Laurent Vinatier: Proust in Prison

Imprisoned in Russia from June 2024 to January 2026, Laurent Vinatier recounts how discovering Proust in detention helped him withstand isolation and anguish, until literature became a genuine way of holding on and of looking towards the future.

Jérôme Bastianelli, President of the Société des Amis de Marcel Proust — Laurent Vinatier, you are a former researcher in international relations, a specialist in the Russian world. You were imprisoned in Russia from June 2024 to January 2026, initially on an administrative ground, a pretext. After your release, in a profile that Le Monde devoted to you, you said that one of the first things you wanted to do on returning to France was to go to Cabourg, in the footsteps of Marcel Proust, whom you had discovered in detention. That is what made us want to invite you this evening. But before we talk about this encounter with Proust, could you remind us of the circumstances of your arrest?

Laurent Vinatier — I was working for a Swiss-based non-governmental organisation specialising in international mediation. Our job was to try to keep channels of communication open between opposing sides. I first dealt with Ukraine from 2014, then with relations between Russia and Ukraine and, after 2022, with relations between Russia and the United States.

We had no mandate from any state. That made us rather vulnerable: we were neither diplomats nor journalists and, as soon as you talk to both sides, you can easily be suspected by one as much as by the other.

In 2024, I had been under surveillance for some time. I paid little attention to it because it was fairly routine. Then the Russian authorities decided to arrest me on an administrative pretext: I had not registered as a “foreign agent”. In Russia, that designation applies to people who engage in an activity deemed political while being funded from abroad.

At first, my lawyer, my family and I thought the matter would be settled fairly quickly. But I was sentenced to three years in prison, the maximum. I then understood that my case had taken on a political dimension.

I spent the first ten months in an ordinary prison, in a cell for fourteen people. Conditions were hard, of course, but there was great solidarity among the prisoners. Above all, I managed to obtain books in French.

J. B. — And that is how Proust entered your cell?

L. V. — Yes. When I realised that I might spend several years in prison, I told myself that this was perhaps the time to read everything I should have read before. I asked my wife to send me Chekhov, Racine and Proust.

The problem was that French books had to be found in Russia. My wife, who is Russian, ordered the volumes she could find, somewhat at random. And two volumes of Proust eventually reached me: Le Côté de Guermantes and La Prisonnière. The choice of that second title was rather ironic in my situation! Curiously, I did not make the connection straight away.

I had also received Un amour de Swann, which I read in that first prison. I was discovering Proust. I was a little lost, since I was picking up the work midway, but I very much liked Swann, the Verdurins, the jealousy, that whole world. And when I had to leave that prison, I chose to take with me the two volumes I had not yet read.

J. B. — That is when your conditions of detention changed profoundly.

L. V. — Yes. After my sentence, I was to be sent to a penal colony. The transfer is an extremely violent experience. You travel in prison trains, in cages, and prisoners can be moved for weeks across Russia, from one transit prison to another. It is a way of making prisoners lose all their bearings.

I was placed in a transit prison about two hundred kilometres from Moscow. There was practically nothing there: no hot water, almost no way of washing, no exercise yard, no books. Everything had been taken from us, including my two Proust volumes.

Then the FSB decided not to send me to a penal colony: a new investigation had been opened against me, this time for espionage, a charge that could mean not three but twenty years in prison. While waiting to be returned to Moscow, I was kept in isolation in the hospital of a provincial prison.

That is where things became much harder. I was surrounded by very sick prisoners, often incarcerated for decades. Some disappeared from one day to the next. We were shaved, dressed in grey gowns, led in silence to the refectory. I truly felt I was entering the world Dostoevsky describes in Souvenirs de la maison des morts.

And above all, I thought I might die there.

J. B. — And it was precisely in that place that Proust came back to you.

L. V. — Yes, by a kind of miracle. A prisoner who worked for the prison administration and had some authority on the floor managed to track down my two volumes. One day, he brought them to me. It was a real breath of oxygen.

We did practically nothing all day. So I started reading Le Côté de Guermantes, very fast, almost feverishly. Then I began La Prisonnière. I was, in fact, extremely frustrated by the gaps between the volumes. At the end of Le Côté de Guermantes, I absolutely wanted to know what would happen next, and I did not have Sodome et Gomorrhe. I was condemned to jump from one volume to another, with considerable holes in the story.

J. B. — What touched you particularly in Le Côté de Guermantes?

L. V. — Paris, first of all. The sounds of Paris, the Bois de Boulogne, the sentimental disappointment with Mme de Stermaria, the Duchesse de Guermantes… I had once lived near the Bois de Boulogne. Reading those pages let me return to places I knew and transport myself there in my mind. There was also the whole world of the salons, that pre-1914 Parisian society, at once alluring and decadent, which I was discovering through Proust's pen. And then, of course, there was the beauty of the language. In the prison hospital, I read Proust aloud. A cat sometimes came into my room in the morning. So I read it pages of Proust. It fairly reliably sent the cat to sleep — but not me!

J. B. — You told me that the notes in your edition themselves played a rather unexpected part.

L. V. — Yes. I discovered there that Proust had fought a duel. I remembered that he had been involved in several affairs of that kind, notably the one with Jean Lorrain. That struck me enormously. My image of Proust was of someone who had above all explored his inner world. And suddenly I was discovering a man who had been able to spend a night knowing that the next morning he might die in a duel. I said to myself: if Proust was capable of living through that night, of getting up the next day and going to the duel, then I can certainly survive this hospital. So even the footnotes became a source of courage.

J. B. — Then you were transferred to Lefortovo, in Moscow.

L. V. — Yes. Lefortovo is a notorious high-security prison: many political prisoners have passed through it since Soviet times. I was now being held there as part of an espionage investigation. The regime had nothing in common with that of my first prison: the cells were designed for one or two people, you moved about with your head down and your hands behind your back. The very principle of Lefortovo is that prisoners must never see one another. There was no physical violence against me, but constant psychological pressure.

I first spent four months alone in a cell. There was a second, empty bed, and that possible presence was itself distressing: would someone arrive? When? Who would it be? It is like in Chekhov's plays: if there is a pistol hanging on the wall, you know it is going to be used.

My two Proust volumes had again been taken from me on arrival. I made requests and, a month later, they came back to my cell. They were practically the only books in French I had access to.

J. B. — And La Prisonnière then took on a particular importance?

L. V. — Yes. I read it in that state of extreme tension. I was especially interested in the pages on Russian literature and Dostoevsky. During my first months of detention, I had read a great deal of Russian literature in Russian and had developed a kind of aversion to it. I found there was too much pathos, too much wallowing in misery. So in Proust I was rather mischievously looking for arguments against Dostoevsky! And what I retained above all were the reservations he expressed about him. I began to learn those passages by heart. I had also learned some of Charlus's speeches in Le Côté de Guermantes, because I found their wording extraordinary.

J. B. — Why this desire to learn Proust by heart?

L. V. — At first, reading served essentially to protect me. But from September 2025, something changed. I began to sense that there might be a mobilisation on my behalf and that a way out was possible. So I tried to turn my resistance into preparation. Until then, I had done exercise to check that I was still holding up: I did two hundred press-ups every morning and told myself that as long as I could manage it, I was stable. Now I wanted to strengthen myself.

That is when I began learning Proust during exercise periods. At Lefortovo, exercise was taken alone, in a small yard of some ten square metres surrounded by high walls. A radio blared music (usually American) to prevent prisoners from communicating from one yard to another.

So I walked round in circles with my volume of Proust, hands behind my back, learning passages. I even took care to hold the book so that the guard could see I was reading Proust in French!

J. B. — There were, in particular, the pages on La Chartreuse de Parme.

L. V. — Yes, because in prison you end up really living in books. At Lefortovo, you could ask the library for two books. There was a catalogue with hundreds of titles, but the library itself was not at all arranged according to that catalogue. So you had to list about ten titles in the hope that the librarian would find one or two.

One day, she brought me La Chartreuse de Parme, in Russian. I had not asked for it as a priority and I thought: still, I am not going to discover Stendhal in Russian! But I did, all the same. And it so happens that Proust talks about La Chartreuse de Parme in La Prisonnière. The books began to communicate with one another: I was reading Stendhal in Russian, then Proust in French talking about Stendhal. Prison created connections I would probably never have known anywhere else.

J. B. — You also began to write.

L. V. — Yes. I wrote a great deal and had begun a novel that had absolutely nothing to do with prison: it was set in Venice. There again, Proust accompanied me, since he writes about Venice. I learned certain passages of his work and, when I wrote the next morning, I tried to recapture something of his rhythm. It was very pleasant: you put in a few adjectives, lots of commas, and for a moment you feel you are writing like Proust! More seriously, learning his sentences by heart changed my own way of writing. They stayed in me.

J. B. — Which brings us to Cabourg. Why did that town take on such importance during your detention?

L. V. — In the transit prison, before I got my Proust back, I had found a single book in the cell, written by an American psychoanalyst. It explained the role of self-suggestion and visualisation: in a difficult situation, you should try to picture very precisely a place where you felt good. When I found myself alone at Lefortovo, I tried that method. Evenings were particularly hard. Once the lights were out, I sometimes had panic attacks. I felt extremely vulnerable and was afraid of dying in my cell.

I first tried to visualise Venice, which I love. It did not work. At that time I was reading La Prisonnière. I thought of Balbec. At first, I did not really know how much reality lay behind that name. But Balbec made me think of Cabourg, where I had been before. So I began to visualise the beach at Cabourg. And it worked.

Lying on my bed in the evening, I saw that beach again. In my mind I walked along the sea. That image managed to calm the anguish. And so Cabourg became, through Proust, a place of refuge.

J. B. — One understands, then, why you wanted to go there after your release.

L. V. — Yes. And when I went back, it really was the beach I had seen in my cell. It looked like what I had kept within me. In prison I also read Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who survived the concentration camps and who explains, among other things, that those who hold out are able to project themselves into their future life. He himself imagined giving lectures in Vienna after the war. That struck me greatly. It was no longer just a matter of protecting oneself by imagining another place, but of picturing a future.

J. B. — You were finally released on 8 January 2026. How did you find out?

L. V. — Very late. On 19 December 2025, during Vladimir Putin's big annual press conference, a TF1 journalist asked him a question about me. Putin replied that he would look into the situation. I only understood its significance several days later. On 30 December, the FSB had me write a request for a pardon to the president. But I refused to entertain too many illusions: in prison, hope can become dangerous.

On 8 January, a female guard suddenly ordered me to gather all my belongings in five minutes. I still thought I was simply going to change cells or be transferred to another prison. Then a guard arrived with the bag that had been placed in storage when I arrived at Lefortovo. It contained, among other things, all the texts I had written in my previous prisons and the beginning of my novel. At that moment, I began to understand. The prison governor announced my pardon. I was driven straight to the tarmac of a Moscow airport, where an exchange with a Russian basketball player was to take place. When I saw the first French officials, I said to myself: this time, I'm out. Even today, that is still the dominant feeling: I find it incredible to have got out.

J. B. — After your return to France, one might have imagined you would write an account of your detention. But that is not what you want to do. Instead, you are writing a novel — as if this experience had taught you, to borrow from Proust, that “real life, life at last laid bare and illuminated […] is literature”.

L. V. — Yes, what this experience taught me above all is the power of literature. I was trained as a researcher in political science and international relations. I had read a great deal of history, political science, essays. Literature, on the other hand, I had somewhat neglected, and I had not realised its power to teach us how to live. In prison, I read enormously: Stephen King, Dan Brown, Theodore Dreiser, Stendhal, Proust… Books take you travelling, obviously, but they do more. They offer answers to universal questions. Not the answer: an answer, a writer's. And that is already considerable.

Proust gave me several of those answers. I did not always agree with him, by the way! In my diary, I sometimes criticised what he wrote about love or jealousy. But that was precisely what living with a writer means: arguing with him, answering him. So I have no wish to write a straightforward account of my detention. I would rather tell a story, go through fiction, with a narrator who will not quite be me. Perhaps there too is something Proust taught me: that play between author, narrator and character. The novel should come out in September 2027.

J. B. — It only remains for us to wish you well in continuing your reading of Proust — and in particular in filling all the gaps that the chances of the prison library left in La Recherche. And now that you know Cabourg, we hope to welcome you soon to Illiers-Combray, at the Maison de Tante Léonie. Thank you above all for sharing with us this very singular experience: that of a literary work which, in extreme circumstances, ceases to be merely a book and becomes a refuge, a presence and perhaps, in the most concrete sense of the term, a way of holding on.

Questions from the audience

A member of the audience — So you were reading in Russian, in French and sometimes in English?

L. V. — Yes, although I communicated only in Russian. Reading in French had something almost magical about it. My two volumes of Proust were the only French books that followed me from one prison to the next. I still have them. They are annotated at the places where I learned passages by heart, and I still sometimes open them to go over them again.

At this point in the discussion, Laurent Vinatier's mother, who is in the room, takes the floor.

Mme Vinatier, Laurent Vinatier's mother — First of all, I would like to thank you. I was very touched that you invited Laurent precisely because he had spoken of his encounter with Proust in prison and of those pages he was learning by heart.

For almost a year and a half, we tried to remain very discreet, because above all we did not want to hamper any possible negotiations. Then we understood that the media could play an important part. We then met with a great deal of kindness and sympathy from journalists. For us too, that mobilisation counted for a lot. Living for months in anxiety is very hard. To be able at last to act, to speak, to express ourselves, and to know that people were listening to us did us a great deal of good.

J. B. — Thank you very much. And thank you also for being with us this evening.

A member of the audience — What remains of Stendhal when you read him in Russian?

L. V. — It is obviously not the same as reading him in French, but I was surprised by how much power remained. You could feel the breath of history and adventure. And you identify with Fabrice: so many misfortunes befall him and yet, despite everything, he keeps going. In prison, that kind of thing counts.

A member of the audience — What did you feel at the very last moment, when you understood that you were really free?

L. V. — From the moment I was with the French, I knew it was over. I simply said to myself: “I'm out.” And almost immediately: “How is this possible?” It is a feeling that has never really left me.

A member of the audience — Stendhalians and Proustians are sometimes set against each other. Can one be both?

L. V. — Yes, fortunately! But I still have a great deal left to read of each of them.

J. B. — That is all we can wish you. Thank you for being here, and a good evening to you all.