Svetlana Alexievich: ‘After communism we thought everything would be fine. But people don’t understand freedom’
In conversations
with Svetlana
Alexievich, it quickly becomes apparent that she is more comfortable
listening than she is talking. That’s hardly surprising: the Belarusian writer
has spent decades in listening mode. Alexievich, now 69, put in thousands of
hours with her tape recorder across the lands of the former Soviet Union,
collecting and collating stories from ordinary people. She wove those tales
into elegant books of such power and insight, that in 2015 she received the
Nobel prize for literature.
In today’s Russia,
Alexievich’s work is a Rorschach test for political beliefs: among
the beleaguered, liberal opposition, she is frequently seen as
the conscience of the nation, a uniquely incisive commentator on the
disappointments and complexities of the post-Soviet condition. Mainstream
opinion sees her as a turncoat whose books degrade Russia and Russians.
When I meet her in a
cosy basement café in her home city of Minsk, the entrance nestled in an
amphitheatre of imposing, late-Soviet apartment blocks, she has just returned
from a book tour of South Korea, and is about to embark on a trip to
Moscow. “It’s tiring to have the attention on yourself; I want to closet myself
away and start writing properly again,” she says, looking visibly wearied by
the travel and spotlight. Alexievich reluctantly agreed to deliver a talk
about a book she wrote more than three decades ago, The Unwomanly Face of War,
which has been republished in a new English translation this month. It was
written in the early 1980s, and for many years she could not find a publisher,
but during the soul-searching of the late-Soviet perestroika period,
it tapped into the zeitgeist of reflection and critical thinking, and was
published in a print run of 2m, briefly turning Alexievich into a household
name. Later, the merciless flashlight Alexievich shone on to the Soviet war
experience became less welcome in Russia. Since the Nobel win, her work has
found a new international audience, giving her a second stint of fame 30 years
after the first.
The original
inspiration for the book was an article Alexievich read in the local Minsk
press during the 1970s, about a retirement party for the accountant at a local
car factory, a decorated sniper who had killed 75 Germans during the war.
After that first interview, she began to seek out female war veterans across
the Soviet Union. A million Soviet women served at the front, but they were
absent from the official war narrative. “Before this book, the only female
character in our war literature was the nurse who improved the life of some
heroic lieutenant,” she says. “But these women were steeped in the filth of war
as deeply as the men.”
It took a long time,
Alexievich concedes, to get the women to stop speaking in rehearsed platitudes.
Many were embarrassed about the reality of their war memories. “They would say,
‘OK, we’ll tell you, but you have to write it differently, more heroically.’”
After a frank interview with a woman who served as the medical assistant to a
tank battalion, Alexievich recounts, she sent the transcript as promised and
received a package through the post in response, full of newspaper clippings
about wartime feats and most of the interview text crossed out in pen. “More
than once afterward I met with these two truths that live in the same human
being,” Alexievich writes. “One’s own truth, driven underground, and the common
one, filled with the spirit of the time.”
The book touches on
topics that were taboo during the Soviet period and have once again
been excised from Putin’s Russia: the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which Stalin
and Hitler carved up Europe, the executions
of deserters and the psychological effects of war for years to come.
Her subjects recall sweaty nightmares, grinding teeth, short tempers and an
inability to see forests without thinking of twisted bodies in shallow graves…
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