Departing from Tolstoy: Polyphony and Monologism

This chapter explores whether Suite francaise is a polyphonic novel and, if so, whether this definition can be reconciled with the novel’s explicit Tolstoyan influence. The point of departure is twofold: the novel’s unfixed narrative voice, and archival evidence that corroborates Nemirovsky’s desire to be an impartial narrator of France’s debacle. In dialogue with Bakhtin’s work on dialogism, and addressing his ambiguous stance on Tolstoy’s work—“monolithically monologic” yet “determined by heteroglossia”—the chapter argues that Nemirovsky’s techniques, her vast use of irony, satire and free indirect discourse, are the marks of a resolutely heteroglot, multivoiced, hence polyphonic novel.