to the closed frontiers; the parallel structures of the rebels with their enforced “revolution tax” and the sanctions practiced by the rebels against recusants (such as the cutting off of lips and noses for the “unislamic” crime of smoking cigarettes) was in decline. Despite all that, and to general surprise, de Gaulle offered the people of Algeria a referendum in 1960…..When the war ended in 1961, 90% of the French had left Algeria. Many of those who remained were massacred. Above all the harkis, the Algerians who had sided with the French, some 100,000 persons, were killed, often in a horrendous manner. …De Gaulle refused to take in refugees from Algeria. Embittered and ashamed, Volkoff was to repeatedly denounce that treachery for the rest of his life. (pp 9-12)

So the war came to an end with the retreat of France from its former colony. It was the second defeat of France at the hands of independence movements, the first being the surrender of the French in 1954 to the Viet minh, the Vietnamese communists. 1954 was, perhaps not coincidentally, the year in which the rebellion in Algeria began. In both wars there was and is a strong belief that France was stabbed in the back by politicians and intellectuals who did everything they could to support the uprisings against their own country and subvert the French army and work from home to ensure the victory of France’s enemies.

Die Handgrenate is a very short work and is a long short story, not a novel. The action centers, as the title indicates, on a hand grenade, a hand grenade which passes from hand to hand, each temporary “owner” anxious to pass it on to someone else. The hand grenade in question is a French defensive fragmentation grenade, a DF 37. Some people may remember at school being given the task, as a test of descriptive skills, of writing an account of “the life of a dime” or “the life of a penny” as it passes from owner to owner. Die Handgrenate mischievously parodies such a homework task by providing an account of stages in the life, not of a small coin, but of a hand grenade as it changes hands. First the DF 37 is stolen from an officer by Edmond, a young man sympathetic to the Algerian rebels. Thereafter the grenade passes from one hand to the next. It is smuggled to Algeria by Luc, a soldier sympathetic to the rebels, as it approaches its violent preordained end. What exactly that end will be the reader does not know exactly, and the suspense of the plot mirrors the suspense and tension (literal tension in the case of a hand grenade) which grips the reader for the duration of the short tale. The hand grenade of the story is live, is tense with the restrained power to kill and maim, not just a potential but a purpose, the purpose for which it was designed. Killing, maiming, crippling is the raisin-d’être of a DF 37. The story is too short for an exploration of the ethical implications and questions posed here, but there is a kind of subtext to this tale: to what extent is something like this hand grenade “evil”? Does it make sense to talk about evil? The evils of DF 37? The evils of war? Volkoff adroitly opens the way for a reader to ask these questions, while as a writer offering no resolution. The author just continues with his Hemingway like adventure; but tense with unreleased ethical questions, about the rights and wrongs of war, the physical consequences of decisions concerning betrayal and sacrifice which are grounded on ethical, or mercenary or ideological considerations and which bring about extreme perhaps devastating physical consequences for many people.

Die Handgrenate opens with a scene in a military academy where a sergeant is presenting a hand grenade to a high school class. Volkoff describes through the sergeant’s words (probably drawn on his own experience either as a student or himself as a military instructor) in unsettling, and pointedly accurate technical detail, how a hand grenade functions, and specifically a DF 37,the razor sharp shards (“military confetti”) which are propelled by the explosion and designed to fly in a multitude of directions in a wide radius to wound, slash, maim, disfigure, and kill. If Volkoff admits to the necessity and the inevitability of war, he certainly does not romanticize either.

The students listen to the sergeant with polite attention. Ironically, given subsequent events, the sergeant’s principal concern is not to appear ridiculous or to be laughed at. The young students may have been affected by a cynicism typical of the times, is the implication. In that, he is successful. The students are earnest and respectful. Pleased at his success and the respect shown to him, the sergeant ignores the most elementary rules of security by leaving his specimens unguarded in the classroom. The fact that he is using live grenades for the purposes of his demonstration and leaves live ammunition unguarded struck this reviewer as somewhat implausible. Was the French military really as negligent as that, their sergeants using live munitions for lectures they give and even leaving the ammunition for anyone to help themselves to? That is how the hand grenade begins its journey in Volkoff’s story. Leaving plausibility aside, at a deeper level it is true that dramatic events are often “triggered”, to coin a phrase singularly appropriate here, by absurd and hardly credible blunders or negligence. The complacency and incompetence of the sergeant is humorously highlighted by his delight at being asked a typical rookie’s question. He has just told his audience that a DF 37 gives the person who throws it seven seconds between the release of the safety catch and the explosion. Someone throwing a grenade should wait three seconds after releasing the catch before throwing. Then comes the question the sergeant is expecting and hoping for. Volkoff is being humorous at his own expensive because he too is the experienced soldier informing the greenhorn reader just as the sergeant informs the greenhorn pupils:

 “Why should you hold a grenade for three seconds of the seven seconds you have after releasing the safety catch before lobbing your grenade at the enemy?”

Anyone with even basic military training will know the answer and that answer plays a key role in the final action of the story: If you hold the hand grenade three seconds before you throw it, the enemy will not have time to throw it back at you.

After the theft of the hand grenade, the story relates how the grenade passes from hand to hand. Edmund, who has stolen the grenade, takes it to a girl called Zoé, a girl living alone in a service room in an old building, a small room in a maze of corridors, of a kind which was commonly rented by young people in Paris in the decades after the war. Zoé has a reputation for relieving young men of their virginity and also is known to have contact with people connected with the independence movement. Edmund’s idealism (she has contacts with revolutionaries) has a strongly mercenary component, (she relieves young men of their virginity). He expects to so impress her with his gift, which he offers rather like a male spider tendering a dead fly to its would-be mate, that he will become another man to be relieved of his virginity. Zoé is not attracted to him at all however, and feigns near indifference to his gift. She gives him no more than an absent minded peck but is delighted by the grenade because she vainly hopes it will win her the respect of Madjid, the man she yearns for. Madjid, a man with “sunken cheeks and a hook nose” is neither as courageous nor as idealistic as Zoé believes him to be. Zoe is utterly contemptuous of Edmund but that contempt which she feels towards Edmond is mirrored by Madjid’s contempt towards her. These characters are hypocritical, egotistical, boastful and cowardly and all of them, as portrayed by Volkoff, hold a high opinion of themselves and delude themselves that they are idealistic. They are delusional. Volkhoff shows the reader what really drives them to do what they do.

The contamination, even to the point of non-recognition, of idealism by mercenary and egotistical wishes, reminds us that treason is of fundamentally two kinds, or one can say there are two aspects to it. There is the treason borne out of idealism, of the belief that another God or another country is superior or truer than the one ostensibly followed or into which a man is born, and the mercenary kind of treason, the treason which works for a material gratification, usually pecuniary or erotic. Edmund and Zoé may delude themselves that they are idealists, but the reader can clearly see that there is at least as much or more of the mercenary in them than idealism. Their admiration for a cause is really the attachment to whatever they think will help them to obtain the human object of their desire. Madjid passes the grenade on to Luc, a young FLN sympathizer in the French army. Luc is a young man with the kind of privileged background which is often a breeding ground for treachery. However, if the reader feels assured that the mercenary kind of treachery is necessarily the worst, that assurance is undermined at the end of the book. The last person to hold the grenade is the hapless and pusillanimous Boualem, tool of the revolution and its unwilling martyr, pressed to a momentous revolutionary act of horror by Si Lakhdar, a gaunt, utterly pitiless FLN Robespierre figure, ( significantly, a revolutionary password is “Robespierre, Rousseau, Rome.” Whether this was a real FLN password or fantasy of the author is not clear) for whom no scruple is allowed to stand in the way of the victory of the revolution. Cruel and remorseless, Si Lakhdar is committed to the victory of the revolution. Like Robespierre he is above mercenary considerations, but his idealism is cruel, kindless, and without moral scruple.

Volkoff acknowledged a great debt to Dostoyevsky and the final scenes of Die Handgrenate are very reminiscent of Dostoyevsky’s Devils, perhaps too much so, the writing at times seems derivative. Here is the same Christian judgment which Volkoff and Dostoyevsky evidently share: if the revolution is ultimately “good” how can it possibly bear such fruit, have such obviously wicked and cruel figures speaking in its name, commit such cruel acts, destroy so many human lives, cause such suffering?

Volkoff in his story highlights the good instinct of the simple man at arms. It is the simple cadet Garnier who is very rightly suspicious of the apparently harmless old woman, Khedidja. It is the warrant officer Brabant who senses and sees an approaching terrorist attack. Their acuity and alertness, their heroism and dedication, is contrasted with the imposture of the man who so disgusts Volkoff that he does not even name him but his identity is clear. He is a voice over the radio and the import of his words is clear to soldier and rebel alike.

“Standing, crouching, curled up in the lower bunk, sitting up on the top bunk, with grave expressions striving to understand better and their expressions even darker because they did not like what they understood, the members of the auxiliary force had their eyes fixed on the transistor radio. It was placed in the middle of the room on the floor, with antenna at full length and vibrating and out of the vibrating apparatus there emanated the slowly unfolding and powerfully modulated voice of the leader of France. It was a commando voice but was not commanding: the voice interpreted, pleaded, suggested, implied. The officers and corporals in the canteen or in their rooms were listening to the same voice on other radios and perhaps they understood the leader’s speech? The members of the auxiliary force could not hope to understand what the all too complicated, too educated, too sophisticated words meant, yet better than their superiors they grasped the significance of the voice. They knew instinctively that a leader who spoke in that kind of tone of voice would not long remain leader. And since that voice was France for them, it was France’s downfall they were witness to.” (pp 85-86)

There is subplot to the main tale, which is the predicament of the brothers Hamid and Tahar. Tahar has “gone into the woods” meaning that he is on the side of the rebels. He tries to persuade his brother Hamid, who is still loyal to his French commander, to join the cause of independence while, as he ominously puts it, “there is still time”. They too have heard the speech and they too have instinctively grasped its meaning.

Die Handgrenate is a simple tale which nevertheless points the way to many themes which are anything but simple. It also introduces Volkoff’s world and his novels. Whether the publication of this short story will encourage the translation and publication of more works by Volkoff into German remains to be seen. How well known and how much read Vladimir Volkoff will be in the German or English speaking world in the years to come is a matter of conjecture, but the publication of this work in German is obviously a step in the direction of wider recognition. The name of Vladimir Volkoff is one that should be passed on to those who have not heard of him.