November 7, 2022, marks the 90^th anniversary of the birth of one of the leading cultural figures of the Russian diaspora, the writer, playwright, poet, essayist, translator, and teacher Vladimir Nikolaevich Volkoff (b. in Paris, 25 October/7 November 1932; d. in Bourdeilles, France, 1/14 September 2005).

 

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Du Roi

 

V. N. Volkoff was born into a family of Russian émigrés. His father was Nikolai Vladimirovich Volkov, and his mother was Tatiana Iurievna Volkova (née Porokhovshchikova).

 

The Volkoffs were a noble family of Tatar origin, who entered service to the Russian tsars during the reign of Ivan IV the Terrible. The future writer’s paternal grandfather was Major-General Vladimir Alexandrovich Volkov (1877-1919?), an officer of the Tsesarevich’s Own 12^th Eastern Siberia Rifle Regiment, commandant (as a colonel) of the Ust-Dvinskii Defensive District (beginning in 1916), and commander (during the Civil War, under the government of Admiral A. V. Kolchak) of the White garrison in Omsk. His fate is unknown: some sources report that he died in Omsk in 1919, but others report that he escaped to China and died in Harbin.

 

V. N. Volkoff’s maternal great-grandfather was Major-General Sergei Alexandrovich Porokhovshchikov, the brother of the Slavophile and prominent merchant and philanthropist Alexander Alexandrovich Porokhovshchikov. Sergei Alexandrovich Porokhovshchikov was the commander of the Siberian Cadet Corps in Omsk from 1887 to 1888, and was married to the first cousin of the great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nadezhda Petrovna (née Tchaikovskaya, the daughter of General Peter Petrovich Tchaikovsky, 1789-1871).

 

V. N. Volkoff’s father, N. V. Volkov, graduated in 1924 from the Cadet Corps and served in the French Foreign Legion. During the Second World War he died in a German prisoner of war camp.

 

V. N. Volkoff studied at the Lycée Claude Bernard in Paris and at the Sorbonne. In 1954 he earned a licentiate in classical philology. In 1955 he moved to Amiens with his mother. His parents divorced, and he did not communicate with his father for many years, but at the end of his life they made their peace with each other.

 

In 1957, V. N. Volkoff was called up for military service. He entered the Marines and volunteered for service in Algeria, where he was posted on the border with Morocco and in counterintelligence. In 1958, he was made an officer. He was decorated with the “Croix de la Valeur Militaire” (1961). While serving in the military he married for the first time (from which marriage a daughter, Tatiana, was born). He left the military as a lieutenant in 1962, and then for a time served in the French Ministry of Defense.

 

In 1962, he moved to the US, where he taught French and Russian language and literature in a college in Atlanta, Georgia. He founded a theatrical group that performed French classical works, as well as his own plays. He also started writing novels, which were published with the French publisher “L’Âge d’Homme.”

 

In 1974, in Liège, he defended his dissertation on aesthetics and earned his PhD. In 1978 he married for a second time. Beginning in 1979, he returned more and more often to France. In 1979 he was awarded the Chateaubriand Prize. His novel Le Montage was translated into 12 languages and received the Grand Prize of the French Academy. In December 1982, the newspaper Le Monde declared 1982 the “Year of Volkoff.” On January 3, 1983, this recognition was repeated by the newspaper Le Matin de Paris. In 1989 he received the International Peace Prize.

 

In 1991, he visited for the first time his ancestral homeland. He later made many other trips to Russia.

 

In 1994 he returned to live in France permanently and moved into a house he had bought in Bourdeilles. He was awarded the Legion of Honour in 1994. He founded the Institute for the Study of Disinformation, and in 1999 was one of the signatories of a petition “Europeans for Peace,” which protested US and NATO action in Yugoslavia (see liste (chez.com).

 

V. N. Volkoff loved France, the country of his birth, but also had an abiding loyalty to his ancestral homeland, Russia. As Florence de Baudus, a French scholar of Volkoff’s life and works (https://ru.frwiki.wiki/wiki/Florence_de_Baudus) has put it, “as Russian as one can be by the blood of all his ancestors, by his Orthodox faith, by his native language (that is, the one he learned first), by his loyalty to Russia, but French by birth, and then through voluntary entry into military service as an officer in Algeria (his second birth), Volkoff liked to say that the word la patrie has two distinct translations into Russian: homeland [or rodina]—the place where one was born; and motherland [or otchizna]—the country of one’s fathers, the country of one’s genetic background. For him personally, these two words signify two separate countries, a complicated thing, but such rich background material for the work of a novelist” (Florence de Baudus, Le Monde de Vladimir Volkoff, éditions du Rocher, Paris 2003, p. 12).

 

Underlying all of V. N. Volkoff’s traditionalism and patriotism was his loyalty to the monarch. Monarchy is a theme that runs like a red thread through all his creative writings. His convictions about monarchy are most visible in his novel Le Professeur d’histoire and in three of his essays:

“Du roi,” “Pourquoi je suis moyennement démocrate,” and “Pourquoi je serais plutôt aristocrate.” “In Volkoff's world, the prince is the keystone. In whatever form he takes (king, tsar, emperor, military leader, poet, father), he plays a role in almost all of Volkoff’s works, and indeed in all of them, insofar as, for Volkoff, the prince is a constant metaphor, whatever the contradictions or antimonies that the metaphor presents” (“Du monde de Volkoff, le prince est la clef de voûte. Sous diverses formes (le roi, le tsar, l’empereur, le chef militaire, le poète, le père), il joue un rôle dans presque tous les ouvrages de Volkoff, et même tous, dans la mesure où, pour Volkoff, le prince est une métaphore constante, quelles que soient les contradictions ou du moins les antinomies qu’elle suppose.”) (Florence de Baudus, Le Monde de Vladimir Volkoff, éditions du Rocher, Paris 2003, p. 12).

 

V.N. Volkoff was a convinced and consistent legitimist, a loyal supporter of the legitimate Heads of the Russian dynasty in exile. In his essay “Du Roi,” he wrote: “I remember my excitement when, at about age 19, I was introduced to Grand Duke Wladimir: I thought that I was meeting a man who could give me any order, who had the power of life and death over me” (“Je me rapelle mon émotion lorsque, à quelque dix-neuf ans, je fus présenté au grand-duc Wladimir: je pensais que j’allais rencontrer un homme qui pouvait m’ordonner n’importe quell service, qui avait droit de vie et de mort sur ma personne” (V. N. Volkoff, Du Roi, Paris: Julliard/L’Age d’Homme, 1987, p. 81). After Wladimir Kirillovich’s death, V. N. Volkoff repeatedly expressed his affection and devotion to Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, Grand Duchess Leonida Georgievna, and Tsesarevich George.

 

V. N. Volkoff died at Bourdeilles (Nouvelle-Aquitaine Region, Dordogne Department, France), as he was finishing his final edits to his new novel Le Tourmenteur.

 

For more, see:

https://ru.frwiki.wiki/wiki/Vladimir_Volkoff

 

https://www.whoswho.fr/decede/biographie-vladimir-volkoff_19313

 

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Among V. N. Volkoff’s more famous works are:

«L’Agent triple», «Le Trêtre», «Le retournement», «Les Humeurs de la mer», «Le Montage», «Le Professeur d’histoire», «Vladimir le Soleil rouge», «Nouvelles américaines», «Les Hommes du tsar», «L’Enlèvement», «L’Hôte du Pape», «Chroniques angéliques», «Le Complot», «Le Tortionnaire», «Du Roi», «Petite Histoire de la désinformation», «Manuel du politiquement correct», and «Larry J. Bash», a series of young adult adventures books about the secret service agent Lieutenant Langelot and the young American detective Larry Justinian Bash. (For a complete bibliography, see: Биография и книги автора Волкофф Владимир (rulit.me)).

 

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