Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

In this sense, the Nobel Laureate for 2015, Svetlana Alexievich, is in worthy company with authors who are recognized by the world but indignantly rejected by their own country. Yes, she’s actually a Belarusian writer born in Ukraine, but her books tell of our general Soviet and post-Soviet experience, about the merciless millstones of the empire, so therefore she belongs also in equal measure to Ukrainian and Russian history and culture – and the offended attitude towards her in Russia shows that she is considered to be one of our own, but an apostate who is washing our dirty linen in public.

Why do the indignant Russian ‘patriots’ denounce Svetlana Alexievich? On the whole, there are three objections: first, they say, she is hardly known in Russia; second, they attack her because, they say, what she writes ‘is not literature’ (it’s documentary prose); and, third, their main objection, is that she is a ‘Russophobe’, who plays up our problems and ‘does PR on someone else’s grief’. All three of these accusations indicate one thing: Russia does not like, is unable and is simply afraid to talk about its traumas. And it is, namely, the trauma and memory that cannot be expunged of the tragedy of Russia’s terrifying twentieth century that comprise the overriding theme of Alexievich’s books, and she has chosen the cruellest and most uncomfortable genre: documentary prose, where you can’t hide your pain behind fiction. If Flaubert called himself ‘the pen-man’, then Alexievich calls herself ‘the ear-woman’: she listens to the noise of the street and picks out the voices of people and their personal stories. Her mission is to testify (in the high, biblical sense); she is here in order to speak about the trials and tribulations of the individual. Alexievich herself spoke about this in an interview she gave to the magazine Ogonyok :

Our principal capital is suffering. This is the only thing which we constantly mine. Not oil, not gas, but suffering. I suspect that this is what all at once attracts, and repels and surprises the Western reader of my books. It is that courage to go on living, no matter what. [37] https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2827530 . Why Do We Cry and Pray So Bitterly? (In Russian), 12 October 2015.

Alexievich’s gift for compassion is indicative of her Belarusian roots. ‘I was traumatized from childhood by the subject of evil and death’, she acknowledges, ‘because I grew up in a postwar Belarusian village where this was all anyone talked about. We constantly thought about it.’ Lying as it does at the crossroads of wars, and suffering from the wheels of history more than anywhere else, Belarus created its own particular culture of memory, encapsulated in the books of the writers Vasil Bykov and Ales Adamovich: as the Belarusian poet, Vladimir Neklyaev, noted, if all of Russian literature came out of Gogol’s Overcoat , then Alexievich’s art comes from the documentary book by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, Out of the Fire . The Belarusian gaze of Alexievich is the anti-imperial vaccination of humanity for our common culture, the best representatives of which, from Pushkin to Brodsky, were often blinded by the temptation of empire.

Her works are a catalogue of the tragedies of Soviet and post-Soviet history: the Great Patriotic War (the books War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face and The Last Witnesses , respectively about women and children in war); the war in Afghanistan ( Boys in Zinc ); the Chernobyl disaster ( Chernobyl Prayer ); suicides in the transition period of the 1990s ( Enchanted with Death ); and the problem of post-Soviet refugees ( Second-Hand Time ). Her books are uncomfortable, her observations ruthless and passionless, like the tale about the single mother from the Stalinist year of 1937 who, when arrested, asked her childless girlfriend to look after her daughter. The friend brought the girl up, and when the mother returned from the camps after seventeen years and asked to see how her daughter had turned out, it emerged that it was the friend who had denounced her, because she dreamt of having the daughter for herself; unable to cope with the reality of this, the mother went and hanged herself. Alexievich has hundreds of similar stories, which she pushes, like needles, into the most painful spots – areas not normally talked about in Russia.

The ‘Alexievich problem’ for Russia is not political, nor psychological; and it certainly is not because of her imagined ‘Russophobia’, or the political preferences of the Nobel Prize committee. It’s in the deep complexes of the Russian consciousness, which cannot talk about pain and cannot cope with the experience of trauma. On the whole, the subject of pain is taboo in Russia. Suffering is something internalized, which people try to deal with inside themselves or possibly in a very narrow family circle, but it is never brought out for public viewing. It is not normal in Russia to talk openly about pain. Often, if people happen to hear by chance about an illness from someone they’re talking to, they’ll wave them away, as if they are afraid of being infected: ‘Oh, don’t offload your problems onto me!’ Topics such as cancer, disability or deformity are as taboo as they always have been. People will collect money to help, but often that is simply a way of buying one’s way out of someone else’s pain, a magic spell. The Russian mass consciousness is archaic and superstitious. We hear, so frequently: ‘Don’t demonstrate other people’s illnesses on yourself!’, or ‘Don’t talk about illness or you’ll go down with it!’

Because of this superstitious horror in Russia, the experience of the collective trauma of the twentieth century has never been openly discussed: the Revolution, famine, the GULAG, the war, evacuations, deprivation. In many families, younger generations learn about the repression of their relatives only by hearsay; at first people kept quiet out of fear, then this became habit: the less we talk about frightening things, the sooner we’ll forget about them. Eighty years on, this experience has not been assimilated into our culture or the mass consciousness, nor have the witnesses – conversations about the repressions, incredible in their moral blindness, go round in circles: people seriously argue about whether they were justified or whether the evidence of them has been exaggerated. Varlam Shalamov’s books, with their terrifying accounts of what went on in the camps in Kolyma, stand like a solitary monument to the side of these discussions: people are too scared even to come close to them. [38] The camps in Kolyma, situated in the far northeastern corner of Russia, were considered the most notorious in the whole GULAG system. In the same way, people are afraid to touch on the subject of the famine in the Volga Region in the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–3, or the siege of Leningrad – there was hysterical reaction in the media after a single question (which wasn’t even approved!) on the Dozhd television channel as to whether it was worth the cost of one and a half million lives to hold onto the city. [39] Re Holodomor , see above. The siege of Leningrad by the German Army in the Second World War lasted from 8 September 1941 to 27 January 1944, and cost the lives of one and a half million of the city’s inhabitants. Re Dozhd TV, see note 32. Any attempt to discuss the victims or the human cost of the victory is cut short by the strict internal censor of the Russian mass consciousness.

In exactly the same way, the experience of Russia’s colonial wars in the twentieth century hasn’t been brought out, from Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, to Afghanistan in the 1980s and Chechnya in the 1990s. Compared to the way in which the Americans have agonized over Vietnam – with thousands of books, films, eye-witness accounts – Russia hasn’t even begun to pick over the bones (in 1992 in Minsk, veterans of the Afghan War even brought a political court case against Alexievich for debunking the heroic myth about the war in her book, Boys in Zinc ). The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, was right when he wrote two hundred years ago that Russia is a country without a memory, a space of total amnesia, a virgin understanding of criticism, rationality and reflexes. All our state narrative, family histories and individual experiences are built around a huge emptiness, a lacuna, a minefield. We prefer to tread safe paths with pat phrases and generalities: ‘Those were difficult times’; ‘It was tough for everyone.’ The Second World War, Afghanistan, Chernobyl, people’s broken destinies – they all flare up briefly in the newspapers and are instantly forgotten by society, pushed off into the silt at the bottom of pain. The same is happening today in the conflict in Ukraine: it seems that the fate of the paratroopers from Pskov, the tankmen from Buryatia or the special forces troops who have disappeared in the anonymous battles of the nonexistent war concerns only the opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta ; society has already forgotten about this war and now watches with fascination the clips produced by the General Staff about the bombings in Syria.