French Literature Reviews - 2026
Th. Ozwald, Mérimée and Russia
Comparative and World Literature
Thierry Ozwald, Mérimée et la Russie
Paris, Eurédit, 2014, 16 x 24 cm, 350 p., col. ill.
Price: 76 euros incl. tax.
ISBN: 978-2-84830-184-6.
We are familiar with Mérimée the short story writer, Mérimée the Inspector of Historical Monuments, and the man of the Second Empire. We know his passion for Spain, his inclination toward England, his love of languages, and his talents as a draftsman and caricaturist. Recently, attention has turned to his exceptional letter-writing, and it will not be long before we rediscover a most compelling playwright. But has anyone ever seriously considered the question of his relationship with the Slavic world—particularly Russia?
Yet in the 1850s, without ever having traveled to Russia, Mérimée took a passionate interest in Russian affairs, Russian culture and language, and Russian history. He went so far as to master the subtleties of an idiom he held in the highest regard and embarked on translating major works (Pushkin, Turgenev, Gogol). Until the end of his life, through his social circles, his reading, his work, and his historical research, he continuously pursued his quiet reflections, using this lens to question notions of "modernity" as well. Consequently, it is time to ask—far more thoroughly than has been done thus far—what the profound reasons are for this marked interest.
In the 1850s, coinciding with France’s involvement in the East and the Crimean War, the curiosity of the French public was keenly piqued, and these distant eastern territories became fashionable. Indeed, since the 18th century, Russia had continually fed a kind of exotic complex surrounding unknown lands imbued with romanticism and foreign eccentricities—a complex that alternated between Russophilia and Russophobia, and which intensified after the outbreak of war in 1854. Mérimée seemed to manifest a desire to break free from this paradigm that tended to shape minds, and to cast a fresh, less drearily stereotyped gaze upon Russia.
In any case, this is what this essay sets out to do: to gauge, through his Correspondance générale, his political analysis of emerging conflicts; to pay tribute to the literary dialogue he sought to establish; and above all, to closely examine his historical studies. Far from being mere entertainment or the hazy pastime of a bored and aging scholar, these studies appear to prolong and confirm the grand anthropology that Mérimée, at heart, continually worked upon throughout his entire oeuvre, of which their literary transcription forms the most illuminating illustration. They also speak to the interest that Mérimée, like a discerning Machiavellian, always maintained in war and the phenomenon of warfare.
In doing so, Mérimée scrutinizes Europe in the tradition of Tocqueville (or Custine): this is what we are, the former says while turning his gaze toward America, and this is what we risk becoming; this is what we claimed to be, Mérimée explains regarding Russian history, and this is what we have become.
Thierry Ozwald, agrégé de lettres modernes, PhD in Literature (University of Picardy), and Senior Lecturer at the University of Limoges, is a leading contemporary specialist on the work of Mérimée and the short story genre in general.
During the nineteenth century, French intellectual and cultural life maintained a complex fascination with the Slavic world, oscillating between romanticized exoticism and geopolitical curiosity during times of conflict such as the Crimean War. Within this broader context of shifting attitudes toward eastern territories, writers and scholars often engaged with foreign cultures through translation, correspondence, and historical research. Prosper Mérimée participated in this cultural current through his linguistic studies and his efforts to translate major Russian authors, engaging with a society that had long inspired both admiration and apprehension among French observers.
This study examines Mérimée's political analyses, his literary dialogues with Russian writers, and his historical studies, drawing upon sources such as his general correspondence. The book considers how these pursuits relate to his broader anthropological interests and his reflections on warfare and European society. Readers interested in nineteenth-century French literature, cultural exchanges between France and Russia, or the intellectual trajectory of Prosper Mérimée may find this volume relevant.