Svetlana Aleksievich: The Voice of Soviet Intelligentsia.
Great Russian poet, Marina Tsvetaeva, observed that what provides justification to an artistic work is the fact that it gives voice to and acknowledges those who are already silenced by violence, war, and destruction. In her essay, “The Poet and Time” (1932) Tsvetaeva writes: “The only salvation for me and my work is that, in my case, the demand of the time has turned out to be the command of conscience, a thing of eternity. Of conscience concerning all those who were killed, in the purity of their hearts, and who have not been sung and are not going to be sung.”
This process of giving voice to the voiceless is exactly what endowers with power and authority the work of Svetlana Aleksievich. Through her, we hear the voices of young inexperienced girls drawn into the vortex of WWII, or the voices of simple naïve kids drafted to kill or be killed in Afghanistan, or the voices of endless firefighters, drivers, nurses, and soldiers mobilized to combat the Chernobyl meltdown--without much of a warning or preparation. All have been thrown into tragic circumstances, and those who survived them have preserved numerous stories that open the window into theirs and ultimately our world, with all its cruelty, heroism, or indifference.
Her texts capture the misery and convey the experience of common people who traditionally remain silent. Furthermore, Aleksievich doesn’t differentiate by class or culture, and thus, manages to capture the whole cultural, and social range of voices. This wealth of different outlooks, perspectives, and levels of understanding is what makes her books strong and memorable.
Already her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), with its strong feminist undercurrent, was doomed to succeed, and deservedly so as it captured the stories of women – of their sacrifice, resolve and energy, their stretching to the limit the very definitions of humanity and femininity. Teen girls shaming the experienced male soldiers with their toughness, and skills; mothers killing their babies, so that they would not make noise; mothers going mad and killing children whom they could not feed; cruelty and magnanimity, sex and sexlessness. In short, the book captured the extremes that make Russian culture so fascinating.
Besides this noble purpose of giving voice to the voiceless, the stories that Aleksevich has collected in her books, such as U voiny ne zhenskoe litso (War’s Unwomanly Face), Tzinkovye mal’chiki (Zinky Boys) (1990) or Chernobyl’skaia molitva (Voices from Chernobyl’) (1997) relate to the major historic events of the XX centuries, the events that continue to shape both our present and future. WWII, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Soviet War in Afghanistan, the event that resulted in the collapse of the Soviet Union—the repercussion of these events are still with us, and they will continue to haunt us for the years to come, until we fully come to terms with them. It is coming to terms with them that Aleksievich’s books demand.
By confronting and exploring the experiences that are both Russian and universal, Aleksievich clearly deserve to be a contender for the Nobel Prize in literature. But whether she deserves the actual prize itself, is a different matter. In order to properly evaluate her contribution, lets consider her books’ form and content.
Her work is deeply rooted in both Russian and Soviet cultural traditions. In terms of the content, this tradition goes very back to the Russian view of the world and its fixation on human misery and suffering. 19th century Russian literature knows numerous examples of almost pornographic details that describe human suffering, be it, Grigorovich’s “Anton Goremyka,” Turgenev’s “Living Relics” and “Mu-mu”; Dostoevsky endless panorama of insulted and injured, or Nikolai Nekrasov’s poetry. Nerkasov is particularly noteworthy in this respect; “Thousand Ways to Die” might be another title of his oeuvre, since peasants, animals, children, or women die in his poems in the most gruesome ways imaginable. Here is the quotation from his narrative poem, “On Weather” (O pogode) (1858-65), the one frequently referred to by Dostoevsky: “All kinds of typhus, fever, inflammation follow each other. Coach drivers, laundresses, die like flies; children freeze in their beds.”
By the end of the 20th century, at the time of Perestroika, this tradition acquired its second life in the films and stories of so called, “chernukha,” the extensive body of texts and films that explore evil legacy of Soviet Union, while focusing on a particular plot-line, that can be summarized as “things fall apart, the center doesn’t hold” (Yates). The prose of Liudmila Petrushevskaia and such popular films as Inter-girl or Little Vera provide good examples of this popular genre.
Alekseevich’s embrace of the “chernukha” discourse however, exhibit a feature that can easily be detected already in the nineteenth century narratives of suffering. These narratives of misery have a political dimension, as they tend to inform the reading public, that there is something “rotten in the Kingdom of Denmark,” that is, that Russia’s suffering and pain are imposed upon it by its incompetent or evil rulers. In other words, the sentimental and melodramatic discourse of suffering tends to be accompanied, explicitly or implicitly, by another feature, that of pointing the accusatory finger at authorities, at what Russians call “vlasti.’” The sentiment, this conviction that Russian ruling elite is a failure, was boldly and memorably formulated by a liberal Russian historian of the nineteenth century, Vasily Kliuchevsky who in his public lectures on Russia history observed of this dynamic: “the state bloated, while the people shrank.”
In retrospect, it is obvious, that the Russian intelligentsia’s narrative of suffering of people in the hands of incompetent government is both presumptuous and simplifying. As such, it was already criticized by Alexander Pushkin (Cf. his review of Radischev’s Journey from Moscow to St. Petersburg) and mocked by variety of Russian thinkers, ranging from Dostoevsky to the authors of famous collection, Vekhi (Signposts) (1913), in which a number of the most illustrious Russian philosophers complaint about the simplifications, schematism, and lack of historical knowledge that such view exhibits.
Aleksievich does not seem to hide her schematic and simple-minded approach to Russian history; in fact, she wears it as a badge of honor, always ready to criticize Russia for being tyrannical and oppressive. In a recent interview, she declared: "I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin and Shoigu." This Soviet tyrannical leader, Josef Stalin, his security chief responsible for Stalin-era purges and executions, Lavrenty Beria, with the current Russian defense minister, Sergei Shoigu sounds as bizarre for Russian ears as would be a claim of any German who would claim: “I don’t like Germany of Hitler, Goering, and Merkel.”
But before we criticize Aleksievich’s faulty and simplictic ideology, we need to highlight the positive and powerful aspects of her work. At her best, she clearly partakes of a venerable Russian tradition that she herself describes as “art.” And her contribution to this tradition is both relevant and significant:
We view it as art: conversations about pain. Had I not recorded my heroes, everything would have disappeared together with them. It was my task to get these pieces, these striking pieces of human insights, these human testimonies and turn them all into book. I think it is an attempt to capture time, to sculpt something out of chaos and banality in which we all live.
“Potomu chto u nas rasskazyvat’ o boli – eto iskustsvo.. Elsi by ia ne zapisala svoikh geroev, eto vsyo by ushlo ishezlo by v nikuda vmeste s nimi… sobrat’ eti kusochki, pronzitel’nye kusochki dogadok chelovecheskikh, svidetel’stv chelovechesekikh I sdelat knigu iz etogo vsego… .Mne kazhetsia, hto eto popytka skhavatit’ vremia, vychlenit’ chto-to iz khaosa, v kotorom my zhivem, iz banal’nosti, v kotoroi my zhivem ) (interview to Svoboda).
On the formal level, Aleksievich’s texts rely on the artistic tradition of collage, that became prominent in the film experiments of early Soviet giants of montage, Dziga Vertov in particular. Embracing the revolutionary and democratic approach to art, Vertov insisted on making a new art form, a film without actors, script, plot; he substituted the usual cinematographic devices with the visual fugue of various documentary shots of various people at work or leisure. This tradition of montage, of a peculiar narrative lacking unifying authorial voice, should probably include parts of Dostoevsky’s Diary of The Writer, as well as Babel’s prose with its short stories of various narrators with various verbal registers. This tradition of artistic journalism, of a writer incorporating documents in his artistic texts, was further developed by such authors as Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman in the book, The Black Book of Soviet Jewry (known in Russian as Chernaia kniga). Ehrenburg’s and Grossman’s montage of different voices and authors incorporated eyewitness’ letters, or diaries and other material related to the Nazi activities in Russia and Eastern Europe; it included 118 documents in Russian or translated from Yiddish into Russian.
Even though the publication of The Black Book was suppressed by Stalin, its existence was well known, generating further artistic production, be it Daniil Granin’s and Ales’Adamovich’s Book of Blockade (Blokadnaia kniga) (1979) and even an earlier one -- well-known Belorussian book, I am from a Burned Village ( Ia is ognennoi derevni) (1975) by Ales’ Adamovich, Yanko Bryl’ and Vladimir Kolesnik. And of course, Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago should also be mentioned.
In connection with Aleksievich’s interest in various levels of narratives, various perspectives, and various styles that constitute a narrative, one can also mention an important American tradition of non-fiction writing, be it the novelistic experiments of John Dos Passos and his U.S.A. trilogy (1930-36), or the democratic tradition awarded by the Pulitzer (but not Nobel) prizes and exemplified by such pioneering works as John Hersey’s Hiroshima (the account of several eyewitnesses to devastation produced by nuclear bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) or the much admired work of Studs Terkel, who utilized oral history in order to come to terms with various important historic events and cultural shifts. As a journalist, Aleksievich had to be aware of this tradition and clearly benefited from its insights.
Aleksievich herself acknowledges her indebtedness to Adamovich and Granin, stressing, however, that in difference to The Book of Blockade, she strives to avoid Granin’s and Adamovich’s authorial interjections that provided the narrative with the proper Soviet party line explanations.
The form of montage seems like a logical choice for an author who wants to present the panorama of human misery; after all the true suffering can speak for itself, there is no need to embellish it with authorial intrusions. In fact, when confronted with the misery on the unprecedented scale, like the WWII, or Chernobyl disaster, utilizing montage, a detached documentary approach, when an eye or camera just moves from one scene of destruction to another probably works best. Relying on these tried and effective methods, Aleksievich weaves her tapestry of various human miseries connected with such cataclysmic events as WWII, or Chernobyl, or Afghanistan war, or post-Perestroika’s Russian collapse.
To say that stories that are collected between the covers of her books, are memorable, haunting, hair-raising, blood-boiling, is to say very little. The amount of misery and pain that many of these eyewitnesses had undergone is staggering, but it is the little unexpected details that tend to stay with the reader. Like the details relating to the smells of burned life, be it of humans or animals. One clearly cannot rush through her books, it is a deliberately painful exercise, but I am sure we owe it to the victims to read and remember them, to all those people who lived through these terrors, and were given a chance to share them with us.
Probably nothing exemplifies Alekseevich method of giving the voice to the voiceless better than anything, is her focus on one particular subject that runs through all her work. I refer to the stories of killed, burned, and otherwise destroyed animals that one encounters in all of her books. Here are few examples that capture her technique, her sensitivity, and her ways of presenting her material.
War’s Unwomanly Face:
“When the wounded people are screaming it is scary, but manageable, but nothing is more terrifying when wounded horses are neighing. They are totally guiltless, they should not be responsible for human affairs.” (130).
“I saw the burned down bodies of cows and dogs. Unusual smell. I understood then that everything can burn. Even blood.” (131).
“We re-took the village… entered the big yard. The owner is lying on the ground, executed. His dog sits next to him… It took us to the hut. There, on the threshold, his wife and three children are lying dead. The dog sat next to them and began to cry. Exactly like humans do... It was a big dog.” (133).
Her Voices of Chernobyl book features the memories of a person who was hired as an animal killer, his group was supposed to destroy all the abandoned animals left out in infected area. Evacuated population was told to leave their domestic animals behind: “So we arrive [to the village] –the dogs are circling around their houses. Protecting them. Waiting for the owners. They were happy to see us, they were running toward human voice. …We were shooting them in the sheds, in the houses, in the gardens…They can’t understand why we are killing them. It was an easy kill. Domesticated animals, they are not afraid of weapons or people.” (87)
“There is a bitch lying in the middle of the room. And several puppies around her. She jumped at me, and I shot her right away. …But the puppies were licking our hands, demanding to be petted. We had to shoot them point blank.” (89)
And here are a few quotations from her Afghanistan book: “can you really tell everything that had happened? How the killed camels and people were lying in the same puddle of blood, so that their blood got mixed.” (19)
“It is terrible when the animals are killed… We had to shoot down the caravan that was exporting weapons. We killed them separately: men and donkeys. Both were silent and were waiting for death. But a wounded donkey was screaming, as if they were scratching iron with iron.” (38).
Of course, in some of her stories, the animals play the role of victimizers, not the victims. Which makes the whole think even more terrifying. Thus, in her last book, Time, Second Hand (Vremia, Second Hand) (2013) she returns to the suffering of the voiceless, this time, in a full Dostoevsky mode. One of the voices, a woman who lost her neighbor to suicide caused by perestroika despair, recalls her experiences of WWII, and her life under German occupation:
Our neighbor was hiding in her shed two Jewish boys, beautiful like angels. All Jews were executed but these two managed to hide. One was eight, another ten…Our mother was bringing them milk. .. Three Germans arrived on their motorcycle with a big black dog. Somebody denounced the neighbor. There are people like that with black souls. So the boys ran into the field, into the growing wheat… Germans set the dog upon them… People were collecting them by pieces and shreds. There was not much to bury, really, plus, nobody even knew what name to use. And the neighbor who was hiding them – she was tied to the motorcycle and told to run, until her heart burst. (p. 7 of electronic version, http://bookz.ru/authors/svetlana-aleksievi4/vrema-se_092/page-7-vrema-se_092.html).
Aleksievich should be justifiable proud with her work that rescues all those voices and these experiences from oblivion. What is equally touching is that she captures individual people experiences as they unfold against the background of major social and political changes. Consequently, these experiences seem insignificant both for people who experience them, and for their contemporaries. Only in retrospect can we see how revealing they all are.
“We lived there by the hatred. It is hatred that helped us to survive. The feeling of guilt? It arrived, but not there, but here… What seemed justice them, appears terrifying now. I remember a little girl lying in the dust without arms and legs. Like a broken doll.” (23)
In other words, Aleksievich not just gives voice to the voiceless. Her second great achievement is her ability to make her heroes significant and memorable, even those whom we traditionally ignore or take for granted. Even people’s failure to speak or articulate is turned by her into a memorable and articulate moment. As Cicero would have it: “cum tacent, clamant.” (In their silence, they scream).
This modesty trope, when the speaker wants to stay silent, when he does not really want to share his experiences being convinced that it is insignificant or irrelevant, proves a very powerful tool in the hands of Aleksievich, and better than anything captures the true pain of people. Despite her interlocutors’ insistence that nobody understands them, or that they cannot put their experience into words, Aleksievich does make them speak and convey new and profound meaning.
“Nobody can break the ice in talking to me, to address me in such a way that I can answer… nobody understands where I came from… And I cannot narrate it either” (73) – asserts one speaker in her Chernobyl saga. And he then tells the story of the broken robots, whose computer chips were melted by radiation, while the soldiers were still running around them protected only by their rubber gloves and costumes (75). “We don’t know how to make sense out of this terror. We are incapable,” (80) claims another. While the third recalls how his task was to burry the top soil, five feet of which had to be scraped and reburied: “I read in one of the poets that animals are different from people. I killed them by dozens, hundreds, thousands, without even knowing what name to give them. I was destroying their dwelling, their secrets. I was burying and burying. I was burying earth into earth.” (83-85)
And Aleksievich also has a good eye for the frustrating realities of Soviet bureaucracy, its ability to add an insult to injury, and adding thus a peculiar twist to these already gruesome stories. These victims of war or radiation have to confront even the more formidable foe: a faceless and formalistic official, who refuses to help or acknowledge their suffering only because some of the paperwork is missing. Some other twists of fate reveal the human price of the Soviet Union collapse: several of Aleksievich’s speakers describe how they were chased away by the violence by nationalistic revolutions of Tajikistan, Kirgizstan, or Azerbaijan only to find themselves in Minsk at the time of Chernobyl. Likewise, many of those who survived the war in Afghanistan would end getting a debilitating doze of radiation in Chernobyl.
Despite these its powerful and memorable details, Aleksievich’s books are built upon a number of very serious contradictions. The manner of presentation, the chosen form of narratives, for example, clearly contradicts Aleksievich’s intentions and message.
The form of her narratives implies the multiplicity of voices, polyphony, and therefore the presence of different points of view. In fact, it is this multitude of voices, that the Nobel Prize committee singled out as her winning feature, when they said that she is rewarded for “her polyphonic writing, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
But after reading the harrowing descriptions of various kinds of pain that men inflict upon each other and upon innocent children and animals, one begins to wonder about the message that these narratives are supposed to convey and what point of view it articulates. Consequently, as one critics, Anatoly Karlin, put it in his essay: “far from creating any sort of literary polyphony, she comes of a s a proficient recycler of 1970s-80s Soviet dissident stock of tropes about Russia that nobody there apart from a tiny self-styled intelligentsia in the capital cares the least about.”
Of course, a literary author is not a journalist, and has the right to present a particular narrow point of view. But a journalist is supposed to provide various aspects to the story. Why did Russia go to Afghanistan, for example? Was it just a pure stupidity or pure evil? Thus, according to his own acknowledgement, it was Zbigniew Brzezinski who organized the arming of mujahidin long before Russia entered the Afghanistan war, in an attempt to bait Russia into invasion. Brzezinski thus credited himself for dragging USSR into their Vietnam, and thus creating the situation that resulted in Soviet collapse. This little example provides a different perspective on what appear otherwise, idiotic actions of the Soviet government. One can still criticize Soviet leadership for taking the bait and failing to consider the human price of such interference, yet it is clear that one just can’t dismiss Soviet position as a priori faulty, cruel or inhumane.
In other words, Aleksievch blends her literary techniques, now appealing to licentia poetica, and the right to present her material in whatever form she wants, now claiming to be a journalist, given voices to others. I find this avoidance of responsibilities of both a journalist and an author quite telling and symptomatic. It appears that Aleksievich prefers to follow the reigning ideology formulated for her by the dominant authority figures, and then master her material to fit this ideology. Thus, in the seventies she was more than happy to write about established Soviet icons, including such blatantly cruel and maniacal personalities as the founder of Soviet Secret Police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, while during the perestroika she jumped on the bandwagon of those who began to question the holy cows of Soviet ideology, eventually graduating into a blatantly anti-Russian sentiment, that seems to characterize the position of today’s cultural authorities.
When I discussed the antecedent forms of collage-like presentation used by various practitioners before Aleksievich, I didn’t mention one particular proponent of this tradition. I refer to Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, whose stories of suffering and torture undergone by children in the hands of grown-ups, constitute one of the most memorable chapters of Brothers Karamazov, entitled, “The Rebellion.” Aleksievich’s panorama of evil perpetuated by men, including the story of the German dog that tore two Jewish kids apart, unequivocally point to Ivan’s stories, and his story of a tyrannical general who made his dogs tear apart a young peasant boy for inadvertently damaging one of his dogs’ leg, in particular.
Needless to say, that Aleksievich knows her Dostoevsky well. Already the first pages of her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face, declare her love for Dostoevsky and contain the claim that some of the recollections published in her book are worthy of Dostoevsky’s pen (I v romanakh moego liubimogo Dostoevskog nechasto vstretish” (p. 9). In fact it is Ivan Karamazov that Aleksievich most frequently refers to, as she does, for example, at the very beginning of her Afghanistan narrative: “In Dostoevsky, Ivan Karamazov observes: Beast can never be as cruel as human being. Only human beings can be so artistically, so creatively cruel” (8)
In contrast to Aleksievich stories of suffering, Dostoevsky places Ivan’s rebellious chapters within the novel at large, and even more tellingly, within its Book Five, entitled, appropriately, “Pro and Contra.” In other words, Ivan’s harrowing tales, his attack on human nature and its divine Creator, were supposed to be challenged by other characters and narratives within the novel. But this paradigm of Ivan’s rebellion and Dostoevsky’s polyphonic treatment of it seems to be lost on Aleksievich.
This comparison with Ivan Karamazov’s stories reveals an obvious shortcoming of Aleksievich’s books. While Aleksievich is clearly aware of Dostoevsky’s greatness, she doesn’t really wants to learn from his profound conceptualizing of Ivan’s rebellion. Similar to Ivan, she insists on sticking to the facts, questions the utility of explanations, and is not interested in placing these facts within a proper perspective that Dostoevsky applies to Ivan. By deliberately staying within the framework of Ivan’s facts, by following him rather than Dostoevsky, Aleksievich confuses her job of a writer with the job of the prosecutor. Her collections do not really exhibit a true polyphonic spirit, there is not much of “Pro and Contra” in her texts. Despite the polyphony of the voices, they all sound as if they were testimonies at the trial, proving to us again and again that wars are evil and that they transforms people beyond believe; that nuclear disasters are tragic and devastating, and so is the Soviet mishandling of it. And yes, this mishandling fully reveals the inadequacy of Soviet system. Majority of her books are structured in the same way: inhumane Soviet regime had to be exposed and here are my star witnesses. And then she lets these witnesses tell their heart wrenching stories about their suffering usually at the hands of the cruel regime.
This tension between the formal polyphony and a single-minded message can be jarring. Sometimes it is camouflaged by the sheer intensity of details, but having dealt with these painful details whose impact is more physiological than aesthetic, one is bound to ask the author the question that Alyosha Karamazov asked Ivan: “why are you tempting me” (dlia chego ty menia ispytuesh?). In case of Aleksievich, we also should ask this question, and enquire into the purpose of writing and collecting these terrifying anecdotes, these stories of misery and abuse.
Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov started his career in Dostoevsky’s novel as a journalist, using the pen-name, “Eyewitness.” He has a particular purpose in collecting his newspaper clippings about various tortures, which he also presents in the form of montage to his brother. He acknowledges it to his brother, Alyosha, before narrating them. By attacking the maker of this inadequate world, who allows the evil to prosper, Ivan intends to seduce his brother from naïve faith to despair and rebellion. In fact, Ivan honestly answers Alyosha’s question: “I don’t want to surrender you to your Zosima.” Ivan wants Alyosha to turn away from God and from Alyosha's teacher, Zosima. Does Aleksievich have the same purpose? Who is the God, in her world? Soviet System? Stalin? Communism? Dostoevsky understood very well, that Ivan’s compulsive rebellion results only in despair, madness, and suicide. Is it there that Aleksievich wants to take her readers?
Indeed, it appears that Aleksievich does have a program: she wants to convince us that the Soviet experiment was an unmitigated failure. That became most obvious in her last book, awkwardly entitled, Vremia Second Hand (Time, Second Hand) (2013). Using the English term, “second hand” in its Russian transliteration.
It is in this last book that exhibits all the prejudices of a Soviet liberal intelligentsia. Aleksievich’s previous books dealt with “natural phenomena” like wars or nuclear disaster, and depicted people confronting all forms of physical privation and pain. Valuable as all human experiences are, we can assume that 300 testimonies on the power of, say, nuclear explosion should provide us with a decent understanding of it. But are similar testimonies enough to explain social, psychological, political, cultural, and economic transformation caused by Perestroika? Especially, when most of the several hundred voices amassed in this book seem to point toward one Perestroika’s slogan: “We cannot go on like that any longer.” (Tak zhit’ nel’zia.) In all fairness, the collected testimonies do, includes people who feel nostalgic about the Soviet regime. But their memoires are so generously peppered with so many naïve and unappealing statements like “we had a great country,” or “Russia needs strong leader like Stalin” and their past is so interconnected with Soviet establishment, that it becomes easy to dismiss their opinions.
This approach of using oral history and several hundred random opinions to elucidate the economic and political collapse of the whole country is hardly convincing. Social transformations caused by perestroika are not the same as the war or nuclear explosion. It requires a different approach, based first and foremost on a democratic and non-ideological approach to her interviewees. Without such sympathy, the book looks like a “second hand” journalism, as mechanical copying of the method perfected by great journalist Studs Terkel, “whose searching interviews with ordinary Americans helped establish oral history as a serious genre.” Using his tape recorder and unobtrusive style, Terkel created such outstanding tapestries as Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (1970), Working: People Talk about What they Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do (1974) and The Great Divide: Second Thoughts on the American Dream (1988) Race: What Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession (1992) Without being raised in the truly democratic spirit of the United States, Aleksievich cannot really match sympathetic, professional, and non-ideological style of Terkel, who seamlessly brings together the voices from diverse cultural and sociological groups.
In other words, what gives value to the works of Terkel or Aleksievich is their ability to hear and convey people’s voices. Their ability to listen to them, to pay heed, to take their subjects seriously: “After all, more than anything I was raised within Russian culture, and I would say, that in Russia, the writer always have to talk to people” (Ia vse-taki vospitana bol’she v russkoi kul’ture, ia by skazala, gde pisatel’ vsegda dolzhen govorit’ s narodom.) Yet, despite her claims, Aleksievich frequently exhibits a blatant dismissal of that very people. She fails to take seriously those whom she intends to give voice.
It becomes difficult to square her claims with simultaneous rejection of people’s opinions, with dismissal of their concerns, with repetitive psychologizing of her subjects as slaves yearning for glory. In the same interview to Svoboda radio station, she declares that “it is clear that we invented people, invented what had never existed. We all complained about people’s silence. Well, now they started to talk. And when they did, it became terrifying” (iasno, chto my sebe pridumali narodk, narod kakoi to sovershenno drugoi. My vse govorili, chto zhe on molchit? No vot on zagovorili. Kogda on zagovoril, nto stalo ochen’ strashno). And here is her diagnosis of homo soveticus, the condescending dismissal of people – whom she is supposed to interview – as totally inadequate: “After socialism, what was left is the corrupt people, corrupt intelligentsia, which does not know what is good and evil. The same can be said about common people who were subjected to ideological brainwashing, either against Ukraine or against America. … What’s the most important is that it became impossible to talk” (Polse sotsializma ostalsia razvraschennyi chelovek..ostalas’ razvraschennaia intelligentsia, kotoraia ne zanaiet gde dobro, gde zlo. To zhe samoe q ne budu govorit’ o prostom narode, kotoryi ideologicheski vsyo vremia obrabatyvaiut to protiv Ukrainy, to protiv Ameriki. .. Samoe glavnoe, ne mozmozhno razgovarivat’).
We can thus assert that besides the fundamental flaw in her approach which paradoxically juxtapose dialogical form with monological message about the evils of Soviet life, there is another paradox pervading Aleksievich’s work, the paradox that has been explored by her favorite author, Dostoevsky as well.
Dostoevsky never got tired of exposing this double move of various champions of humanity, whose proclaimed love for people goes hand in hand with the contempt for them. Ivan Karamazov is honest enough to acknowledge that it is easier for him to love people from a distance. In other words, Aleksievich clearly exhibits the affliction from which many characters of Dostoevsky world, including Ivan, suffer: “The more I love humanity in general the less I love people in particular.”
But let us hear Dostoevsky’s own commentary on this paradox. Shortly before his death, Dostoevsky gave a public reading of Ivan Karamazov chapters to the students of St. Petersburg University. Here is a quotation from his preface: “The fact is that if you corrupt Christian faith by tying it with the goals of this world, then at the same time you'll lose all the essence of Christianity, ... The high Christian view of mankind, is denigrated to the view of it as the animal pack, and under the guise of the social love of mankind, appears unmasked contempt of it.” Dostoevsky took this issue of the future saviors of mankind’s contempt for people vary seriously. He thoroughly discusses it his June 11, 1879 letter to Liubimov: “He [Ivan Karamazov] is a sincere man, who admits openly that he agrees with the Grand Inquisitor's view of humanity and that Christ's faith (seemingly) raised man much higher that he in fact is. The question is brought to a head. ‘Do you despise humanity or respect it, you, its future saviors.’”
Long time ago one Russian cynic (and there are plenty of them around) had joked that Soviets had to kill all great poets to let Joseph Brodsky win his Nobel Prize in Literature. Without any desire to argue about Brodsky’s merits, I can say, that thousands of innocent people had to die all over former Soviet Union, from Afghanistan to Chernobyl, and from Donbass to Odessa, so that Aleksievich would get her Nobel Prize.
It appears that Aleksievich who describes the experience of Russian people, who on a very literal level exploits their suffering, at least owes it to them to take them seriously. And not to dismiss them as the bunch of country-bumpkins brainwashed by the regime, as Putin’s clones: “A piece of Putin is in every Russian person, in majority of them, in 86%” (Kusochek Putina v kazhdom russkom cheloveke, v bol’shintstve, 86%). And not to make the following conclusion about that very people whose tragic experiences she captured so well: “People are fooled, robbed, the country is taken apart, with the loot going to Switzerland and England, there are only beggars left. Who save themselves by believing in their grandeur” (Narod obmanut, obobran, stranu razdelili, razvezli po Shveitsariiam, po Angliiam, ostalis’ eti liudi nischie. Oni spasaiutsq tol’ko tem, chto veriat v svoe velichie.)
There is a well known Latin saying, Tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, (times change, and we change with them). Yet, it is hard to observe any changes in Aleksievich. She lived in Europe for more than ten years, yet she clearly failed to notice how much the world has changed. During this period, and without much of the Soviet interference, NATO-led countries had started endless amount of wars that generated endless amount of misery, refuges and things of that nature. Regardless of how one approaches such events as the wars in Iraq, Libya, Syria, or Afghanistan, one has to learn something from these events.
Furthermore, having returned to Belorussia after her long absence, did she make any effort to understand what had happened in her country during her absence? Did she notice that Belorussian President, Lukashenko, in contrast to the countries that joined EU, did not close any factories, that people have jobs and food on their tables, that the country manages to stay afloat by trading their industrial and agricultural products with Russia. One might argue about Lukashenko politics and his treatment of dissident journalists or politicians, but the simple-minded dismissal of him as a home-grown dictator with a Soviet accent, hardly reveals the nuanced approach. This failure to understand Lukashenko’s precarious position, as he tries to negotiate the passage of his small and poor country between EU and Russia, is rather typical. For Aleksievich and like-minded members of Soviet intelligentsia, anyone who is not ready to jump and embrace EU, must be a tyrant or a brainwashed person not worthy of taking seriously. One of the axioms of the pro-western Russian intelligentsia is that Russia as a country that is not quite western, and therefore backward. But why can’t it be just different?
Russia’s liberal intelligentsia’s condescending view of common Russian people as being inadequate, because they are not “western enough” – had been ridiculed by such profound Russian authors as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In his description of Pierre Bezukhov, Tolstoy juxtaposes Bezukhov’ “respect of people” with the traditional liberal dismissal of people as uneducated and superstitious:
The presence of Wilarski, who was continually deploring the poverty and ignorance of Russia and its backwardness compared with Europe, only heightened Pierre’s pleasure. Where Willarski saw deadness, Pierre saw and extraordinary vitality and the strength to endure—the strength which in that vast expanse and amid snows sustained the life of this whole original, unique people.” (War and Peace, Signet classics p. 1325. Book 4, ch. 13)
One will have difficulty to find that type of understanding in Aleksievich. In fact, in contrast to Pierre’s ability to see something beyond “ignorance and backwardness,” it is only “deadness” that Aleksievich persists in seeing, dismissing Soviet experience wholesale: “That cultural layer, what could have enlightened the country on a serious scale and with love, had been destroyed in 1917. Then came repressions, and war. That’s all. Nothing has been left.” (Тот культурный слой, который мог бы всерьез и с любовью заниматься просвешением страны, был уничтожен в 1917 году. Потом репрессии, потом война. И все. Никого не осталось) (Медуза интервью).
Aleksievish is also convinced that Russia is the place the generates savagery and hatred toward others, that the country is overwelmed by madness. According to her, Russian people don't want to think; they just respond to the stimuli triggered in them by Putin: « It is a pure savagery that in our countries there is an escalation of hatred toward «other.» That contradicts everything that takes place in the world…Putin just pressed some buttons and reached some myths from the depth of their subconsciousness, and they began to work.» (То что в наших странах сейчас творится эскалация ненависти и инакому, к другому это же прост дикарство какое то. Это противоречит всему, что сейчас происходит в мире. … Путин все таки нажал на какие то кнопки, достал из глубин их подсознания все эти мифы, и они сработали).
Likewise, she is more than happy to repeat the tired cliches about Russian lack of individuality, that communal pressures always dominate over and individual, and other similar banalities, dismissed already by Tolstoy: «We have a giant space, it is more important than a separate individuality, which from the beginning was sacrficed on the alter of conquest, and not at the alter of preserving this conquest.» (У нас огромное пространство, оно важнее и главнее личности, которая вначале была положена на алтарь завоеваний, а теперь на удержание завоеванного.»
These cavalier dismissals of the complex Russian-Soviet experience hardly reveal a nuanced and complex approach that great artists need to exhibit. Outrageous and inhumane as Nazi experiment was, for example, it still resulted in various great artistic attempts to understand it, instead of taking a high moral horse and just condemn. One such example is a 1961 film, created with the memories of Nazi atrocities were still fresh in peoples’ minds. I refer to Stanley Kramer Judgment at Nuremberg, the film in which he manages to create a great defense for Nazi jurists. That's what made this film so strong: it did make us understand the complex moral and emotional world of Nazi jurists. But Alekseevich does not want us to understand; she wants us to condemn.
Well, had they been awarded literary prizes for legal prowess, for the ability to win the case for either prosecution or defense, the writers like Aleksievich or Solzhenitsyn, another Nobel prize winner with a “prosecutor complex,” would deserve to win. But it does not really have to be like that. It is useful to remember in this connection, another Russian Nobel Prize winner, Boris Pasternak. His 1958 Nobel Prize might have a political dimension to it, but in his case, it was clearly awarded to a different type of a writer. For Pasternak – as for Spinoza --what was important is “not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.” He scrutinized the Soviet experience in the attempt to understand it and he wanted his readers to understand it as well.
Aleksievich appears thus to fully embrace this contradictory pattern of thinking, that professes the sympathy for poor people suffering at the hands of the government, yet, which is ready to ignore and dismiss that very people, if they fail to criticize its government with the same intensity as intelligentsia does. So who cares that there is ninety percent of the population supports Putin or Lukashenko, when these people don’t know better, being brainwashed by the regime. But does dismissing 90% of population as ignorant fools manipulated by propaganda reveal love and understanding of these very people? Or rather the haughtiness and contempt, the same haughtiness that Dostoevsky referred to, criticizing the future saviors of mankind?
In light of this contempt manifested toward the opinion of common Russian people it becomes more difficult to view Aleksievich as a crusader against evil, but rather like someone who sees her own people as a bunch of pawns in the hand of a vile government. Of course, she can believe in her crusade, especially when such a crusade is awarded with money and prestige. But seen from a proper perspective, these endless lacerations and expositions, this compulsive need to stare and make others to stare at evil might also be seen as petty, ignoble, and frequently self-serving, since exposing and exploiting her countrymen’ pain becomes a profitable business awarded with success, recognition. In that vein, Aleksievich is not much different from Alexander Solzhenitsyn who made a glorious career for himself by exposing and exploiting the evils of Stalin’s regime – at the time when West was ready to hear about them, of course.
In 1972, Yuli Daniel (1925-1988), an imaginative writer, and a well known Russian dissident, the person who spent time in Soviet prison for his non-conformist writings, had composed a bitter poem, called simply “To liberals” (Liberalam). In this poem, Daniel observes the peculiar paradox of Russian liberals (considering himself as one of them, by the way), who only appear heroic, and who in fact, deliver their heroic diatribes on behalf of suffering Russia, without truly participating in its misery, yet benefiting from it. Daniel’s prophetic lines clearly capture the paradox –that resonates through Russian history and culture—of coexistence within Russian liberals of sympathy for suffering humanity with the simultaneously ability to exploit it for their own moral gain. Unfortunately, it fell on Svetlana Aleksievich to become such a liberal this time: “O, liberals, you are the favorites of each and every epoch… All life is the pretext for catchy phrases. For the sake of them –we enter the rink or take a risk… Oh, liberals, you are the parasites on the festering wounds of people’s misery.”
О, либералы — фавориты
Эпохи каждой и любой…
Вся жизнь — подножье громким фразам,
За них — на ринг, за них — на риск...
О, либералы — паразиты
На гноище беды людской.
The unhealthy relationship between common Russian experience of pain and suffering, and the diatribes against it, is something that irritated Russian literary geniuses like Dostoevsky or Chekhov. Thus, on February 19 of 1997, Chekhov wrote in his diary: “A dinner in ‘Continental’ in memory of a Great Reform [Reform of 1861 that liberated the serfs]. Boring and preposterous. To dine, drink champagne, make noise and deliver speeches about people’s self-awareness, their conscience and freedom, while at the same time as all around you the same slaves in waiter uniforms run around the tables, the same serfs freeze outside as coach-drivers –that means to lie to Holy Spirit.” (19 февраля. обед в «Континентале» в память великой реформы. Скучно и нелепо. Обедать, пить шампанское, галдеть, говорить речи на тему о народном самосознании, о народной совести, свободе и т. п. в то время, когда кругом стола снуют рабы во фраках, те же крепостные, и на улице, на морозе ждут кучера, — это значит лгать святому духу.)
Chekhov sees a big lie, a sacrilegious one, in this tendency of catchy phrases and declamations to accompany the frequent dismissal of common people and their concrete reality. I am afraid that Nobel Prize committee by rewarding the Prize in Literature to Ms. Aleksievich, had clearly perpetuated such a lie.
