КУЛЬТУРА И ИСКУССТВО (последнее)
"WHAT IS OUR MEMORY?" [Dialog with Svetlana Aleksiyevich]
Актуальные публикации по вопросам культуры и искусства.
This text is the transcript of Svetlana Aleksiyevich's conversation with Almira Usmanova, Candidate of Philosophy, the Center for Gender Research of the European Humanities University, Minsk.
Svetlana Aleksiyevich does not need to be introduced. She is well-known not only in Belarus. Her books have been published in Russia, Germany, France and other countries. They have also been staged and filmed. Her creative work is discussed and attracts attention of not only mass readers and literary critics. Party ideologists accused the author of pacifism, naturalism, and dissident views. The Zinc Boys trial revealed unreadiness of the society for repentance and criticism. It also revealed certain misunderstanding of literary "truth" which the author had to defend in court. But Aleksiyevich's right to her own opinion and philosophical view is proved by her literary recognition and first of all by those whose life-stories became the basis of her books.
Svetlana Aleksiyevich's first book War Has No Female Face was published in 1985. Then there appeared Last Witnesses (1985), Zinc Boys (1989), Enchanted by Death (1993), Chernobyl Prayer (1997).
The representatives of our Centre wanted to discuss with Svetlana Aleksiyevich many problems: what prevails in her books - literature or history (as she admits that her books are a chronicle of the soul history of several generations of Soviet people), if there are any specific features of a female view on the world and art, what has changed in our country for the last 10 years.
"I define the genre I work in as the history of feelings. My fact is a feeling. From book to book I create an encyclopaedia of feelings, of my contemporaries' inner world".
A. Usmanova: What has formed your world outlook, your writer's opinion? Why did you chose a documentary genre but not, for example, prose or poetry? How do you define your manner of writing? On the one hand it can be defined as academic work - the "oral story", the main idea of which is to let real "history subjects", i. e. ordinary people, have their say. These people are usually neglected by the official history (in the best case they are included in statistical data). An "oral story", in French researcher's definition is "an autobiography of those who do not write". But on the other hand, if one has a broader look at the results of your work, they can be treated as a certain pedagogical or social action - your books restore the memory transmitting mechanism from one generation to another; from one social group to another.
S. Aleksiyevich: How I began to write... I come from a village teachers' family. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Belarusian. I was brought up on the boundary of two Slavic cultures. Our house was full of books. My village, nature and books. My understanding of the world as polyphony rests on it. I thought that the world is many voices, many people. But the world I saw out of the window was different from the one newspapers wrote about. The war stories I heard from the people were also different. Unlike those we got used to. They were better than books. There are wonderful books about war but life was much more unpredictable and horrible. Then l have got this feeling that art cannot even imagine the human aspect.
I was trying to express myself. When I started to work for a newspaper it turned out that the things which interested me were of no interest for the newspaper. What I was interested in exists on the boundary between subconscious and conscious. Later I defined it for my self as a "biological" woman but not an ideological one.
I belong to the generation called "philological", It was clear that average literature reflects the truth and a genius writer expresses his own world understanding, life idea, his view on the world. For example, Platon Karataev - this is an idea, he does not exist in real life. But I was hypnotised by the reality. I wanted to understand it. Only after reading the book I am From a Fire Village by Ales Adamovich did I catch a coincidence with my world understanding. When it is a document and at the same time is art. Thus my first book was born, War Has No Female Face.
I call it "history of feelings". I am not interested in the factual side of events. It exists as an outline of history. I am interested in a person during the war time; her/his feelings, consciousness. When I faced it I understood that in our war literature a person used to exist as a representative of one world opposed to the other. I am interested in human nature, whether it is strong or fragile, and in general, what depths a person has. And how this person can be protected. A person experiencing a new feeling is of interest for me. People confess that they can not learn it from books. My genre is a document but it is also my guess about a person. For me a person exists in a social sphere but I am intrigued by a person in general.
"What must I defend? My writer's right to see the world the way I see it... Or perhaps I must prove that there is the truth and plausibility, that a document in art is not a certificate you get at a recruiting office... I collect details, feelings not only from a separate human life but from the spirit of time, its voices and space. I do not invent but arrange the material in reality. A document for me is both those who tell me and I myself with my outlook and feelings".
A. Usmanova: Are there any borders between art and a document, fictional and real, literature and history? The documentary genre you work in constantly raises this question. It is very important to clarify the concept of a document. It is of importance for a documentary writer, for historians and mass readers. It was well revealed during the Zinc Boys trial.
S. Aleksiyevich: The more I work with documents the more I understand that we treat them as our own interpretations of what is happening to us. It always seemed to me that a document means a certain boundary which you are not to cross. Now I understand that there are no fixed and rigid boundaries for the document.
It is important to make the document work according to the laws of art. I do not think it is easy. There is a phenomenon of mass consciousness. People are not used to this kind of interference of art into life. Just imagine a situation: Archipelago GULAG. What if its contemporaries had read it in the 40s-50s? If it had been given to the mass censorship? What could we have had now? In my case with Zinc Boys there was no gap between the book and the time. And, of course, people started to make "corrections".
A. Usmanova: The trial is like a mass consciousness cut. But besides powerful though concealed impulses from the military bureaucrats and communists, for the mothers who were "used" by the state machine, it was rather a problem connected with the intimacy of their recollections and the fact that their intimate thoughts were made public. And it was also a problem of the form these reminiscences take in the book. You had to answer the question about the way you understand the document, what is literature, what responsibilities the author has and what your being the author means.
S. Aleksiyevich: It is necessary to take into account the two layers of consciousness existing at that time. There existed ideological literature. When I was preparing my book War Has No Female Face for publication there was a shocking story about a conversation in a trench before a battle which could be the last for everybody. It dealt with the most sacred things. I sent the story to my main character, she crossed it out and said: "I told all that for you to understand how hard was it for us, girls, to be at the war. But you should write something different in your book, girl". And she sent me her stories about the military patriotic work she was engaged in at the schools. That was her idea of what one should write for the public. We got used to such kind of ideological literature. All journalism was like this. I remember one of my characters from the book about the Afghan war kept on saying: "You must write but it is impossible to tell". And later on he sued me. I asked him: ''How could you?" and he answered; "I thought you were going to write something quite different..."
A. Usmanova: One of the problems for researcher dealing with your work is notion of the Author: laconic and delicate author commentary creates the integrity of a book and the harmony of the world it reflects. The author's point of view is felt despite the polylogue of voices in your books. How do you achieve it? Isn't there a certain contradiction if you deal with a document?
S. Aleksiyevich: I think everyone's life is a creation of history. I mean that we all create it and art tries to reproduce the world picture. Evidence, documents belong to art and make the world picture complete. My personal experience suggests me that the opportunities of the document in art have not been explored enough and not yet exhausted. Yes, at first there must be some global, epic event which many people participate in. And the crossing of all these points, lights and shades gives birth to the idea of a book, of the world which is created by many people including the author.
Every historical period is embodied in its own aesthetics, in its words. Every generation writes its own texts but their topics are very similar: eternal themes of birth, suffering, love, death. I relate to everything as to a mystery, human mystery. Every person has this mystery (love, crime, fear of death), her/his own understanding of it. All this gives birth to a unique text (not always coherent, successive, detailed).
"Everything is to be defined and pronounced aloud for the first time. Suppose something has happened for which we have no analogy, no experience, our hearing and eyesight are not adapted to it, even our vocabulary is not adequate. All these inner instruments. They are adjusted to hearing, touching, seeing. None of it is possible..."
A. Usmanova: While reading Chernobyl Prayer the author's point of view is definitely felt in the arrangement of your characters' monologues, in the progression of the text from birth to death, to the death of feelings. The initial pages are realised as a chronologically exact statement of "pain", fresh impressions, but little by little you start feeling death, devastation... At first it is life (after Chernobyl but still - "life") and then - a gradual retreat into quite a "different'' world. This is a kind of an answer to the question how art can bear the anthropological experience of atrophy of some feelings and birth of new ones. Generally speaking, there is an impression that our organs of sense have their own history.
S. Aleksiyevich: For me this transition or erasing of borders between the alive and non-alive, between me and a butterfly is a very important "discovery" which I made while working on the book. You experience this feeling in Chernobyl when your past does not help you. This is quite a new experience. The laws governing the world do not work here though they seem to be universal. It is not by chance that many of my story-tellers used to say: "I can't find words to describe what I have seen and lived through", "I have never read or seen anything like that". You start to understand better the unusual character of what is going on. I remember a story of a woman (a sole voice at the beginning of the book) who was told in a hospital: "Forget that you love him. You must not come up to him". Or when those who were evacuated told me about a strange feeling that "the sun is shining, spring onions are coming out, even a mouse is living in the house". One elderly woman used to say: "I have seen the war but this is not like that".
A. Usmanova: Does ad hoc decision make any sense for you as a writer? Your books are to a certain extent determined by current demand. Both Chernobyl and Afghanistan themes are still very topical.
S. Aleksiyevich: Thousands of books have been written about war, a lot has been written about Chernobyl. I wrote a book about the Great Patriotic War 40 years after it, about Chernobyl - 10 years after and about socialism - when it did not exist any longer. But why did I write about Chernobyl only 10 years after? I wanted to do it earlier but I understood that I did not have got yet my own vision. I was able to write a book which could be written by other people. But then as if I heard a new sound and everything started to look in a different way.
I was told that my books about the Great Patriotic War and about Chernobyl can be endlessly prolonged. I answered that the idea itself had beet exhausted. One more fact, one more life story will not change or add anything to my understanding of these events and the people who took part in them. That is the reason I would not write a book about the war in Chechnya. One more story about war will not become a ultimate answer to the question what makes one person kill another. My understanding of the problem has been reflected in my books.
"Our history is the one of suffering. Suffering is our refuge, our cult. We have been hypnotised by it".
A. Usmanova: Is there a problem of "ethics" of your writing? I mean moral obligation to the memory of the person who told you her/his story. And, broadly speaking, the theme contents of your books. You stated once that we are all hypnotised by suffering. But you seem to be hypnotised by it too or is it the detached observation of a person, like a surgeon (once you used this metaphor) cutting human flesh?
S. Aleksiyevich: To begin with, art is based on the use of someone's memory. A writer describes not only her/his own suffering and even more often s/he does not write about her/himself at all. The purifying effect of art constitutes its moral character.
A. Usmanova: Catharsis by Aristotle?
S. Aleksiyevich: It hurts in order to heal. Art is like a searchlight. Out of thousands who suffer it selects one.
As for ethical character of my books' plot. Sometimes I am accused of necrophilia. I think it is unprofessional and absurd. Do we have any other history than this - "seas of blood and common graves"? From this point of view I am only a chronicle writer. I write about the things that are or were taking place. Unfortunately, the 20th century is the period of frightening totalitarian ideas. So many human lives have been involved in the process of their realisation. I chose these people and I wanted to look back at the past together with them, to live it through "for the second time", I do not see any other topic for myself. For art it is a very complicated task. Of course, there appears a problem of self-protection, your own human tiredness.. But I am following this way. Perhaps, my eyes and organs of sense are organised in this way. I see the world in its tragic aspect.
A. Usmanova: I think it is really a tragic view. It can be the effect of your own sensitivity to other's suffering. However, it seems to me that through describing the horrors of war there takes place a sort of aesthetisation of horror, no matter how simple is the language used for telling us about death. Making horror more aesthetic is being founded in the act of writing itself. "Aesthetics of horror" - this problem does not belong to the recent decade. But now it has become especially acute - TW reports dealing with recent wars (Chechnya, Kosovo) prove it one more time. A lot of people are shocked by depersonalisation and quasi objectivity of photo and TV reports taping death. The power of writing is no less convincing than photography. It is important to describe suffering for descendants but for contemporaries it looks different.
S. Aleksiyevich: These are the laws of art. Death in my books is different - it is blood, dirt, lice just like in life. But for a piece of writing to become a piece of art it must be done according to the laws of art. Otherwise human consciousness will not absorb it. I cannot show just a stream of life, then my books would have been endless. Spielberg's Society, for example, is compiling total history of Holocaust victims but who is going to read it? I believe that only the pieces of reality that have been filtered through art can make a person think, cry, sympathise.
"War reveals such sides in a person he would have never developed under different conditions. He wants to kill, he likes it - why? It is called an instinct of war, hatred, destruction. We do not know this biological person, our literature lacks it. We underestimate it in ourselves, we rely on the idea and the word too much".
A. Usmanova: When you say that our literature "lacks a biological person" do you mean that we must fill in this gap or do you mean that "a biological person" is unattainable in general and for literature in particular? Though some avant-guard literary experiments (since the time of Joice, Prust and, perhaps, we should even start with Marquis de Sad) have always been directed at overcoming the gap between l'ecriture and the metaphysics of corporeality.
S. Aleksiyevich: Why are the action films, pornography, science fiction so popular now? Because man is and always has been afraid of the unknown. The idea of Apocalypse, of punishment for sins accumulates this fear. Apocalyptic consciousness is an element of mass consciousness. We started to understand it only after Chernobyl. Before it the world seemed to be stable and dependant on our will. This world is over. We do not know a human being. l have already mentioned that art does not imagine about many sides in a person and our art did not even want to think about it Our art was closed to a beastly man, our man was sacred. One-dimensional world. And a person is very complicated - neither a beast nor a saint. I think that dark sides in a human being prevail over light ones. A human soul is a place where good and evil are fighting. A wo/man out of time interests me. When I say it I mean that an "eternal man" is also a biological wo/man with her/his physiological needs, s/he likes when other people suffer or are afraid.
"There is so much history beside us which we have not realised or felt yet as History".
A. Usmanova: A well-known idea is that history does not teach us anything. The French historian Mark Bloch once wrote: "Our civilisation has always expected much from our memory". But when a new tragedy comes we always ask: Is history useless? Harmful? Illogical? Absurd? Russian literature of the 19th century suggested us that "history teaches a person to be a citizen". The question about the sense and the need of history seems to be proper in this country which was always doomed to a sort of "collective amnesia". I mean our reluctance to keep in memory negative experience, the tendency to its erasing - even literally through destruction of monuments, the ignoring of witnesses and evidence...
S. Aleksiyevich: All Russian literature and art was based on this point of view - they believed in their missionary task. ''Art is the teacher of life". It is of no interest to me to stay within these limits. On the other hand, we start to understand many things without experiencing them, without living them through. So like it or not we still learn something from art. And from history. I write for the sake of self-understanding. "Social pedagogic" presupposes the availability of answers. You must remember that quite recently "teachers of life" used to give ready-made answers, used to teach us how we should live. And today it is so boring to hear all that. It turned out that to be a preacher is quite an unrewarding task.
A. Usmanova: I think that the value of art is not to give ready-made answers but to make us think...
S. Aleksiyevich: There is only one way for me. When I am asked to give an answer to a complicated problem I say that there is only perpetual motion, there is a road. This is selfvaluable. There is no common road for everybody. Every single person is different and her/his life can not be repeated. I feel it when I meet my future characters. At first they are one persons, later - they are different. In Zinc Boys I spoke with a mother who by that time kept talking to her son lying in a coffin in her room. And she was quite different some years after (during the trial). When she was shouting My son is a hero! she was like a little screw in the industry of patriotism. Besides, life is changing and we are changing too. There is a great distance between War Has No Female Face and Zinc Boys as if they have been written by different people.
As for the sense of history. For me it is first of all in the sense of every individual life. I was shocked by the stories of women about the war - blood, death, camps. I was shocked by the way they spoke about it. Horrible time but they felt nostalgic about it. Later when I was looking at the pictures I understood that, no matter how hard the time was, it was their time, the time of their youth, of their personal life. So probably the sense is in the life itself. And the rest is the background, entourage. My father used to say: "It is sad that all my life is the war, "after the war" and then, "after socialism", all the time in struggle, in devastation". If you think about the essence of life in general, not connecting it with yourself, then you may think that it is senseless. I believe that everything, can be found within a person. And it is very interesting for me.
A. Usmanova: Coming back to our reality and to a person who is trying to find the sense of her/his life. Though some outer world events are the background of our lives there is no doubt that there is a close connection between them. As a writer you personally can distance yourself from the going on and look at life in a different way, You have your own keen life perception and I'd like to ask you how you comprehend the present and the progress in achieving the freedom, your characters lacked so much.
S. Aleksiyevich: When they were rehearsing a performance based on lay took Zinc Boys I told the actors: "No need to scream out loudly directing your words to the place the Central Committee was located: "They have taken our sons!" You must direct your words to yourself and into yourself - it is me, a slave, who has brought up a slave. It was in the consciousness of Soviet people and it still remains. One cannot immediately accept and appreciate freedom having slavery experience. It does not happen at once - today you are a slave and tomorrow - a free person. Freedom is a whole structure, an organisation of soul and mind. It is not Swiss chocolate, it can't be simply imported.
Yet we have changed. People have seen the diversity of the world. Under the influence of advertising quite a different consumer taste has been formed. The information about one product having hundreds of kinds is elementary but still it is a form of freedom. The main achievement of freedom is that a new generation is being born which accepts all this as a matter of fact. A generation which does not have a slavery memory. For the people who are 4O-50 years old now it is more difficult to get rid of the burden of their past. And I am a product of my time too. I also try to free myself from prejudices and superstitions of a Soviet person.
A. Usmanova: When you say that it is necessary to get rid of slavery consciousness and memory does it mean that it is good to forget? Isn't there a threat of a well-known collective amnesia?
S. Aleksiyevich: It depends on what to get rid of. I think that if anything happens to a person it cannot he obliterated because it is personal experience, suffering and you cannot escape your own memory. Moreover, people do not want their sufferings to remain nameless. I wanted to change the name of a woman who told me her story in the book Chernobyl Prayer because of its intimate character. But the woman told me: "No need to change my name. I suffered so much, I want my name to remain". I had been taught by Zinc Boys and led by the idea that the concrete name was of no importance for art. What seemed to be really important was the verisimilitude to life feelings. And I was surprised. I think it proves that people do not want to erase anything from their memory. Why must my sufferings be wiped out?
A. Usmanova: We have already mentioned that, unlike heroic literature and official history, you always try to single out one voice from the crowd, to view a person not as a passer-by on the historical scene but as a person having her/his own sufferings and feelings. This person needs to retrive her/his own individuality, that's why s/he wants to be named. If we want to humanise our past it is important to retain feelings and emotions but it is not less important to preserve the names.
S. Aleksiyevich: I think that if anything does not remain in writing, it seems not to have existed at all. Though memory and word are very imperfect tools to register the past and the present. They are fragile and unstable. Besides they are dependant on time.
"From a story of a nurse: "I'd like to be at the war but not at this one, at the Great Patriotic War".
A. Usmanova: Now to the problem of demythologisation. The last stronghold of collective consciousness of Soviet people was its involvement in a common victory over German fascism. The Great Patriotic War was kept in collective memory as an example of a just war. Multiple exposures of the Soviet regime have destroyed this belief. Thus the whole generation has lost the integrity of its identity. On the other hand, as your characters from Zinc Boys say, they associate the war in Afghanistan with the Great Patriotic War. How painless is the destruction of myths, a new look at our history for our people?
S. Aleksiyevich: Myth is necessary for a global, universal idea - like socialism, for example. For a powerful totalitarian idea. 0r at a basic stage of the society formation. A modern person's consciousness is mosaic. The time of united, homogeneous, governed by myths society is over. As I have already mentioned, a modern person finds the sense in his private life but net in his unity with the state. That is why I think that the time of Great Myths is over. The value of every individual human life - that is the main sense of history. Myths are dangerous. They are popular when a personal consciousness is paralysed. You can eliminate them but you cannot beat them. My creative work coincided with the period of demythologisation of a Soviet person's consciousness. But I think that it is a global, world process.
"Female memory comprises such a scope of personal feelings at war which does not usually interest a man. A war captivates a man by its action. Women feel and overcome it in quite a different way due to female psychology: bombings, death, suffering - these are not the only aspects of war. The things she remembers and takes from this deadly hell become a unique spiritual experience of unlimited human possibilities which we have no right to forget".
A. Usmanova: An "oral story" has much in common with the so called gender history because women play a special role among the witnesses of "global history". It is well known that a woman as a subject is missing from the "male" history of western civilisation. Women, as a rule, are seldom to be found where the decisions on wars, peace and the like are to be made. Historical sources register mainly male view on history. On the other hand, as many researchers point out, women are privileged witnesses for an "oral story". As a traditional division of the world onto "male" (politics, social life and publicly recognised labour) and "female" ( home and family life) is obvious, in this kind of research the modality of their testimony seems to be quite reasonable - men represent in their memories "social order", the world of universal and obligatory things while women describe their past in very personal, emotional, even intimate colours, outer world events come through the filter of their personal comprehension. For the "history of feelings" you are dealing with it is a unique material. Do you as a writer, historian and a woman (I mean that a female look at history is guaranteed by this very fact) realise this difference of female and male memories, their views on the world? Do women recollect history a better and different way?
S. Aleksiyevich: My first book was the best proof of this statement. I was interested in female look at the war not only of rare and unique character of this evidence. Unfortunately, we do not know how many women took part in that war (women partisans and members of the resistance movement have never been counted). I was trying to find my way to write about the war. And then I realised that being a woman I must look at the war through "women's eyes". Thus I discovered quite a different material. When I spoke with Adamovich about my book he was surprised and said that he would have never been able to write such a book, he did not even realise that there could be such an angle of viewing the problem. For example, I still remember the words of a woman who took part in the war. She said that since that year she had stopped liking summer. Especially illustrative is the comparison of a husband's and a 'wife's a memories. They were on the front together but the man remembered a battle itself while the woman said that it was terrible to see killed sailors' caps in the river. Can you see what sort of image it is?
Then I heard about quite a different war, it was a different sound. Colour, smell, sound - they were all different in female perception of war. Details which had a very strong impact. When my book was published (and I managed to do it only after Gorbachev had come to power) it had a huge 2 million copies circulation, it was translated into many languages, staged in theatres. For many people it was a kind of revelation. Why was it impossible to publish the book before? I was accused of pacifism, naturalism etc. Just remember a woman who carried two wounded out of the battle, one of them turned out to be German and the other,being half dead, tried to kill him. The woman helped them both. War from a female point of view is a killing, just or unjust. For a man it is often a hard job and hardships of a military life.
"I cannot get rid of the feeling that war is caused by male nature, which is beyond my comprehension".
A. Usmanova: Do you believe in gender predisposed way of life and feeling? Is it possible to speak about absolute incompatibility of male and female views?
S. Aleksiyevich: I think, yes. Now when I am writing a book about love - Wonderful Deer of Eternal Hunting, about the way men and women view it, I see that it happens in quite different ways. These are two different worlds and views. I felt the same when I was writing my first book. In general, the presence of this viewpoint is very well felt in literature. Anna Karenina could be written by a man only. There are writers who possess a bisexual look at the world (Prust, for example or Berdjaev). But these are rather exceptions. A specifically female look at the world is felt in a very delicate view, in reticence...
A. Usmanova: I cannot but ask you about your plans and new books.
S. Aleksiyevich: Now I am writing two books - Wonderful Deer of Eternal Hunting, a kind of confession of men and women about love, and And The Light That Is Not Evening's. This is a continuation of my chronicle. People do not only fight, suffer, climb a reactor's roof but also love. In my history of feelings I have wrote on people of war, revolution and the Chernobyl disaster. But this picture will not be complete if I do not write about a "night man", about her/his "night life". There is God's providence and there is love. That is what my new book is going to be about.
Why do I think that it is important to write about relations between men and women, about love and family? Soviet people were in general homeless people. Contrary to an average western person our people always tried to find the sense of their lives in something heroic - revolution, war, fire, in something outside themselves. We cannot live without a heroic deed, just at home, for example.
And The Light That Is Not Evening's is a book about our approaching to the end of life, leaving for ever. When we come to this edge, the ultimate question about life and death arises again. Before leaving this world people look back at their lives trying to understand "What was it?". So, it is about the eternal searching of sense in the human life.
Svetlana Aleksiyevich does not need to be introduced. She is well-known not only in Belarus. Her books have been published in Russia, Germany, France and other countries. They have also been staged and filmed. Her creative work is discussed and attracts attention of not only mass readers and literary critics. Party ideologists accused the author of pacifism, naturalism, and dissident views. The Zinc Boys trial revealed unreadiness of the society for repentance and criticism. It also revealed certain misunderstanding of literary "truth" which the author had to defend in court. But Aleksiyevich's right to her own opinion and philosophical view is proved by her literary recognition and first of all by those whose life-stories became the basis of her books.
Svetlana Aleksiyevich's first book War Has No Female Face was published in 1985. Then there appeared Last Witnesses (1985), Zinc Boys (1989), Enchanted by Death (1993), Chernobyl Prayer (1997).
The representatives of our Centre wanted to discuss with Svetlana Aleksiyevich many problems: what prevails in her books - literature or history (as she admits that her books are a chronicle of the soul history of several generations of Soviet people), if there are any specific features of a female view on the world and art, what has changed in our country for the last 10 years.
"I define the genre I work in as the history of feelings. My fact is a feeling. From book to book I create an encyclopaedia of feelings, of my contemporaries' inner world".
A. Usmanova: What has formed your world outlook, your writer's opinion? Why did you chose a documentary genre but not, for example, prose or poetry? How do you define your manner of writing? On the one hand it can be defined as academic work - the "oral story", the main idea of which is to let real "history subjects", i. e. ordinary people, have their say. These people are usually neglected by the official history (in the best case they are included in statistical data). An "oral story", in French researcher's definition is "an autobiography of those who do not write". But on the other hand, if one has a broader look at the results of your work, they can be treated as a certain pedagogical or social action - your books restore the memory transmitting mechanism from one generation to another; from one social group to another.
S. Aleksiyevich: How I began to write... I come from a village teachers' family. My mother is Ukrainian and my father is Belarusian. I was brought up on the boundary of two Slavic cultures. Our house was full of books. My village, nature and books. My understanding of the world as polyphony rests on it. I thought that the world is many voices, many people. But the world I saw out of the window was different from the one newspapers wrote about. The war stories I heard from the people were also different. Unlike those we got used to. They were better than books. There are wonderful books about war but life was much more unpredictable and horrible. Then l have got this feeling that art cannot even imagine the human aspect.
I was trying to express myself. When I started to work for a newspaper it turned out that the things which interested me were of no interest for the newspaper. What I was interested in exists on the boundary between subconscious and conscious. Later I defined it for my self as a "biological" woman but not an ideological one.
I belong to the generation called "philological", It was clear that average literature reflects the truth and a genius writer expresses his own world understanding, life idea, his view on the world. For example, Platon Karataev - this is an idea, he does not exist in real life. But I was hypnotised by the reality. I wanted to understand it. Only after reading the book I am From a Fire Village by Ales Adamovich did I catch a coincidence with my world understanding. When it is a document and at the same time is art. Thus my first book was born, War Has No Female Face.
I call it "history of feelings". I am not interested in the factual side of events. It exists as an outline of history. I am interested in a person during the war time; her/his feelings, consciousness. When I faced it I understood that in our war literature a person used to exist as a representative of one world opposed to the other. I am interested in human nature, whether it is strong or fragile, and in general, what depths a person has. And how this person can be protected. A person experiencing a new feeling is of interest for me. People confess that they can not learn it from books. My genre is a document but it is also my guess about a person. For me a person exists in a social sphere but I am intrigued by a person in general.
"What must I defend? My writer's right to see the world the way I see it... Or perhaps I must prove that there is the truth and plausibility, that a document in art is not a certificate you get at a recruiting office... I collect details, feelings not only from a separate human life but from the spirit of time, its voices and space. I do not invent but arrange the material in reality. A document for me is both those who tell me and I myself with my outlook and feelings".
A. Usmanova: Are there any borders between art and a document, fictional and real, literature and history? The documentary genre you work in constantly raises this question. It is very important to clarify the concept of a document. It is of importance for a documentary writer, for historians and mass readers. It was well revealed during the Zinc Boys trial.
S. Aleksiyevich: The more I work with documents the more I understand that we treat them as our own interpretations of what is happening to us. It always seemed to me that a document means a certain boundary which you are not to cross. Now I understand that there are no fixed and rigid boundaries for the document.
It is important to make the document work according to the laws of art. I do not think it is easy. There is a phenomenon of mass consciousness. People are not used to this kind of interference of art into life. Just imagine a situation: Archipelago GULAG. What if its contemporaries had read it in the 40s-50s? If it had been given to the mass censorship? What could we have had now? In my case with Zinc Boys there was no gap between the book and the time. And, of course, people started to make "corrections".
A. Usmanova: The trial is like a mass consciousness cut. But besides powerful though concealed impulses from the military bureaucrats and communists, for the mothers who were "used" by the state machine, it was rather a problem connected with the intimacy of their recollections and the fact that their intimate thoughts were made public. And it was also a problem of the form these reminiscences take in the book. You had to answer the question about the way you understand the document, what is literature, what responsibilities the author has and what your being the author means.
S. Aleksiyevich: It is necessary to take into account the two layers of consciousness existing at that time. There existed ideological literature. When I was preparing my book War Has No Female Face for publication there was a shocking story about a conversation in a trench before a battle which could be the last for everybody. It dealt with the most sacred things. I sent the story to my main character, she crossed it out and said: "I told all that for you to understand how hard was it for us, girls, to be at the war. But you should write something different in your book, girl". And she sent me her stories about the military patriotic work she was engaged in at the schools. That was her idea of what one should write for the public. We got used to such kind of ideological literature. All journalism was like this. I remember one of my characters from the book about the Afghan war kept on saying: "You must write but it is impossible to tell". And later on he sued me. I asked him: ''How could you?" and he answered; "I thought you were going to write something quite different..."
A. Usmanova: One of the problems for researcher dealing with your work is notion of the Author: laconic and delicate author commentary creates the integrity of a book and the harmony of the world it reflects. The author's point of view is felt despite the polylogue of voices in your books. How do you achieve it? Isn't there a certain contradiction if you deal with a document?
S. Aleksiyevich: I think everyone's life is a creation of history. I mean that we all create it and art tries to reproduce the world picture. Evidence, documents belong to art and make the world picture complete. My personal experience suggests me that the opportunities of the document in art have not been explored enough and not yet exhausted. Yes, at first there must be some global, epic event which many people participate in. And the crossing of all these points, lights and shades gives birth to the idea of a book, of the world which is created by many people including the author.
Every historical period is embodied in its own aesthetics, in its words. Every generation writes its own texts but their topics are very similar: eternal themes of birth, suffering, love, death. I relate to everything as to a mystery, human mystery. Every person has this mystery (love, crime, fear of death), her/his own understanding of it. All this gives birth to a unique text (not always coherent, successive, detailed).
"Everything is to be defined and pronounced aloud for the first time. Suppose something has happened for which we have no analogy, no experience, our hearing and eyesight are not adapted to it, even our vocabulary is not adequate. All these inner instruments. They are adjusted to hearing, touching, seeing. None of it is possible..."
A. Usmanova: While reading Chernobyl Prayer the author's point of view is definitely felt in the arrangement of your characters' monologues, in the progression of the text from birth to death, to the death of feelings. The initial pages are realised as a chronologically exact statement of "pain", fresh impressions, but little by little you start feeling death, devastation... At first it is life (after Chernobyl but still - "life") and then - a gradual retreat into quite a "different'' world. This is a kind of an answer to the question how art can bear the anthropological experience of atrophy of some feelings and birth of new ones. Generally speaking, there is an impression that our organs of sense have their own history.
S. Aleksiyevich: For me this transition or erasing of borders between the alive and non-alive, between me and a butterfly is a very important "discovery" which I made while working on the book. You experience this feeling in Chernobyl when your past does not help you. This is quite a new experience. The laws governing the world do not work here though they seem to be universal. It is not by chance that many of my story-tellers used to say: "I can't find words to describe what I have seen and lived through", "I have never read or seen anything like that". You start to understand better the unusual character of what is going on. I remember a story of a woman (a sole voice at the beginning of the book) who was told in a hospital: "Forget that you love him. You must not come up to him". Or when those who were evacuated told me about a strange feeling that "the sun is shining, spring onions are coming out, even a mouse is living in the house". One elderly woman used to say: "I have seen the war but this is not like that".
A. Usmanova: Does ad hoc decision make any sense for you as a writer? Your books are to a certain extent determined by current demand. Both Chernobyl and Afghanistan themes are still very topical.
S. Aleksiyevich: Thousands of books have been written about war, a lot has been written about Chernobyl. I wrote a book about the Great Patriotic War 40 years after it, about Chernobyl - 10 years after and about socialism - when it did not exist any longer. But why did I write about Chernobyl only 10 years after? I wanted to do it earlier but I understood that I did not have got yet my own vision. I was able to write a book which could be written by other people. But then as if I heard a new sound and everything started to look in a different way.
I was told that my books about the Great Patriotic War and about Chernobyl can be endlessly prolonged. I answered that the idea itself had beet exhausted. One more fact, one more life story will not change or add anything to my understanding of these events and the people who took part in them. That is the reason I would not write a book about the war in Chechnya. One more story about war will not become a ultimate answer to the question what makes one person kill another. My understanding of the problem has been reflected in my books.
"Our history is the one of suffering. Suffering is our refuge, our cult. We have been hypnotised by it".
A. Usmanova: Is there a problem of "ethics" of your writing? I mean moral obligation to the memory of the person who told you her/his story. And, broadly speaking, the theme contents of your books. You stated once that we are all hypnotised by suffering. But you seem to be hypnotised by it too or is it the detached observation of a person, like a surgeon (once you used this metaphor) cutting human flesh?
S. Aleksiyevich: To begin with, art is based on the use of someone's memory. A writer describes not only her/his own suffering and even more often s/he does not write about her/himself at all. The purifying effect of art constitutes its moral character.
A. Usmanova: Catharsis by Aristotle?
S. Aleksiyevich: It hurts in order to heal. Art is like a searchlight. Out of thousands who suffer it selects one.
As for ethical character of my books' plot. Sometimes I am accused of necrophilia. I think it is unprofessional and absurd. Do we have any other history than this - "seas of blood and common graves"? From this point of view I am only a chronicle writer. I write about the things that are or were taking place. Unfortunately, the 20th century is the period of frightening totalitarian ideas. So many human lives have been involved in the process of their realisation. I chose these people and I wanted to look back at the past together with them, to live it through "for the second time", I do not see any other topic for myself. For art it is a very complicated task. Of course, there appears a problem of self-protection, your own human tiredness.. But I am following this way. Perhaps, my eyes and organs of sense are organised in this way. I see the world in its tragic aspect.
A. Usmanova: I think it is really a tragic view. It can be the effect of your own sensitivity to other's suffering. However, it seems to me that through describing the horrors of war there takes place a sort of aesthetisation of horror, no matter how simple is the language used for telling us about death. Making horror more aesthetic is being founded in the act of writing itself. "Aesthetics of horror" - this problem does not belong to the recent decade. But now it has become especially acute - TW reports dealing with recent wars (Chechnya, Kosovo) prove it one more time. A lot of people are shocked by depersonalisation and quasi objectivity of photo and TV reports taping death. The power of writing is no less convincing than photography. It is important to describe suffering for descendants but for contemporaries it looks different.
S. Aleksiyevich: These are the laws of art. Death in my books is different - it is blood, dirt, lice just like in life. But for a piece of writing to become a piece of art it must be done according to the laws of art. Otherwise human consciousness will not absorb it. I cannot show just a stream of life, then my books would have been endless. Spielberg's Society, for example, is compiling total history of Holocaust victims but who is going to read it? I believe that only the pieces of reality that have been filtered through art can make a person think, cry, sympathise.
"War reveals such sides in a person he would have never developed under different conditions. He wants to kill, he likes it - why? It is called an instinct of war, hatred, destruction. We do not know this biological person, our literature lacks it. We underestimate it in ourselves, we rely on the idea and the word too much".
A. Usmanova: When you say that our literature "lacks a biological person" do you mean that we must fill in this gap or do you mean that "a biological person" is unattainable in general and for literature in particular? Though some avant-guard literary experiments (since the time of Joice, Prust and, perhaps, we should even start with Marquis de Sad) have always been directed at overcoming the gap between l'ecriture and the metaphysics of corporeality.
S. Aleksiyevich: Why are the action films, pornography, science fiction so popular now? Because man is and always has been afraid of the unknown. The idea of Apocalypse, of punishment for sins accumulates this fear. Apocalyptic consciousness is an element of mass consciousness. We started to understand it only after Chernobyl. Before it the world seemed to be stable and dependant on our will. This world is over. We do not know a human being. l have already mentioned that art does not imagine about many sides in a person and our art did not even want to think about it Our art was closed to a beastly man, our man was sacred. One-dimensional world. And a person is very complicated - neither a beast nor a saint. I think that dark sides in a human being prevail over light ones. A human soul is a place where good and evil are fighting. A wo/man out of time interests me. When I say it I mean that an "eternal man" is also a biological wo/man with her/his physiological needs, s/he likes when other people suffer or are afraid.
"There is so much history beside us which we have not realised or felt yet as History".
A. Usmanova: A well-known idea is that history does not teach us anything. The French historian Mark Bloch once wrote: "Our civilisation has always expected much from our memory". But when a new tragedy comes we always ask: Is history useless? Harmful? Illogical? Absurd? Russian literature of the 19th century suggested us that "history teaches a person to be a citizen". The question about the sense and the need of history seems to be proper in this country which was always doomed to a sort of "collective amnesia". I mean our reluctance to keep in memory negative experience, the tendency to its erasing - even literally through destruction of monuments, the ignoring of witnesses and evidence...
S. Aleksiyevich: All Russian literature and art was based on this point of view - they believed in their missionary task. ''Art is the teacher of life". It is of no interest to me to stay within these limits. On the other hand, we start to understand many things without experiencing them, without living them through. So like it or not we still learn something from art. And from history. I write for the sake of self-understanding. "Social pedagogic" presupposes the availability of answers. You must remember that quite recently "teachers of life" used to give ready-made answers, used to teach us how we should live. And today it is so boring to hear all that. It turned out that to be a preacher is quite an unrewarding task.
A. Usmanova: I think that the value of art is not to give ready-made answers but to make us think...
S. Aleksiyevich: There is only one way for me. When I am asked to give an answer to a complicated problem I say that there is only perpetual motion, there is a road. This is selfvaluable. There is no common road for everybody. Every single person is different and her/his life can not be repeated. I feel it when I meet my future characters. At first they are one persons, later - they are different. In Zinc Boys I spoke with a mother who by that time kept talking to her son lying in a coffin in her room. And she was quite different some years after (during the trial). When she was shouting My son is a hero! she was like a little screw in the industry of patriotism. Besides, life is changing and we are changing too. There is a great distance between War Has No Female Face and Zinc Boys as if they have been written by different people.
As for the sense of history. For me it is first of all in the sense of every individual life. I was shocked by the stories of women about the war - blood, death, camps. I was shocked by the way they spoke about it. Horrible time but they felt nostalgic about it. Later when I was looking at the pictures I understood that, no matter how hard the time was, it was their time, the time of their youth, of their personal life. So probably the sense is in the life itself. And the rest is the background, entourage. My father used to say: "It is sad that all my life is the war, "after the war" and then, "after socialism", all the time in struggle, in devastation". If you think about the essence of life in general, not connecting it with yourself, then you may think that it is senseless. I believe that everything, can be found within a person. And it is very interesting for me.
A. Usmanova: Coming back to our reality and to a person who is trying to find the sense of her/his life. Though some outer world events are the background of our lives there is no doubt that there is a close connection between them. As a writer you personally can distance yourself from the going on and look at life in a different way, You have your own keen life perception and I'd like to ask you how you comprehend the present and the progress in achieving the freedom, your characters lacked so much.
S. Aleksiyevich: When they were rehearsing a performance based on lay took Zinc Boys I told the actors: "No need to scream out loudly directing your words to the place the Central Committee was located: "They have taken our sons!" You must direct your words to yourself and into yourself - it is me, a slave, who has brought up a slave. It was in the consciousness of Soviet people and it still remains. One cannot immediately accept and appreciate freedom having slavery experience. It does not happen at once - today you are a slave and tomorrow - a free person. Freedom is a whole structure, an organisation of soul and mind. It is not Swiss chocolate, it can't be simply imported.
Yet we have changed. People have seen the diversity of the world. Under the influence of advertising quite a different consumer taste has been formed. The information about one product having hundreds of kinds is elementary but still it is a form of freedom. The main achievement of freedom is that a new generation is being born which accepts all this as a matter of fact. A generation which does not have a slavery memory. For the people who are 4O-50 years old now it is more difficult to get rid of the burden of their past. And I am a product of my time too. I also try to free myself from prejudices and superstitions of a Soviet person.
A. Usmanova: When you say that it is necessary to get rid of slavery consciousness and memory does it mean that it is good to forget? Isn't there a threat of a well-known collective amnesia?
S. Aleksiyevich: It depends on what to get rid of. I think that if anything happens to a person it cannot he obliterated because it is personal experience, suffering and you cannot escape your own memory. Moreover, people do not want their sufferings to remain nameless. I wanted to change the name of a woman who told me her story in the book Chernobyl Prayer because of its intimate character. But the woman told me: "No need to change my name. I suffered so much, I want my name to remain". I had been taught by Zinc Boys and led by the idea that the concrete name was of no importance for art. What seemed to be really important was the verisimilitude to life feelings. And I was surprised. I think it proves that people do not want to erase anything from their memory. Why must my sufferings be wiped out?
A. Usmanova: We have already mentioned that, unlike heroic literature and official history, you always try to single out one voice from the crowd, to view a person not as a passer-by on the historical scene but as a person having her/his own sufferings and feelings. This person needs to retrive her/his own individuality, that's why s/he wants to be named. If we want to humanise our past it is important to retain feelings and emotions but it is not less important to preserve the names.
S. Aleksiyevich: I think that if anything does not remain in writing, it seems not to have existed at all. Though memory and word are very imperfect tools to register the past and the present. They are fragile and unstable. Besides they are dependant on time.
"From a story of a nurse: "I'd like to be at the war but not at this one, at the Great Patriotic War".
A. Usmanova: Now to the problem of demythologisation. The last stronghold of collective consciousness of Soviet people was its involvement in a common victory over German fascism. The Great Patriotic War was kept in collective memory as an example of a just war. Multiple exposures of the Soviet regime have destroyed this belief. Thus the whole generation has lost the integrity of its identity. On the other hand, as your characters from Zinc Boys say, they associate the war in Afghanistan with the Great Patriotic War. How painless is the destruction of myths, a new look at our history for our people?
S. Aleksiyevich: Myth is necessary for a global, universal idea - like socialism, for example. For a powerful totalitarian idea. 0r at a basic stage of the society formation. A modern person's consciousness is mosaic. The time of united, homogeneous, governed by myths society is over. As I have already mentioned, a modern person finds the sense in his private life but net in his unity with the state. That is why I think that the time of Great Myths is over. The value of every individual human life - that is the main sense of history. Myths are dangerous. They are popular when a personal consciousness is paralysed. You can eliminate them but you cannot beat them. My creative work coincided with the period of demythologisation of a Soviet person's consciousness. But I think that it is a global, world process.
"Female memory comprises such a scope of personal feelings at war which does not usually interest a man. A war captivates a man by its action. Women feel and overcome it in quite a different way due to female psychology: bombings, death, suffering - these are not the only aspects of war. The things she remembers and takes from this deadly hell become a unique spiritual experience of unlimited human possibilities which we have no right to forget".
A. Usmanova: An "oral story" has much in common with the so called gender history because women play a special role among the witnesses of "global history". It is well known that a woman as a subject is missing from the "male" history of western civilisation. Women, as a rule, are seldom to be found where the decisions on wars, peace and the like are to be made. Historical sources register mainly male view on history. On the other hand, as many researchers point out, women are privileged witnesses for an "oral story". As a traditional division of the world onto "male" (politics, social life and publicly recognised labour) and "female" ( home and family life) is obvious, in this kind of research the modality of their testimony seems to be quite reasonable - men represent in their memories "social order", the world of universal and obligatory things while women describe their past in very personal, emotional, even intimate colours, outer world events come through the filter of their personal comprehension. For the "history of feelings" you are dealing with it is a unique material. Do you as a writer, historian and a woman (I mean that a female look at history is guaranteed by this very fact) realise this difference of female and male memories, their views on the world? Do women recollect history a better and different way?
S. Aleksiyevich: My first book was the best proof of this statement. I was interested in female look at the war not only of rare and unique character of this evidence. Unfortunately, we do not know how many women took part in that war (women partisans and members of the resistance movement have never been counted). I was trying to find my way to write about the war. And then I realised that being a woman I must look at the war through "women's eyes". Thus I discovered quite a different material. When I spoke with Adamovich about my book he was surprised and said that he would have never been able to write such a book, he did not even realise that there could be such an angle of viewing the problem. For example, I still remember the words of a woman who took part in the war. She said that since that year she had stopped liking summer. Especially illustrative is the comparison of a husband's and a 'wife's a memories. They were on the front together but the man remembered a battle itself while the woman said that it was terrible to see killed sailors' caps in the river. Can you see what sort of image it is?
Then I heard about quite a different war, it was a different sound. Colour, smell, sound - they were all different in female perception of war. Details which had a very strong impact. When my book was published (and I managed to do it only after Gorbachev had come to power) it had a huge 2 million copies circulation, it was translated into many languages, staged in theatres. For many people it was a kind of revelation. Why was it impossible to publish the book before? I was accused of pacifism, naturalism etc. Just remember a woman who carried two wounded out of the battle, one of them turned out to be German and the other,being half dead, tried to kill him. The woman helped them both. War from a female point of view is a killing, just or unjust. For a man it is often a hard job and hardships of a military life.
"I cannot get rid of the feeling that war is caused by male nature, which is beyond my comprehension".
A. Usmanova: Do you believe in gender predisposed way of life and feeling? Is it possible to speak about absolute incompatibility of male and female views?
S. Aleksiyevich: I think, yes. Now when I am writing a book about love - Wonderful Deer of Eternal Hunting, about the way men and women view it, I see that it happens in quite different ways. These are two different worlds and views. I felt the same when I was writing my first book. In general, the presence of this viewpoint is very well felt in literature. Anna Karenina could be written by a man only. There are writers who possess a bisexual look at the world (Prust, for example or Berdjaev). But these are rather exceptions. A specifically female look at the world is felt in a very delicate view, in reticence...
A. Usmanova: I cannot but ask you about your plans and new books.
S. Aleksiyevich: Now I am writing two books - Wonderful Deer of Eternal Hunting, a kind of confession of men and women about love, and And The Light That Is Not Evening's. This is a continuation of my chronicle. People do not only fight, suffer, climb a reactor's roof but also love. In my history of feelings I have wrote on people of war, revolution and the Chernobyl disaster. But this picture will not be complete if I do not write about a "night man", about her/his "night life". There is God's providence and there is love. That is what my new book is going to be about.
Why do I think that it is important to write about relations between men and women, about love and family? Soviet people were in general homeless people. Contrary to an average western person our people always tried to find the sense of their lives in something heroic - revolution, war, fire, in something outside themselves. We cannot live without a heroic deed, just at home, for example.
And The Light That Is Not Evening's is a book about our approaching to the end of life, leaving for ever. When we come to this edge, the ultimate question about life and death arises again. Before leaving this world people look back at their lives trying to understand "What was it?". So, it is about the eternal searching of sense in the human life.
Опубликовано 14 мая 2014 года
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