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Histories of the Soul

When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, the world was intrigued. Dylan himself wondered exactly how his songs related to literature. The Nobel committee’s explanation, that he had ‘created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’, seemed to satisfy most people. (The laureate later quoted his literary influences as Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Odyssey.)

A more interesting choice for the prize, however, was the previous year’s winner, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian journalist. This was odd, not because she was a journalist – although it is unusual for journalists to aspire to ‘literature’ – but because hardly a line of what Alexievich writes is her own.

Her books consist almost entirely of other people’s words, which is why the Nobel committee described them as ‘polyphonic’. What Alexievich does is to tape long interviews with chosen subjects, record group conversations and make notes of random remarks overheard in the marketplace or on the bus. She then edits the material and stitches it together. She is not the first to use this technique. The late Studs Terkel collected the stories of ‘ordinary’ Americans, and oral history has become a recognized discipline. But she is certainly its most powerful – and political – exponent.

By getting people to describe the seismic events of their own times, she aims to counter the official lies of the Soviet state and uncover the truth of what it did to its people for seventy years. Following the recent publication in English of her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War (the Second World War), we now have translations of all four of her major works. The other three are Boys in Zinc (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979‒89), Chernobyl Prayer (the nuclear reactor disaster of 26 April 1986), and Second-Hand Time (the collapse of the Soviet Union).

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When Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016, the world was intrigued. Dylan himself wondered exactly how his songs related to literature. The Nobel committee’s explanation, that he had ‘created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition’, seemed to satisfy most people. (The laureate later quoted his literary influences as Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and the Odyssey.)

A more interesting choice for the prize, however, was the previous year’s winner, Svetlana Alexievich, a Belorussian journalist. This was odd, not because she was a journalist – although it is unusual for journalists to aspire to ‘literature’ – but because hardly a line of what Alexievich writes is her own. Her books consist almost entirely of other people’s words, which is why the Nobel committee described them as ‘polyphonic’. What Alexievich does is to tape long interviews with chosen subjects, record group conversations and make notes of random remarks overheard in the marketplace or on the bus. She then edits the material and stitches it together. She is not the first to use this technique. The late Studs Terkel collected the stories of ‘ordinary’ Americans, and oral history has become a recognized discipline. But she is certainly its most powerful – and political – exponent. By getting people to describe the seismic events of their own times, she aims to counter the official lies of the Soviet state and uncover the truth of what it did to its people for seventy years. Following the recent publication in English of her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War (the Second World War), we now have translations of all four of her major works. The other three are Boys in Zinc (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, 1979‒89), Chernobyl Prayer (the nuclear reactor disaster of 26 April 1986), and Second-Hand Time (the collapse of the Soviet Union). Each book required years of work and hundreds of interviews recorded on literally miles of audio tape. Alexievich was not interested in conventional responses, the kind of thing people say to journalists when they are shy, afraid of controversy or anxious to please. Since this was Russia, she had also to overcome the inhibitions imposed on her witnesses by a lifetime of subservience to the state, not to mention their deeply felt patriotism. She waited hours, days and weeks until they were ready to open up. Her interviews were ‘like probing scar tissue’, she said. The men, especially former soldiers, tended to stick to the official version of events. Some were hostile, angry that this young woman should question their sacrifices for the Motherland. Former Party bosses would ring up to berate her – and end up agreeing to tell their own stories. Women were generally more confiding and would reveal to Alexievich things they had never told anyone else. The truth is sometimes too much to bear, re-living one’s past too upsetting. And we, her audience, can sympathize: these stories of violence, loss and betrayal are painful to read, more shocking than anything a fiction writer could dream up. Once the floodgates of memory are opened, her witnesses are more eloquent than any novelist could make them. These histories of the soul, as Alexievich calls them, are built up like portrait paintings. Each piece of testimony adds a layer to the canvas. They are litanies of suffering, repetitive but mesmerizing. And what emerges is a remarkably coherent picture. Even when, as in Second-Hand Time, the narrators fall into two camps – those who regret the collapse of the USSR and those who rejoice at it – the sentiments on each side are consistent, a guarantee of their essential truth. Born in Ukraine in 1948, Alexievich grew up in what is now Belarus. There as a child she had overheard the women of the village – there were few men left – talking about their dreadful experiences during the Nazi invasion. It was this that prompted The Unwomanly Face of War, the first of her ‘documentary novels’ (and the only one of the four whose English translation is not entirely convincing). Women’s role in the Great Patriotic War had been glossed over for decades. And when it was retrieved, it was sanitized. This sanitized version is the one the women would give Alexievich, at least while their husbands were in the room. The men did not trust their wives to tell their own stories. About a million Russian girls, mostly volunteers, served at the front where they were generally accepted as comrades, and issued with men’s clothes and boots too big for them. Some later became famous as snipers or tank crews. The unsung heroines were the nurses, teenagers who crawled repeatedly over the battlefield under fire to drag back wounded men, dead weights twice their own. Fear of death was not as bad as having to wear men’s underpants, says one. Another confesses that her greatest fear was ‘losing my beautiful legs’. Women found it more terrible to kill than men did, and had more to fear from capture: often they were summarily shot. By the time they were sent home to be women again, their hair had turned white, their periods had stopped and they could not bear to look at the colour red. Some took years to recover and marry. They were not sought out by men they had served with, who wanted pretty, peacetime wives. Boys in Zinc (a reference to the metal coffins in which casualties were sent back to Russia) is an indictment of war, the horrors witnessed by the young conscripts and the grief of mothers who have lost an only child. We hear what death on the battlefield really looks like. It’s nothing like the movies, says one survivor. A soldier shot in the head can run for half a kilometre crazily chasing his own brains as they stream from his skull. Mothers describe the trauma of bereavement. What exactly lies inside that zinc coffin they cannot see and are not allowed to know. They had been assured that only sons would not be sent to Afghanistan, and would now never trust the state again. Falsely described as a brotherly mission to build socialism, the war was conducted behind a fog of secrecy and ineptitude. Casualty numbers and war-grave locations were concealed while survivors were treated with fear and contempt. (I once met an embittered Afghan war veteran at a hotel bar in Leningrad who, in reply to my innocuous question, pulled a gun on me.) The mistrust created by the Afghan campaign is said to have been a proximate cause of the Soviet Union’s collapse. All the pride and patriotism created by the victory over Hitler at Stalingrad was dissipated. Chernobyl saw the ultimate betrayal of the people by their leaders. Not only did the nuclear reactor fail – an unthinkable failure of Soviet technology – but the plant’s management failed to report the truth of what had happened. When they did, the high-ups in the Kremlin found the knowledge too great to bear. It was easier to pretend that everything was under control: so for twelve hours they refused to evacuate the people living under the radiation cloud. Typically, Alexievich says none of this herself. She lets the people tell their own story. And the first story is the heart-rending account of a young wife from Pripyat, pregnant with her first child, whose husband went out in his shirtsleeves in the middle of the night to fight the fire on the reactor roof. She followed him to the radiation hospital in Moscow where he and his firemen colleagues were taken, bribed her way inside and was able to hold him until he died. Her baby, a little girl, was born prematurely and died of radiation poisoning within four hours. The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. The men were oblivious to their lack of protection, which even if it had been available would not have saved them. When the army arrived, the place looked like a war zone. (Some residents thought world war had broken out.) But the soldiers were fighting a war against an invisible enemy. As one says, you did not die on the battlefield, only later when you got home. Chernobyl was a true nightmare. The one place in the world where people felt safest – their home – was now the most dangerous place to be. Apart from the black puddles, everything looked the same as before. But everything – the house, the garden, the forest, the wild animals, the household pets – was now deadly poisonous. No wonder many of the old people simply refused to believe it and preferred to stay in this mutant world of the living dead, watching the soldiers search for clean earth in which to bury poisoned earth. If Chernobyl Prayer is the most eloquent of the four books, Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets is the most penetrating. It goes to the heart of the question which so puzzles us in the West: after everything they have suffered in the last hundred years, why do so many Russians regret the end of the Soviet Union? Alexievich paints a vibrant collective portrait of Homo sovieticus. Brought up under Communism, he lives now under capitalism. In the past, he suffered poverty, bereavement and betrayal, dreading the knock on the door. Yet he had hope. ‘We were people of faith,’ says one interviewee. That faith was dashed when, after a brief interval of democracy, society suffered from the rampages of raw capitalism and material greed epitomized by a new dictator and his tame oligarchs. There was plenty to buy in the shops, certainly, but the prices were beyond reach. Russia became a country in which a coalminer and his family could be murdered for a stereo player. Migrants from the Caucasus or central Asia, formerly respected as Soviet citizens, found themselves subject to racial abuse and maltreatment in Moscow, the city they once regarded as their capital. If old Communist hardliners hated the new regime, many of their anti-Communist children were disillusioned too. Second-Hand Time is the best insight into modern Russia you will read. But is it literature? It’s hard to see why not. Svetlana Alexievich has discovered a powerful way of writing history. Her reality is magnified by the dignity and eloquence of history’s minor actors – by their tears and silences as much as by their words. Her characters prove to be larger than life, their stories as dramatic as any novel. This journalist has used reportage to do work which, before her arrival, fiction alone was deemed capable of doing. Nowhere is human nature more exposed to our view than in her pages.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 60 © Christian Tyler 2018


About the contributor

Christian Tyler wrote a weekly interview column for six years during a thirty- year career at the Financial Times of London. He knows how hard it can be to get people to open up.

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