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10 LITERATURE & MEMOIRS SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE questions have been removed from the conver- sations, and the reader can only infer the inquiry that may have prompted the narrator’s response. Usually, she reserves prefaces and epilogues for spelling out her own views in her own words. At times, she inserts herself in the body of the text only to bracket herself out, in order to indicate (in the parentheses) the affec- tive condition of her interlocutor: his or her smile, tear or pensiveness. Otherwise, her tex- tual appearances are manifested only in the strangely baroque headings of the chapters – “Monologue on How Happy a Chicken Would Be to Find a Worm”. “And What Is Bubbling In the Pot Is Also Not Forever” or “On Life the Bitch and One Hundred Grams of Fine Powder in a Little White Vase” – which seem intended to offset the bareness of much of her interlocu- tors’ language. If the classical Latin American testimonio – such as I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian woman in Guatemala (1984) – tends to be assembled as the life-history of a single per- son, then the version created by Alexievich privileges a life-event. As she explained in 1994, “I have no time to paint a portrait. Things change too quickly [. . . .] I just take simple pic- tures. Snapshots . . .”. This approach allows her both to condense personal stories to a few pages, or even to a few lines, and to increase the number of documented testimonies. Grouped thematically – by gender, age, or life- defining event – these stories produce a kalei- doscope of vibrant shards of memory. TLS NOVEMBER 18 2016 T here was always something incongru- ous about the Communist leaders’ fascination with the past, something strange about the utopia that gave up its pro- mise of the radiant future. Leonid Brezhnev’s memoirs came out in 1978 in three issues of Novyi Mir (The New World), the symbol since the early 1960s of the oppositionally minded intelligentsia. The appearance of Brezhnev’s trilogy in the same journal that had once published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich signified a move towards a conservative politics of memory that reframed the painful complexity of Soviet history as a combination of stoic per- severance and heroic victories. Presenting a panoramic view of the Soviet past, the mem- oirs narrated the events of the Second World War and post-war reconstruction as a part of Brezhnev’s own personal biography, implic- itly equating the history of the USSR with the life of the party’s Secretary General. Printed in millions of copies, the trilogy flooded the Soviet Union and became mandatory high- school reading. It looked as if the personality cult was back. Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev did not really narrate his recollections: they were ghostwritten by a group of journalists from prominent Moscow newspapers. He may have corrected some of the galleys and even con- tributed a few stories, but by and large the tril- ogy was a full-blown attempt by the Soviet propaganda machine to simulate the docu- mentary genre. The formal features of the eyewitness account were preserved, but its essence had been hollowed out. Jokes about the memoirs abounded. In one of them, Brezh- nev kept asking his fellow Politburo members what they thought of the trilogy. They all told him it was fascinating, captivating. In the end, Brezhnev concluded: “Sounds like a good book. Maybe I should read it, too!” Without this cultural backdrop, it is easy to overlook the full significance and profound radicalism of Svetlana Alexievich’s docu- mentary prose. No doubt the content of her books, which began to appear in 1985, shocked many. But it was her method of gener- ating, collecting and compiling personal stories that really shook up the late-Soviet industry of fabricated memoirs. Born in 1948, Alexievich grew up in Belarus and studied journalism at the University of Minsk. In the late 1970s, she began her life’s work of elicit- ing personal accounts: from female partici- pants and child survivors of the Second World War; from veterans of the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan and mothers who lost their sons there; from victims of the Chernobyl disaster; and from people who had attempted suicide. Told as first-person narratives, these accounts provided a sobering jolt that helped to dispel the historical fog created by the quasi-docu- mentary chimeras of ghostwritten memoirs. Of course, the accounts compiled by Alex- ievich are far from being unprocessed histori- cal memories; nor are they the verbatim transcripts of her interviews. In fact, nowhere in her books does Alexievich explain exactly how she shapes her interviews into stories. What is clear is that she selects and reorders fragments from hundreds of conversations with her interlocutors, transforming the “raw accounts” of her eyewitnesses into literary sto- ries that aim to retain the evidentiary quality of the original sources. As such, her method has much in common with the Latin American genre of the testimonio. Prompted by ques- tions, the narrators tell their own stories, following their own associative paths. The interviewer/transcriber then transforms this oral conversation into a written monologue. The goal is to preserve the stories that would otherwise remain marginalized or simply unheard, and the trick is to minimize the tran- scriber’s authorial power. In her collections of testimonies of the Second World, Alexievich carefully remains in the shadow of her interlocutors. Most of her Limited in her own forms of expression, Alexievich focuses her efforts on the deep structure of her compilations. She met- iculously orchestrates the sequencing of her narrators, and her books bear a certain resemblance to plays, with characters appear- ing on stage one after the other to deliver their monologues; their parts remain separate, but together they all contribute to a powerful cho- rus. Comparisons might also be drawn with the montage of Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov; like those pioneering directors, Alexievich cre- ates meaningful sparks by placing narrative shots in contrapuntal formations. Erased dur- ing the process of its textualization, the dialogi- cal structure of the testimonio comes back, but now as a dialogue between different testimo- nies. The monologue of a successful business- man might be followed by that of a die-hard Communist, and their textual coexistence forces the reader to negotiate the instability of meaning caused by radically incompatible nar- ratives competing with each other to dismantle the monolithic history of Soviet socialism into personalized stories. “In reality, none of us lived in the USSR”, observes one of Alexiev- ich’s interlocutors in Second-Hand Time; “we each lived in our own social circle. The hikers’ clique, the climbers’ group . . . ”. Purposefully fragmented, Alexievich’s collections of testi- monies demonstrate the contested ownership of the contradictory past as successfully as they model an ideal of plural authorship. This “polyphony” of experience and remembrance, or (to evoke another Bakhtinian term) the inherent “unfinalizability” of the dialogic exchange that Alexievich generates between testimonies, also affected the biogra- phies of the books themselves. Their method of composition invited frequent revisions and additions, and almost every book was altered after first publication. Some later editions included excerpts initially excluded because of censorship; other projects expanded mas- sively with time. Thus, a slim collection of sto- ries about attempted suicides, Enchanted by Death (1994, untranslated) re-emerged nearly twenty years later as the voluminous Second- Hand Time, published in Russia in 2013. Other books evolved less drastically but no less significantly. The gradual transformation of The Last Witnesses (1985, untranslated) is emblematic in this respect. The first edition of this collection of monologues by child survi- vors was fully representative of a general trend to document unknown facets of the Second World War. Together with the stories, it included photographs of Alexievich’s inter- locutors, adding an extra layer of historical authenticity. In later editions, the number of stories grew but the photos disappeared, and fewer details about the interlocutors were sup- plied. This decontextualization, however, was more helpful than harmful: it transformed the work from an oral history project into a literary composition. The change of subtitle was also indicative: originally presented as “A book of unchildlike stories”, The Last Witnesses eventually reappeared with the subtitle “Children’s solo voices”. An overlooked Svetlana Alexievich SECOND-HAND TIME Translated by Bela Shayevich 704pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paperback, £14.99. 978 1 910695 11 1 CHERNOBYL PRAYER A chronicle of the future Translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait 240pp. Penguin. Paperback, £9.99. 978 0 241 27053 0 Neighbours in memory Svetlana Alexievich: the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism
Transcript of Neighbours in memory - Princeton University...such as I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian woman in...
10 LITERATURE & MEMOIRS
SERGUEI ALEX. OUSHAKINE questions have been removed from the conver-sations, and the reader can only infer theinquiry that may have prompted the narrator’sresponse. Usually, she reserves prefaces andepilogues for spelling out her own views in herown words. At times, she inserts herself in thebody of the text only to bracket herself out, inorder to indicate (in the parentheses) the affec-tive condition of her interlocutor: his or hersmile, tear or pensiveness. Otherwise, her tex-tual appearances are manifested only in thestrangely baroque headings of the chapters –“Monologue on How Happy a Chicken WouldBe to Find a Worm”. “And What Is Bubbling Inthe Pot Is Also Not Forever” or “On Life theBitch and One Hundred Grams of Fine Powderin a Little White Vase” – which seem intendedto offset the bareness of much of her interlocu-tors’ language.
If the classical Latin American testimonio –such as I, Rigoberta Menchu: An Indian
woman in Guatemala (1984) – tends to beassembled as the life-history of a single per-son, then the version created by Alexievichprivileges a life-event. As she explained in1994, “I have no time to paint a portrait. Thingschange too quickly [. . . .] I just take simple pic-tures. Snapshots . . .”. This approach allows herboth to condense personal stories to a fewpages, or even to a few lines, and to increasethe number of documented testimonies.Grouped thematically – by gender, age, or life-defining event – these stories produce a kalei-doscope of vibrant shards of memory.
TLS NOVEMBER 18 2016
There was always something incongru-ous about the Communist leaders’fascination with the past, something
strange about the utopia that gave up its pro-mise of the radiant future. Leonid Brezhnev’smemoirs came out in 1978 in three issuesof Novyi Mir (The New World), the symbolsince the early 1960s of the oppositionallyminded intelligentsia. The appearance ofBrezhnev’s trilogy in the same journal that hadonce published Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s OneDay in the Life of Ivan Denisovich signifieda move towards a conservative politics ofmemory that reframed the painful complexityof Soviet history as a combination of stoic per-severance and heroic victories. Presenting apanoramic view of the Soviet past, the mem-oirs narrated the events of the Second WorldWar and post-war reconstruction as a part ofBrezhnev’s own personal biography, implic-itly equating the history of the USSR with thelife of the party’s Secretary General. Printed inmillions of copies, the trilogy flooded theSoviet Union and became mandatory high-school reading. It looked as if the personalitycult was back.
Unlike Nikita Khrushchev, Brezhnev didnot really narrate his recollections: they wereghostwritten by a group of journalists fromprominent Moscow newspapers. He may havecorrected some of the galleys and even con-tributed a few stories, but by and large the tril-ogy was a full-blown attempt by the Sovietpropaganda machine to simulate the docu-mentary genre. The formal features of theeyewitness account were preserved, but itsessence had been hollowed out. Jokes aboutthe memoirs abounded. In one of them, Brezh-nev kept asking his fellow Politburo memberswhat they thought of the trilogy. They all toldhim it was fascinating, captivating. In the end,Brezhnev concluded: “Sounds like a goodbook. Maybe I should read it, too!”
Without this cultural backdrop, it is easy tooverlook the full significance and profoundradicalism of Svetlana Alexievich’s docu-mentary prose. No doubt the content ofher books, which began to appear in 1985,shocked many. But it was her method of gener-ating, collecting and compiling personalstories that really shook up the late-Sovietindustry of fabricated memoirs. Born in 1948,Alexievich grew up in Belarus and studiedjournalism at the University of Minsk. In thelate 1970s, she began her life’s work of elicit-ing personal accounts: from female partici-pants and child survivors of the Second WorldWar; from veterans of the Soviet invasion inAfghanistan and mothers who lost their sonsthere; from victims of the Chernobyl disaster;and from people who had attempted suicide.Told as first-person narratives, these accountsprovided a sobering jolt that helped to dispelthe historical fog created by the quasi-docu-mentary chimeras of ghostwritten memoirs.
Of course, the accounts compiled by Alex-ievich are far from being unprocessed histori-cal memories; nor are they the verbatimtranscripts of her interviews. In fact, nowherein her books does Alexievich explain exactly
how she shapes her interviews into stories.What is clear is that she selects and reordersfragments from hundreds of conversationswith her interlocutors, transforming the “rawaccounts” of her eyewitnesses into literary sto-ries that aim to retain the evidentiary quality ofthe original sources. As such, her method has
much in common with the Latin Americangenre of the testimonio. Prompted by ques-tions, the narrators tell their own stories,following their own associative paths. Theinterviewer/transcriber then transforms thisoral conversation into a written monologue.The goal is to preserve the stories that wouldotherwise remain marginalized or simplyunheard, and the trick is to minimize the tran-scriber’s authorial power.
In her collections of testimonies of theSecond World, Alexievich carefully remainsin the shadow of her interlocutors. Most of her
Limited in her own forms of expression,Alexievich focuses her efforts on the deepstructure of her compilations. She met-iculously orchestrates the sequencing ofher narrators, and her books bear a certainresemblance to plays, with characters appear-ing on stage one after the other to deliver theirmonologues; their parts remain separate, buttogether they all contribute to a powerful cho-rus. Comparisons might also be drawn with themontage of Sergei Eisenstein or Dziga Vertov;like those pioneering directors, Alexievich cre-ates meaningful sparks by placing narrativeshots in contrapuntal formations. Erased dur-ing the process of its textualization, the dialogi-cal structure of the testimonio comes back, butnow as a dialogue between different testimo-nies. The monologue of a successful business-man might be followed by that of a die-hardCommunist, and their textual coexistenceforces the reader to negotiate the instability ofmeaning caused by radically incompatible nar-ratives competing with each other to dismantlethe monolithic history of Soviet socialism intopersonalized stories. “In reality, none of uslived in the USSR”, observes one of Alexiev-ich’s interlocutors in Second-Hand Time; “weeach lived in our own social circle. The hikers’clique, the climbers’ group . . . ”. Purposefullyfragmented, Alexievich’s collections of testi-monies demonstrate the contested ownershipof the contradictory past as successfully as theymodel an ideal of plural authorship.
This “polyphony” of experience andremembrance, or (to evoke another Bakhtinianterm) the inherent “unfinalizability” of thedialogic exchange that Alexievich generatesbetween testimonies, also affected the biogra-phies of the books themselves. Their methodof composition invited frequent revisions andadditions, and almost every book was alteredafter first publication. Some later editionsincluded excerpts initially excluded becauseof censorship; other projects expanded mas-sively with time. Thus, a slim collection of sto-ries about attempted suicides, Enchanted byDeath (1994, untranslated) re-emerged nearlytwenty years later as the voluminous Second-Hand Time, published in Russia in 2013. Otherbooks evolved less drastically but no lesssignificantly. The gradual transformationof The Last Witnesses (1985, untranslated) isemblematic in this respect. The first edition ofthis collection of monologues by child survi-vors was fully representative of a general trendto document unknown facets of the SecondWorld War. Together with the stories, itincluded photographs of Alexievich’s inter-locutors, adding an extra layer of historicalauthenticity. In later editions, the number ofstories grew but the photos disappeared, andfewer details about the interlocutors were sup-plied. This decontextualization, however, wasmore helpful than harmful: it transformed thework from an oral history project into a literarycomposition. The change of subtitle was alsoindicative: originally presented as “A book ofunchildlike stories”, The Last Witnesseseventually reappeared with the subtitle“Children’s solo voices”. An overlooked
S v e t l a n a A l e x i e v i c h
S E C O N D - H A N D T I M ETranslated by Bela Shayevich
704pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paperback, £14.99.978 1 910695 11 1
C H E R N O B Y L P R A Y E RA chronicle of the future
Translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait240pp. Penguin. Paperback, £9.99.
978 0 241 27053 0
Neighbours in memorySvetlana Alexievich: the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism
12 LITERATURE & MEMOIRS
TLS NOVEMBER 18 2016
criticism from those who preferred to hide thetraumatic consequences of the “Afghan war”behind the façade of military heroism. For thefirst time, Alexievich informed her readers inthe preface to the book that she had deliber-ately concealed the real names of her interloc-utors – to protect their privacy, as sheexplained, but also (as would become clear) topreserve some artistic freedom. Nevertheless,Alexievich was sued in Minsk in 1992 byseveral of her interviewees, who accused herof misrepresenting their views and distortingtheir stories. Most of the accusations were dis-missed by the court, but the trial pushed Alex-ievich to refine in public the genre of her work.In her speeches at the trial, she appealed “as awriter” to the distinction between “truth andverisimilitude” (pravda i pravdopodobie). “Iam not thinking things up”, she insisted; “I amnot inventing anything. I am organizing thematerial with the help of reality itself.” Thedetails and feelings that finally ended up in her“artistic prose of a kind” were taken not onlyfrom the single life of a single individual butalso from the lives, spaces and voices that sur-rounded her: “My books . . . are both a docu-ment and my representation of our times”. It isthis two-part solution – a document and a rep-resentation – that would finally help Alexiev-ich reframe her five-book project as a unifiedcycle, Voices of Utopia. At the same time, thismethod leaves a certain ambiguity around hergenre of plural authorship. Not only can read-ers not tell how representative are the quotesthat she selects from her interviews; they alsohave no way of distinguishing whether a storyhas been compiled from multiple narratives orfrom the accounts of single narrators. In con-trast to the testimonio genre, there are no origi-nal tapes to go back to; or, at least, they are notpublicly available (and, in the case of ZinkyBoys, had been destroyed before the trial).
Chernobyl Prayer: A chronicle of the futureand Second-Hand Time are the final two instal-ments of the cycle. The first edition of theChernobyl book came out in Russian in 1997and quickly appeared in multiple translationsin Europe and the US. This masterly new trans-lation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains thenerve and pulse of the Russian, conveying theangst and confusion of the narrators. Second-Hand Time appears in English for the first time,and while the translation by Bela Shayevich ishighly competent, it often lacks the edginessof the original. Shayevich does, however,explain terms, names and events, providinguseful historical context for the foreign reader.
Unlike the three earlier books, the last twovolumes are not centred on the cruelty of war.Yet there is a strong thematic connection aptlyarticulated by a survivor of the Chernobylcatastrophe: “they will always go together inhistory: the downfall of Socialism and theChernobyl disaster. They coincided. Cherno-byl hastened the collapse of the Soviet Union.It blew the empire apart”. In essence, the twobooks are dramatic accounts of the empire’send and its aftermath. Their narratives of suf-fering demonstrate how a traumatic experi-ence could result in the production of variouscommunities of loss. Survivors of the nuclearmeltdown of 1986 keep returning to the ideathat Chernobyl is “sculpting something out ofus. Creating. Now we have become a people.The people of Chernobyl”. Survivors of thecollapse of the USSR similarly insist: “I livedthere for half of my life . . . you can’t just erasethat . . . . Everything in my head is built around
account of a particular war morphed into apolyphonic depiction of a universal humantragedy, its importance rooted not in its exactgeographic or temporal location but in theaffective power that it conveys.
The fragmentary nature of the testimonies,amplified by their contextual minimalism, canmake for disorientating reading. There shouldbe no mistake, though: this disorientation isessential to the overall project. As Alexievichclarified in Enchanted by Death, “We all arewitnesses and participants, executioners andvictims united in a single body; we have beenscattered among the fragments of what, untilrecently, was a gigantic socialist empire . . . Wehave forgotten how to distinguish war andpeace, day-to-day routine and Being, life anddeath. Pain and screams. Freedom and slav-ery” (all translations mine, except those fromthe books under review). Alexievich’s monta-ges neither rescue these distinctions nor con-solidate the fragments she finds. Rather, theymap discursive dislocations and chronicleexistential confusions. “We were buildingsocialism”, one of her interlocutors recalls inSecond-Hand Time, “and now on the radiothey say that socialism is over. But we’re . . .we’re still here . . .”. It is precisely this insist-ence on “still being here” after wars, disasters,political terror or national pogroms thatendows the testimonies with unforgettablenarrative force.
An inspiration for Alexievich, as she hasoften acknowledged, was the work ofher mentor, the Belarusian writer Ales
Adamovich (1927–94). His collection Out ofthe Fire (1977, English translation 1980) pre-sented the results of an oral history project con-ducted over many years that recorded theeyewitness accounts of rural Belarusianswhose villages were incinerated during theSecond World War. Interview excerpts wereinterspersed with photos of the survivors, andcomments by Adamovich and his colleagues.Quite unusually for the 1970s, the volume evenincluded two small LPs with selected record-ings of the interviews. This factographic mon-tage of oral stories, documentary sources andother media provided Alexievich with a formaltemplate. As she put it recently in an interview,“I was always tortured by the understandingthat no single heart or single mind could containthe whole truth. Truth is always fractured; thereis a lot of it, and it is scattered all over the world.How could one possibly collect it? Suddenly,[in Out of the Fire] I saw how it could be done.That’s how my [first] book, War’s UnwomanlyFace, was born”. This collection of women’snarratives about the Second World War (1985,trans. 1988) was initially suppressed by censor-ship, only to become, in due course, a culturalphenomenon that paved the way for a boom inpost-Soviet theatre, cinema and literature.
Alexievich’s later projects retained her fun-damental commitment to finding, preservingand “organizing lumps of truth”, as DzigaVertov wrote in the 1930s. Yet after The LastWitnesses, she began moving away from thestrictly documentary nature of oral history.From here on, it becomes clear that her inter-view material could be used by her as the foun-dation for creating what she herself called“composite characters”. A pivotal stage in thisdevelopment was Alexievich’s third and per-haps most controversial book, Zinky Boys(1989, trans. 1992), devoted to the Soviet inva-sion of Afghanistan. It provoked vociferous
12 LITERATURE & MEMOIRS
Soviet structures” (Second-Hand Time). Inboth books, the narrators are puzzled, con-fused and enraged by their inability to compre-hend what has happened to them, and searchfor guilty parties: “To answer the question ofhow we should live here, we need to know whowas to blame” (Chernobyl Prayer). They holdresponsible various individuals, groups andinstitutions. Yet the issue of accountability ishardly their main concern. They all are search-ing for something more personal: for a way toreconcile their former lives with their currentconditions. “I want to live after Chernobyl, notto die after it”, a male technology designerexplains; “I want to know what I can cling to inmy faith, what will give me strength”.
Many decide to cling to their former lives, insome cases quite literally. Chernobyl Prayerhas several stories by people who exchangedsafety for the familiarity of their homes,located within the radioactive zone:
We returned with our cats. And dogs. We cameback together. The soldiers and riot policewouldn’t let us in, so we came by night. Took theforest paths. The partisan paths . . .
We’ve got two sacks of salt. We’ll be alrightwithout the state [. . .] There is land and grass toyour heart’s content. Water in the well. Freedom!We like it. What we have here is no collectivefarm, it’s a commune. Communism! We’ll buyanother horse. And then we won’t need anyone.
Others “resettled” figuratively, relying ontheir Communist past as a refuge from post-Communist change:
I grew up in a deeply Soviet time. Totally Soviet.
Born in the USSR. But the new Russia . . . I donot understand it yet, I can’t say what’s worse,what we have today or the history of the Com-munist Party. My mind still functions accordingto the Soviet system, the Soviet mould; after all,I spent half of my life under socialism. All of thatis ingrained in me. You couldn’t beat it out. AndI don’t think that I’d want to. Life used to be bad,now, it’s outright frightening (Second-HandTime) Both books are full of similar justifications
and complaints, and it would be easy to dis-miss them as acts of nostalgic withdrawal oras escapist fantasies. Except they are not. Thenarrators are neither self-delusional fools,uninformed by the danger of radiation, norunrepentant apologists for Communist terror.They know what they’ve survived: “We sur-vived Stalin, survived the [Second World]war”, a woman from Chernobyl explains. “Ifwe hadn’t laughed and had fun, we’d havehanged ourselves ages ago.” They use theauthority of their testimonial voice to resistattempts to consign them to the dustbin of his-tory and to claim their right to a meaningful life– even if that life might seem wrong to others.In their different ways, they reiterate onesimple idea, succinctly expressed by a femalenarrator: “I can do without a lot of things. Theonly thing I can’t do without is the past”(Second-Hand Time).
A large part of Second-Hand Time showswhat happens to those who do try to sever theseties of dependency through suicide – attemptedor completed. Death was always a central topic
TLS NOVEMBER 18 2016
in Alexievich’s cycle, but in the accounts of theSecond World War or the Afghan invasion, itseemed, if not natural, then at least inescapa-ble. The Chernobyl disaster, Alexievich sug-gests, was also war, in a new, still unknownform. But in Second-Hand Time, death andnear-death experience are the outcome ofsomething very different: a profound disillu-sionment with human beings, a whole country,an ideology and, ultimately, life itself. Shedescribes the collection as the narratives ofthose “who had been permanently bound to theSoviet idea”, who could neither “just walkaway from History” nor learn to live without“some great idea”. As if undermining the verypremiss of her cycle – with its thousands ofirreconcilably different memories – sheuncharacteristically claims: “We share a com-munist collective [more precisely, “single”]memory. We’re neighbours in memory”.
Ihope that this desire to homogenizememory is just a momentary sign of thegenre exhaustion that Second-Hand Time
as a whole indicates. Produced mostly duringAlexievich’s years abroad in Western Europe,this last book is curiously unscrupulous in itsselection of material. Its montage frequentlydissolves into a patchwork of unattributednewspaper clippings or rumours, into “ped-dling the apocalypse”, in the words of a cam-eraman in Chernobyl Prayer. Pages of“overheard” statements are printed withoutany names, even fictionalized ones, or dates.Some stories are indistinguishable from urbanlegends. One chapter even offers a set of narra-tives distilled from a documentary film andaccompanied by the director’s comments.This is a collection of heavily remediatedmaterials which demonstrates that Alexiev-ich’s two-part strategy – a document and anartistic vision of the time – is breaking down.The “document” has not quite gone, but its sta-tus is rather blurred. Perhaps later editions ofSecond-Hand Time will rectify these short-comings, or perhaps they will stimulate asearch for new narrative tools and forms oforganization.
Despite these technical flaws, Second-HandTime is an important collection of testimoniesthat powerfully depicts the paradoxical andpainful persistence of the memory of utopia.Rejecting a life without faith, Alexievich’sinterlocutors assert, “We had a dream”. Therole of these “Soviet dreams and ideas”becomes all the more salient against the back-drop of the alternatives Alexievich traces. Oneof the most heart-wrenching narrative threadsin the last two books of the cycle concerns poi-sonous forms of post-Soviet nationalism or, tobe more precise, their victims. A refugee fromTajikistan aptly summarizes the general senti-ment: “Instead of the freedom we had all beenwaiting for, civil war broke out” (Second-Hand Time). Multiple civil wars, in fact.Ethnic difference emerged as the key toolfor creating new social hierarchies. Anotherrefugee from Tajikistan explains,
In Dushanbe, I worked as the deputy chief of therailway station, and there was another deputywho was Tajik. Our children grew up together. . . He used to call me “little sister, my Russiansister”. And suddenly he walks over – we sharedan office – stops in front of my desk and shouts:“When are you going back home to Russia? Thisis our land!” (Chernobyl Prayer). Forcibly displaced, some, strange as it
seems, found a safe haven in Chernobyl. The
head of a family of refugees from Dushanbeexplains: “Why did we come here? To theChernobyl Zone? Because no one will kick usout. From this land. It’s nobody’s. God hastaken it over. People have deserted it”. Forothers, Chernobyl’s abandoned land becomesa living metaphor for the disappeared Mother-land, as this mother with five children pointsout:
We used to have a Motherland. It’s gone now.Who am I? Got a Ukrainian mother, my dad’sRussian. I was born and raised in Kirghizia, thenmarried a Tatar. Who are my children? What’stheir ethnicity? . . . In our passports, for me andmy children it says “Russian,” but we are notRussians. We’re Soviet! But the country I wasborn in does not exist. . . . We’ve become ashomeless as bats. . . . Our country does not exist,but we still exist (Chernobyl Prayer). Surviving an empire is never easy, and
Alexievich’s books are saturated with horrify-ing details about humiliation, torture and kill-ing. However, there is a crucial difference thatdistinguishes these post-imperial testimoniesfrom the Second World from similar stories,say, about the partitioning of India. If we areto believe Alexievich’s narrators, the Sovietsystem did manage to produce large-scalecommunities, in which ethnic differences andnational affiliations were overshadowed byother, more inclusive and cosmopolitan, formsof collective belonging. In both books, almostevery story about national conflicts starts witha variation of the same observation: “Every-one lived together like one big family[. . . .] The world was divided up differently: issomeone a good or bad person, are they greedyor kind? [. . .] everyone had the same national-ity – we were all Soviet”. They do not forget toadd, though, that “everyone spoke Russian”(Second-Hand Time).
This memory of a recent life without ethnicboundaries or, at least, with boundaries thatseemed to be transparent, adds a special angstto stories of ethnic animosity among formerneighbours and friends. Moreover, imaginaryas this past “friendship of people” may havebeen, it continues to reverberate in the presentwith its failed promise of universalism and eth-nic non-distinction. Two decades after the col-lapse of the Soviet Union, a Tajik refugeeexplains to Alexievich why her “brothers”come to live and work in Moscow:
they do not feel like they’ve come to live withstrangers, their parents lived in the USSR; Mos-cow used to be everyone’s capital . . . Whenthey’re at school, all Tajik boys dream of goingto Russia to make money . . . . At the border, Rus-sian customs officers ask them, “Who are yougoing to visit?” And they all answer “Nina.”. . . For them, all Russian women are Nina . . .They don’t teach Russian in school any more.All of them bring their prayer rugs (Second-Hand Time). These voices of utopia, inseparable from the
experience of dislocation, are a unique contri-bution to the literature of testimony. With hercycle Svetlana Alexievich has established her-self as the first major postcolonial author of post-Communism: the daughter of a Ukrainianand Belarusian who uses the Russian language– the only language in which she is completelyfluent – to collect and present, from her ownsubaltern perspective, subaltern accounts of thetraumas inflicted by empire. Shaped by the lan-guage of the empire, she fractures and frag-ments it from within, testifying to the fragility ofits power.
