Abstract

The article aims to show how the co-presence of languages becomes a matrix of writing in the two multilingual writers Chamoiseau and Nabokov. Chamoiseau invents a new genre (Une enfance créole) from his experience of languages: if in his childhood Creole and French coexist harmoniously, it will then be the school that introduces the hierarchy between domain language and Creole. For Nabokov, it is the retranslation into English from the Russian of the autobiography, originally written in English, that provokes a posteriori affective reconquest of the mother tongue and animates his writing with the feeling of loss.