Sound and Persuasive Voice against War
TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 12 Oct 2015
Stephan E. Nikolov, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service
“Svetlana Aleksievich is a rare example of wisdom literature, which received the Nobel Prize. The Nobel Prize is usually given to somebody who attracts over the decades, provokes, moves the world. The prototype is clear – Orpheus, the strings of which make animals and stars to obey. A “living classic” or a “kicker” may get the Nobel Prize, an artistic prose author or a peering into the depths of things poet. The Nobel Prize runs metaphysics in literature, in the true sense of the investigation of the first entity, no matter what would these entities threaten us, salvation or scandal. At this time, the Nobel Prize is given to Orpheus descended into hell. It is not the passion, but wisdom that is playing on the strings, and literature already does not provoke any more, but respond to the provocation. What is inaccurately is called by the word “non-fiction”, is, in fact, a response to the philosophy of existence. It impossible not to react to the prose of Svetlana Aleksievich, as it is impossible not to react to a cry of the street: maybe it is a cry of pain.”
— Alexander Markov. Doctor of Philology, senior researcher at the Department of Christian culture of the Institute of World Culture at M. Lomonosov Moscow State University[i]
Expectedly, TRANSCEND community and everybody involved in peace/antiwar research and activism should be both professionally and passionately attentive toward the ambiguous, especially during recent years, Nobel Peace Prize. This year awarded were four collective public actors, the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet (General Labour Union, the Confederation of Industry, Trade and Handicrafts, Human Rights League, and the Order of Lawyers) for its contribution ‘to the building of a democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the 2011 revolution’. Nobel Peace Prize more than other Nobel Prizes lost most of its credibility, becoming more and more politicized and subjected to untrustworthy interests, culminating in recent assaulting of a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Medical aid group Doctors Without Borders’ hospital in Afghanistan, by the jets under the command of another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, US President Obama.
However, my intention is to examine another Nobel Prize, controversial and sensitive too – the one in Literature. It was awarded to Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexiyevich. One cannot say that this was a predictable decision – mentioned were few names of prospective nominations, but not hers. Moreover, Eastern Europe as a whole was seldom choice for such kind of recognition. And Belarus, as once Alexiyevich wrote, ‘is for the world terra-incognita – unknown, unfamiliar land.” “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” the Swedish Academy announced.
Ms. Alexiyevich, 67, is the 14th woman to win the literature prize, and one of just a few Nobel laureates to be recognized for nonfiction. While the Nobel committee has occasionally awarded the prize to philosophers and historians, including Bertrand Russell and Winston Churchill, it has been more than half a century since a dedicated nonfiction writer has won what many regard as literature’s most prestigious award.
“The selection of Ms. Alexievich – wrote Alexandra Alter in the New York Times – was lauded as a long overdue corrective, and as a high point for journalism as a literary art. By placing her work alongside those of international literary giants like Gabriel García Márquez, Albert Camus, Alice Munro and Toni Morrison, the Nobel committee has anointed a genre that is often viewed as a vehicle for information rather than an aesthetic endeavor.”[ii]
Svetlana Alexiyevich was born 31 May 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine (USSR at this time) into the family where father – a WW II veteran – is Belarusian, and her mother – Ukrainian. After her father demobilized from the , her family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village. There both her parents were local school teachers: father’s grandfather was also a rural schoolteacher, and he used to teach before joining the Army.
As early as in her school days Svetlana wrote verses and contributed articles to the school newspaper. After finishing school, Alexiyevich was employed as a reporter on the Narovl, Gomel Region, local paper. According to the law in those days she needed two years employment record in order to enroll in 1967 the Minsk University Department of Journalism. During her university years she won several awards from the republican and all-Union competitions for scholarly and students’ papers.
After earning her degree, Alexiyevich was sent to the town of Beresa, Brest Region, to the local paper, all together teaching at the resident school. At that time she was torn between various career options: to continue the family tradition of school teaching, scholarly work, or journalism. After a year she was invited to the capital, Minsk, as the republic’s Rural Gazette editor. Some years later she took the job of a correspondent for the Union of Byelorussian Writers’ Neman literary magazine to be soon promoted to the section for non-fiction head.
She tried her pen in various genres, such as the short story, essay, and reportage. As she recollects, “I’ve been searching for a genre that would allow the closest possible approximation to how I see and hear the world. Finally I chose the genre of actual human voices and confessions. Today, when man and the world have become so multifaceted and diversified, when we finally realized how mysterious and unfathomable man really is, a story of one life, or rather the documentary evidence of this story, brings us closest to reality.” She added, “But I don’t just record a dry history of events and facts, I’m writing a history of human feelings.”
Actually, Ms. Alexiyevich’s genre fits into an established literary tradition of deeply reported narrative nonfiction written with the sweep and the style of a novel. Practitioners includes luminaries like Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Joan Didion and, more recently, writers like Katherine Boo and Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Followers of Ms. Alexievich’s texts say that it is namely their literary quality that helps them to transcend the specific historical settings explored by her, providing a hint of universality to her stories. This is a step beyond the ordinary journalism and media reporting, because it is penetrated by author’s touch and empathy.
It was the renowned Byelorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who had decisive influence on her choice, above all his books I’m from the Fiery Village and The Book of the Siege. He wrote them jointly with other authors, but the idea and its development were entirely his own, and it was a completely new genre for both Byelorussian and Russian literature. Adamovich himself was looking for the right definition of the genre, calling it “collective novel”, “novel-oratorio”, “novel-evidence”, “people talking about themselves”, “epic chorus”, to name a few of his labels. Alexiyevich has continuously specified Adamovich as her main tutor. He helped her to find a path of her own. In one of her interviews she revealed: “Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper… This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.”
“Out of thousands of voices, these pieces of life and existence, and that between and behind the words I fold not reality (reality is inconceivable), but image… The image of the time. The way we see it, as we imagine it. Authenticity is born out of a multiplicity of circles… I put the image of my country from people living during my time… I would like to have my books becoming annals, encyclopedia of nearly a dozen generations, which I caught, and with whom I walk… How they used to live? What they believed in? How they have been killed, and they killed? How they wanted and couldn’t, failed being happier.”
In 1983 she completed her book The Unwomanly Face of the War. For two years it remained at the publishing house, but was not printed. Alexiyevich was accused of pacifism, naturalism, de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman. Such accusations could have quite serious consequences in those days. All the more so since already after her first book I’ve Left My Village (monologues of people who abandoned their native parts) she has already had a reputation of a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments. On order of the Byelorussian Central Committee of the Communist Party Alexiyevich’s already composed book was destroyed and she was accused of anti-Communist and anti-government views. She was threatened with sacking her. They told her: “How can you work on our journal with such not ours views? And why are you not yet a member of the Communist Party?
Then new times came with Mikhail Gorbachev’s coming to power and initiated the perestroika.
In 1985 The Unwomanly Face of the War was published simultaneously in Minsk and in Moscow – in the journal “Oktyabr”, Belarusian publishing house “Mastackaya litaratura”, then in publishing house “Sovyetskiy Pisatel” (Soviet writer), “Roman-Gazeta”, etc. In the following years it was repeatedly reprinted; on the whole more than two million copies were sold out. This novel, which the author calls “the novel-chorus”, is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the unknown aspects of the Second World War that had never been related before. The book was hailed by the war writers as well as the public.
In the same year her second book came out: The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories, which has also languished unpublished for the same reasons (pacifism, failure to meet ideological standards). This book also ran into many reprints and was acclaimed by numerous critics, who called both books “a discovery in the genre of war prose”. The war seen through women’s and children’s eyes opened up a whole new area of feelings and ideas.
Book was welcomed by famous writers war veterans: V. Kondratiev, G. Baklanov, Daniil Granin, B. Okudzhava and many others. In the same 1985 year another book has been published, The Last Witnesses (one hundred and not childish stories), which also waited for about a year (the charges were still the same – pacifism, the lack of ideological standards in the wings. This book is also repinted many times, named by numerous critics, who called both books “new opening of war prose”. Feminine vision of the war, the children’s perspective on the war opened a whole landmass of new feelings and ideas.
The 40th anniversary of the war victory was marked by a theatre version of The Unwomanly Face of the War at the renowned Moscow Taganka Theatre (staged by Anatoly Efros.) The Omsk Drama Theatre received the State Prize for their perfomance of The Unwomanly Face of the War (director Genady Trostyanetskiy). The play based on the novel was running in many theatres around the country. A cycle of documentary films was produced on the basis of The Unwomanly Face of the War by the Byelorussian director Viktor Dashuk with co-author Svetlana Alexiyevich. The seven parts film cycle was awarded with the USSR State Prize, and received the Silver Dove at the Leipzig Festival of Documentary Films. Alexiyevich also received many other prizes for this work – the “Znak Pocheta” order (Sign of Honour) and several literary and-Union Awards (awards named after Konstantin Fedin, Nikolai Ostrovsky Award and all-Union Lenin Komsomol prize).
1989 saw the publication of The Boys in Zinc, a book about the dirty Afghan war crimes that had been concealed from the Soviet people for ten years. To collect material for the book Alexiyevich was traveling around the country for four years to meet war victims’ mothers and veterans of the Afghan war. She also visited the war zone in Afghanistan. The book was a bombshell and many people could not forgive the author for de-mythologizing the war. In the first place the military and Communist papers condemned Alexiyevich. In 1992, court proceedings have been opened against the author and her book in Minsk. The democratically minded public, however, rose in defense of the book, and thehe case was closed. Later several documentary films and plays were based on this book, co-authored by Alexiyevich, and directed by Sergey Lukyanchikov – movies Shame and I left the conscription.
In 1993, she published Enchanted with Death, a book about attempted suicides as a result of the demise of their socialist ideals and motherland. They were people who felt inseparable from the socialist ideals, who were unable to accept the new order, the new country with its newly interpreted history. The book was adapted for the cinema (The Cross, script Svetlana Alexiyevich, director Genady Gorodiy).
In 1997, S. Alexiyevich completed and published her book The Chernobyl Prayer: the Chronicles of the Future. As her last three books, this one too was first published in the journal “Druzhba narodov” (Friendship of peoples), and then the publishing house “Ostozhye”. This is a compilation of interviews with survivors of the nuclear reactor accident. She spent ten years visiting the Chernobyl zone and conducted more than 500 interviews. The book is not so much about the Chernobyl disaster as about the world after it: how are people are adjusting to the new life, which has already occurred but is not yet perceived. The post-Chernobyl people obtain new knowledge, which is of benefit for the whole mankind. They live as if after the 3rd world war, after a nuclear war. The book’s subtitle is very significant in this respect – chronicles of the future.
“If you look back at the entire our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet – this is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the Gulag, the World War II, the Afghan war hidden from the people, collapse of the great empire, the downfall of the colossal socialist project, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. All this is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.” (words of Svetlana Alexiyevich)
Notwithstanding her international fame, since she is disapproving the government in Belarus, Alexiyevich has occasionally lived abroad – in France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden, among other places. For much of her adult life, however, she has lived in Minsk, and as she asserts that she is able to write only in Belarus, “where I can hear what people are talking about on the streets, in cafes, or at the neighbor’s place.”
Alexiyevich’s books have been published in many countries: USA, Germany, UK, Japan, Sweden, France, China, Vietnam, Bulgaria, India – a total of 19 countries. She has authored 21 scripts for documentary films and three plays, which were staged in France, Germany, and Bulgaria. Regrettably, while over the years she has developed such a global audience, at present only three of her books are available in English, though more translations are expected.
Alexiyevich has been awarded with many international awards, including the Kurt Tucholsky Prize for the “Courage and Dignity in Writing” (the Swedish PEN), the Andrei Sinyavsky Prize “For the Nobility in Literature”, the independent Russian prize “Triumph”, the Leipzig Prize “For the European Mutual Understanding 1998”, the German prizes “For the Best Political Book” and the Herder Prize, and the US National Book Critics Circle Award.
Alexiyevich has thus defined the main thrust of her life and her writings: “I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being, and how I can protect this humanity in a person.” These issues acquire a new implication in connection with the latest events in Beloruss where a military-socialist regime is being restored, a new post-Soviet dictatorship of Lukashenka. And now Alexiyevich is again unwelcome to the authorities in her country because of her views and her independence. She belongs to the opposition which also includes the country’s finest intellectuals[iii].
Her books add up to a literary chronicle of the poignant history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person. She continues to develop her original genre. In each new book it is employed in a new way. One can’t help recalling Lev Tolstoy’s maxim to the effect that it is more interesting to follow real life than to invent it. “Many things in man still remain a riddle for art”, says Alexiyevich.
For her 50th anniversary a two-volume collection of her works came out (Ostozhye publishing house). In the foreword the critic Lev Anninsky says: “This is a unique work, which has probably been undertaken for the first time in the Russian, or rather in the Soviet and post-Soviet culture: the author has traced and recorded the lives of several generations of Soviet people, and the very reality of the 70 years of socialism: from the 1917 Revolution through the Civil War, the youth and hypnotism of the Great Utopia, Stalin’s terror and the Gulag, the Great Patriotic War, and the years of the downfall of the socialist mainland up to the present times. This is a living history told by the people themselves and recorded and selected by a talented and honest chronicler.”
Her most recent book, Second-Hand Time (published in 2013), is her largest and most large-scale – another work of oral history that draws on hundreds of interviews with Russians who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union, spanning from the early 1990s to 2012.
Alexiyevich is currently finishing her book The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt made up of love stories. Men and women of different generations tell their personal stories. “It occurred to me that I’ve been writing books about how people kill one another, how they die. But this is not the whole of human life. Now I’m writing about how people love one another. And again I ask myself the same question, this time through the prism of love: who are we and what country we are living in. Love is what brings us into this world. I want to love people. Although it’s increasingly hard to love them. And getting harder.”
In fact, the Alexiyevich Nobel Prize is extremely topical in the background of today’s jingle. Let more people read her antiwar prose. In the case of Svetlana Alexiyevich, where each word carries a strong charge – thus more will be the ones that would be frightening to the impending threat.
ENDNOTES:
[i] A. Markov. Игра и мудрость: Нобелевская премия Светланы Алексиевич (Game and Wisdom: Nobel Prize of Svetlana Aleksievich Internet magazine “Hefter”, 08.10.2015, http://gefter.ru/archive/16177?_utl_t=fb.
[ii] Svetlana Alexievich, Belarussian Voice of Survivors, Wins Nobel Prize in Literature. By Alexandra Alter The New York Times Oct. 8, 2015
[iii] In his efforts to recreate a new image, President A. Lukashenka has called on the phone Aleksievich to congratulate her with the prize.
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Stephan E. Nikolov, Ph.D. is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace, Development and Environment based in Bulgaria.
Based on http://www.alexievich.org/ and other web sites in Russian.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 12 Oct 2015.
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Dr. Nokolov, you have written a very interesting article about a lady who, as you put it so nicely,has been a “Sound and Persuasive Voice against War.”
I am extremely pleased that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Alfred Nobel, I should like to think, would also have been extremely pleased.
I, too, have tried to be a “sound and persuasive voice against war” in my non-fiction writings but they are drowned out by the massive indifference of our culture and the daily misleading of the public about matters of war (see, e.g., http://tinyurl.com/n9ew856)
Thank you for writing this article.
I shall refer to it in my next post on my blogsite.
Best regards,
Gary Brumback
Dear Mr. Brumback, Many thanks for your good words. I wrote quite spontaneously my brief article, which emerged from a facebook comment. I am quite aware about your disappointment, since I have almost the same experience. Failure to be noticed, to become “sound and persuasive voice” against war as well as any major social issue may be a subject of a special and serious analysis. Indeed, there are many variables and factor that make that to occur – i.e., your voice to be heard, spread, transmitted. Unfortunately, one’s talent, insightfulness, honest and innovative position plays in this process very insignificant role. Unfortunately…