“They want to ward off the silence”. Things left unsaid in Andrei Makine’s novels

: The concept of silence is at the core of the Andreï Makine’s writing. Thus, the aim of this article is to underline its manifold manifestations in the FrancoRussian author’s literary creation. The first part of the article argues that biographical gaps are constitutive of his author image (Amossy, 2009), since he is the only member of the French Academy whose biography is still largely unknown, while the second and third parts focus on the narrative and stylistic usages of silence in his novels, as well as on Makine’s philosophy of creation, namely the “theory of the triple birth” (Osmonde, 2011), partially described in his texts