Carrère, Camus, and the Soviet Kommunalka

I finished reading Renaud Camus’s Enemy of the Disaster: Selected Political Writings. It’s an excellent book but there was something in it that shocked me. And it wasn’t a text by Camus. It was a letter written to Camus by another French writer, the mega best-selling novelist Emmanuel Carrère. I have written about Carrère here, if anybody needs a recap. In short, Carrère is a talentless hack and a Putin-loving lefty who accuses everybody of being a Nazi while praising actual, self-described Nazis like Eduard Limonov.

In his letter to Renaud Camus, Carrère chides the philosopher for his belief that there are way too many migrants in France. He says that if a horde (his word, not mine) of African migrants were to invade his apartment, he would not complain because such an act would bring about global justice. Carrère also says that the French have absolutely no right to live in France that supersedes the right of any recent arrival to live there. Not only does he find no validity in the nation-state, he seems unaware that such a concept even exists.

In response to Carrère’s fantasy of a horde of Senegalese and Afghanis moving into his beautiful apartment and exiling him and his family into one single room while they rubbish up the rest of the place, Camus, who is intellectually on a much higher level, responds that what Carrère seeks is the repetition of the Soviet kommunalka. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, normal people were forced to accept families of uncultured peasants moving into their apartments. The owners would be relegated to one tiny room and would have to co-exist with drunk, chaotic, nasty lumpenproletarians who would blow their noses into the curtains and spit on the floor. If Carrère were at least a bit educated, he’d know that his dream was already put into practice and led to very bad results.

Carrère is very famous in France. His books sell amazingly well. He is considered a true intellectual authority in spite of being a very weak writer and a shallow person. The mega-well-read Camus, in the meantime, is banned, cancelled, and persecuted by the country’s legal apparatus for wrongthink. Another significant difference between them is that the untalented but rich Carrère is a Putinoid and the intelligent, massively banned Camus is pro-Ukrainian. This cannot possibly be any other way because birds of a globalist feather flock together, and Carrère has natural sympathies towards the aggressively neoliberal goals of Putin’s Russia.