Our principal capital is suffering. This is the only thing which we constantly mine. Not oil, not gas, but suffering. I suspect that this is what all at once attracts, and repels and surprises the Western reader of my books. It is that courage to go on living, no matter what.[37]
Alexievich’s gift for compassion is indicative of her Belarusian roots. ‘I was traumatized from childhood by the subject of evil and death’, she acknowledges, ‘because I grew up in a postwar Belarusian village where this was all anyone talked about. We constantly thought about it.’ Lying as it does at the crossroads of wars, and suffering from the wheels of history more than anywhere else, Belarus created its own particular culture of memory, encapsulated in the books of the writers Vasil Bykov and Ales Adamovich: as the Belarusian poet, Vladimir Neklyaev, noted, if all of Russian literature came out of Gogol’s Overcoat, then Alexievich’s art comes from the documentary book by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, Out of the Fire. The Belarusian gaze of Alexievich is the anti-imperial vaccination of humanity for our common culture, the best representatives of which, from Pushkin to Brodsky, were often blinded by the temptation of empire.
Her works are a catalogue of the tragedies of Soviet and post-Soviet history: the Great Patriotic War (the books War Does Not Have a Woman’s Face and The Last Witnesses, respectively about women and children in war); the war in Afghanistan (Boys in Zinc); the Chernobyl disaster (Chernobyl Prayer); suicides in the transition period of the 1990s (Enchanted with Death); and the problem of post-Soviet refugees (Second-Hand Time). Her books are uncomfortable, her observations ruthless and passionless, like the tale about the single mother from the Stalinist year of 1937 who, when arrested, asked her childless girlfriend to look after her daughter. The friend brought the girl up, and when the mother returned from the camps after seventeen years and asked to see how her daughter had turned out, it emerged that it was the friend who had denounced her, because she dreamt of having the daughter for herself; unable to cope with the reality of this, the mother went and hanged herself. Alexievich has hundreds of similar stories, which she pushes, like needles, into the most painful spots – areas not normally talked about in Russia.
The ‘Alexievich problem’ for Russia is not political, nor psychological; and it certainly is not because of her imagined ‘Russophobia’, or the political preferences of the Nobel Prize committee. It’s in the deep complexes of the Russian consciousness, which cannot talk about pain and cannot cope with the experience of trauma. On the whole, the subject of pain is taboo in Russia. Suffering is something internalized, which people try to deal with inside themselves or possibly in a very narrow family circle, but it is never brought out for public viewing. It is not normal in Russia to talk openly about pain. Often, if people happen to hear by chance about an illness from someone they’re talking to, they’ll wave them away, as if they are afraid of being infected: ‘Oh, don’t offload your problems onto me!’ Topics such as cancer, disability or deformity are as taboo as they always have been. People will collect money to help, but often that is simply a way of buying one’s way out of someone else’s pain, a magic spell. The Russian mass consciousness is archaic and superstitious. We hear, so frequently: ‘Don’t demonstrate other people’s illnesses on yourself!’, or ‘Don’t talk about illness or you’ll go down with it!’
Because of this superstitious horror in Russia, the experience of the collective trauma of the twentieth century has never been openly discussed: the Revolution, famine, the GULAG, the war, evacuations, deprivation. In many families, younger generations learn about the repression of their relatives only by hearsay; at first people kept quiet out of fear, then this became habit: the less we talk about frightening things, the sooner we’ll forget about them. Eighty years on, this experience has not been assimilated into our culture or the mass consciousness, nor have the witnesses – conversations about the repressions, incredible in their moral blindness, go round in circles: people seriously argue about whether they were justified or whether the evidence of them has been exaggerated. Varlam Shalamov’s books, with their terrifying accounts of what went on in the camps in Kolyma, stand like a solitary monument to the side of these discussions: people are too scared even to come close to them.[38] In the same way, people are afraid to touch on the subject of the famine in the Volga Region in the 1920s and 1930s and the Holodomor in Ukraine in 1932–3, or the siege of Leningrad – there was hysterical reaction in the media after a single question (which wasn’t even approved!) on the Dozhd television channel as to whether it was worth the cost of one and a half million lives to hold onto the city.[39] Any attempt to discuss the victims or the human cost of the victory is cut short by the strict internal censor of the Russian mass consciousness.
In exactly the same way, the experience of Russia’s colonial wars in the twentieth century hasn’t been brought out, from Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968, to Afghanistan in the 1980s and Chechnya in the 1990s. Compared to the way in which the Americans have agonized over Vietnam – with thousands of books, films, eye-witness accounts – Russia hasn’t even begun to pick over the bones (in 1992 in Minsk, veterans of the Afghan War even brought a political court case against Alexievich for debunking the heroic myth about the war in her book, Boys in Zinc). The Russian philosopher, Pyotr Chaadaev, was right when he wrote two hundred years ago that Russia is a country without a memory, a space of total amnesia, a virgin understanding of criticism, rationality and reflexes. All our state narrative, family histories and individual experiences are built around a huge emptiness, a lacuna, a minefield. We prefer to tread safe paths with pat phrases and generalities: ‘Those were difficult times’; ‘It was tough for everyone.’ The Second World War, Afghanistan, Chernobyl, people’s broken destinies – they all flare up briefly in the newspapers and are instantly forgotten by society, pushed off into the silt at the bottom of pain. The same is happening today in the conflict in Ukraine: it seems that the fate of the paratroopers from Pskov, the tankmen from Buryatia or the special forces troops who have disappeared in the anonymous battles of the nonexistent war concerns only the opposition newspaper, Novaya Gazeta; society has already forgotten about this war and now watches with fascination the clips produced by the General Staff about the bombings in Syria.
This inability to accept, discuss and comprehend trauma leads Russia to an endless cycle of loss. In the same interview with Ogonyok, Alexievich asks the eternal question:
What is the point of this suffering which we all go through? What does it teach us if we just keep repeating it? I am constantly asking myself this question. For many people suffering has become a value in itself. It is their main task in life. But freedom does not grow out of it. I simply have no answer to this.[40]
37
https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2827530.
38
The camps in Kolyma, situated in the far northeastern corner of Russia, were considered the most notorious in the whole GULAG system.
39
Re