Irène Némirovsky

Irène Némirovsky — writer (suite française) with roots in the Russian Empire

Irène Némirovsky was born Irina Lvovna Nemirovskaya in Kiev, then in the Russian Empire, on 11 February 1903, the only child of Léon (Leonid) Némirovsky, a prosperous Jewish banker, and his wife, Fanny. She was brought up largely by a French governess and grew up speaking French fluently. In 1914 the family moved to St Petersburg.

After the Revolution the family left Russia, in 1917 according to some accounts and in 1918 according to most, spending a year in Finland and some time in Sweden before settling in Paris in 1919. She studied literature at the Sorbonne and began publishing in her late teens. In 1926 she married Michel Epstein, a banker who had also come from Russia; their daughters, Denise and Élisabeth, were born in 1929 and 1937.

Her novel David Golder, about a Jewish financier, was published by Grasset in 1929 and made her famous; in 1930 Julien Duvivier filmed it with Harry Baur in the title role. Le Bal followed in 1930, and over the next decade she published some ten novels and many stories, often drawing on the world of émigré financiers and the Russian Revolution she had seen as a child. Despite her success, her applications for French citizenship were not granted, and in 1939 she and her husband converted to Catholicism.

After the German occupation in 1940 the family moved to the village of Issy-l'Évêque in Burgundy, where she worked on a cycle of novels about the defeat and occupation of France. On 13 July 1942 she was arrested by the French police as a stateless person of Jewish descent. She died at Auschwitz on 17 August 1942, aged thirty-nine; her husband was deported and killed later that year. Their daughters, then aged twelve and five, were hidden by their governess, Julie Dumot, and survived.

Denise kept her mother's notebook for decades without reading it, believing it to be a diary. When she finally read it in the 1990s, it proved to contain the first two of five planned novels. Published in 2004 as Suite française, it became an international bestseller and received the Prix Renaudot, the first time the prize had been awarded posthumously.

Tracing the roots — Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine); St Petersburg from 1914

Born in Kiev in 1903, the daughter of the banker Léon Némirovsky, she grew up in Kiev and St Petersburg and left Russia with her family after the Revolution, reaching Paris by way of Finland and Sweden in 1919.

Historical context

Russian Empire · c. 1721–1917

Kiev, Kiev Governorate (now Kyiv, Ukraine); St Petersburg from 1914. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.

Map: Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA)

A career defined by ambition