What could the writer Svetlana Alexievitch make them say?
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
This is the question that I asked myself when I saw the reports on Russian soldiers who were deserters or prisoners and who, according to Ukrainian sources, were sorry to have been sent with few means into this theater that was as violent as it was absurd. Is it true ? What did they really think they were doing there? And what do their families think?
According to the cliché, truth is the first casualty of war. Alexievitch, a Belarusian writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, seeks the truth. Those which, patched together, make it possible to reconstruct history as experienced by those who suffered it.
She takes to the road with her dictaphone and collects hundreds of testimonies to write “voice novels”. An oral and emotional history, of sorts, which serves as a counterpoint to the official version of disturbing events, powerful figures and their ideologies.
Alexievitch has published books on the invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the Second World War as seen by women and the fall of the USSR and its utopia ofhomo sovieticus.
“I have always been tormented by the fact that the truth does not hold in one heart, in one mind. That it is somehow fragmented, multiple, diverse, and scattered around the world. […] I collect everyday feelings, thoughts, words. I collect the life of my time, ”she explained when receiving the Nobel Prize. 1.
I come back to the Russian soldiers at the front.
Are they hardened professionals in the conflicts in Syria and Donbass? Young people barely 20 years old who naively believed they were received as liberators, as Russian propaganda claims? What would they confide in his recorder?
The Russian invasion is perplexing. We read the experts, we try to understand what seems criminal and also, from the Western point of view, irrational. With this column, I want to add a small piece to the puzzle: that of the great Belarusian writer who now lives in exile in Berlin.
Born in 1948 to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, she grew up in western Ukraine. Upon his death, the patriarch is buried in his coffin with his party card. In The end of the red manAlexievitch probes what remains of this era.
As a woman confided to him in her kitchen: “Today, we live better, but life is more sickening. »
“Everything has lost its value,” complains another person, lamenting that McDo has become more popular than the theater.
Towards the end of the 1990s, post-USSR capitalism, which looked more like organized banditry, did not find many enthusiasts. These witnesses feel nostalgia for a time when people lived for a cause that was beyond them.
But Alexievitch does not romanticize the horrors of communism. She speaks to a Ukrainian woman who lived through the famine imposed by Stalin. The peasant woman tells him that they were digging in the ground in search of earthworms to eat.
Basically, what caused the fall of the regime was not the revelations about the Gulag, another interviewee told him. It would rather be the shortage of toilet paper. And oranges, jeans and everything that lightens the weight of everyday life.
Even if the new economic sanctions will not plunge Russia into the same destitution, life will become a little more difficult, once again.
Suffering is a recurring theme among the people she meets. A woman even told him this: “It is our path to knowledge. »
To read Alexievitch, one would say that the story progresses by making loops.
His book on Chernobyl shows the nightmare revived by the attack on the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant. She talks about the bees that had suddenly disappeared in 1986, the grass on which we should no longer sit and the pigeons that crashed into the windshields of taxis that remained in town.
His writing is full of images. In Afghanistan, in the 1980s, she reports that dead soldiers shone in the sun under their zinc coffins, waiting to leave in a plane called “black tulip”.
In the field, she had found young Russians who often came from educated families. They thought they were well received. The shock is brutal. “Do you think that in war people die like in books or in movies? In films and books, death is beautiful, but I, yesterday, saw a friend die from a bullet in the head. He ran about ten meters holding his brain with his hands…”, throws a soldier at him.
The writer has also been threatened with prison for having damaged their image. His book on Afghanistan does not produce any heroes.
In the eyes of the experts, this conflict would have precipitated the fall of the USSR. From the pen of Alexievitch, it above all recalls the absolute stupidity of war.
Today, however, there are fewer lies to justify these sacrifices. The soldiers no longer defend the socialist utopia. They serve the wounded pride of Putin, for whom the Cold War never ended and who fantasizes about imperial Russia.
If there is a constant between the work of Alexievitch and the current conflict, it is that the individual still counts for very little.
“I lived in a country where, from childhood, we were taught to die […]. We were told that man exists to devote himself, to burn alive, to sacrifice himself. We were taught to like men with guns, ”she said a few months ago to Der Spiegel2.
She writes that the “red man” has not completely disappeared. As she summarizes through another testimony: our people have learned to die for freedom, but they have not been taught to be free.
When she received the Nobel Prize in December 2015, Putin had already launched a first offensive in Donbass. She was already foreseeing the worst.
“What should we be: a strong country, or a dignified country where life is good? We chose the first option: a strong country. We have returned to the time of strength. The Russians are at war with the Ukrainians. To their brothers. »