CHARLIE HEBDO’S RUSSIAN HEART
PERHAPS you did not find Charlie Hebdo, the Paris satirical weekly attacked by terrorists on Wednesday, all that funny. That’s only natural: People in different countries laugh at different jokes and have varying tolerance for irreverence, offensiveness and plain grossness. As the French magazine prepares to print a million copies of its next issue — 17 times its usual run — it’s important to note that it comes from a European tradition much broader than the French brand of satirical slapstick it most employs, and has at its roots a personal story as tortured as the continent’s recent history.
Francois Cavanna was the publication’s founding editorinchief, back when it was called HaraKiri. He was the one who renamed it Charlie Hebdo in 1970, after HaraKiri was banned for a cover that used the death of Charles de Gaulle to spoof press coverage of a nightclub fire that took 146 lives.
The son of an Italian immigrant mason, Cavanna grew up in a poor eastern suburb of Paris, taunted by French nationalists but in love with the French language. He didn’t get to make it his profession until much later.
In 1943, at 20, he was sent by the Nazis to Germany to work in an ordnance factory in Treptow, now part of Berlin. There, two Soviet forced laborers, Anna and Maria, assisted him in making artillery shells.
Maria, 19, spoke a mix of Russian and German as she taught him to operate their machine. She came from Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine. “Ukraine? What’s that, Ukraine?” Cavanna later wrote in his most successful book, an autobiographical novel. “I vaguely remembered the name from school, from somewhere on the desperate lightgreen expanse that covered both pages of my atlas with USSR stretched cross it, edge to edge.”
They fell in love, learned each other’s language and did their best to avoid separation.
It was while Francois and Maria were surviving together in the festering Nazi Reich that Cavanna formulated the nothingissacred
Charlie Hebdo has atits roots a... story as tortured as [Europe’s] recent history.
philosophy that would later guide him through his career as a cartoonist and writer:
“Others, they immerse themselves in grand deeds, ideals above everything, invisible and abstract things that ‘give meaning’ to life. . . God, country, humanity, race, class, family, heritage, success, duty, heroism, sacrifice, martyrdom (inflicted or attained), career, power, glory, submission, humility. . . Overcoming oneself. Overcoming the human, the animal in the human. Rejecting the fact that we are on this world just to stuff ourselves with food, crap, sleep, screw and croak, like any other animal. The need for ‘something different’. . . They swallow it, swallow it whole. But isn’t that idiotic, too, isn’t that futile, too? Me, I don’t submit to it. I don’t let my emotions take control, short my small, cold, reasonable mind. At least I try.”
One thing was sacred to Cavanna. In the spring of 1945, the Nazis marched the forced labor ers west as the Russian army advanced. Cavanna and his Maria broke from the column. One day, after a foraging trip, he came back with his loot (flour, sugar, pasta) to where he’d left Maria, but she’d been taken by the Soviet army and sent east. He walked back to find her, spent weeks on the road, but the trail had gone cold.
Cavanna never saw Maria Iosifovna Tatarchenko again. Not that he ever stopped looking, while he made a name for himself as a cartoonist (Sepia was his pseudonym when he sold his sharp, often crass drawings to Paris magazines), and later as a writer and editor.
When the novel based on his time in Germany, “Les Rouskoffs,” was being translated into Russian in the early 2000s, Cavanna helped find the Russian equivalent for its title, a French derogatory term for Russians, like the English “Russkies.” By then, he’d written another book, “Maria,” about looking for his girlfriend, but Tatarchenko must have never read either book.
Cavanna died in January 2014, a year before men he’d hired for HaraKiri (Jean Cabu and Georges Wolinski, by now, like him, French legends) were shot dead by terrorists. He was lucky that way. His life, the war and his love remain in Charlie Hebdo’s DNA, though.
Once you know the story of Cavanna’s lost Russianspeaking Ukrainian girlfriend, the current Russian propaganda, which gloatingly calls the attack the end of European tolerance, rings hollow. Rather, it’s a personal reason for me, and for other Russians, to say,