Moscow is emptying out. Friends, old flames, are leaving. There’s a strange light in familiar windows. Even the city itself, as a space of the memory, belongs now to a past epoch, estranged from many of us who remain.

Walking the streets of the Russian capital today, those of us who were born in the 1970s and 80s realize we were born in a country that no longer exists. We came of age of the 90s, when the Russia that existed then came to us freely, without conditions, like a gift from history. We were spoiled by fate; we felt it was enough to express ourselves in informal signs of community—we waved white ribbons in 2011 to protest flawed elections, but discovered that ribbons were no match for red tape—than in institutional forms of solidarity and democracy: we started few political parties, joined power in few professional unions or public organizations. And so it turned out it was enough for the atmosphere to change, and all of a sudden our generation could only watch; history closed in on us.

Today, it can be said that history is no longer the past, but is walking each step with us. We increasingly perceive uncomfortable parallels with the 1920s and 30s. That we debate which age we’re closer to—the terror of Lenin or the terror of Stalin—speaks volumes about our present situation.

There are images of life in Moscow today which recall images from an earlier time: “The house is sealed in silence now / Only the ticking of the clock. / But the hand won’t touch the switch / The light disturbs the anguish.” These lines were written by my great aunt, Tatyana Lebedeva, a few years before she died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad. Her body would be buried in a mass grave in one of the city cemeteries. Her apartment would be ransacked, her belongings would disappear, and there would remain only a slim notebook filled with poetry, safeguarded by a friend.

“The house is sealed in silence now… ” The poem was dedicated to a parting with a beloved, but time impinges upon language, prescribes verbs: sealed. Because in the same months as the poem was written, the Soviet NKVD secret police had “sealed” the apartments of the arrested; exiting onto the stairwell, people saw wax stamps on their neighbors’ doors, doors of apartments from whence residents had been led away.

“The house is sealed in silence now… ” At the end of the 90s, having fallen in love myself, I read these lines, and the metaphor seemed striking. Today, 15 years later, it no longer seems so. It is: it’s my house that’s been sealed in silence.

The first thing that loses its voice is joy. You are swimming in the current of news. At first it horrifies you: whether it’s word of yet another raid on the offices of a human rights organization or a lawless arrest, you feel anger, alarm, indignation, fear. Then the feelings subside. You get used to them. But nonetheless there’s just no place for joy in today’s Moscow. At least not for sober-thinking people, despite the fabulous (though shrinking) wealth that has been amassed by a precious few; life transforms into exhausting slogs along dark Kafkaesque corridors.

Then your friends disappear. In 1998, having finished high school, I thought seriously about joining the army. My older friend, having served in the special forces, gave me a copy of Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. He handed it to me and said, “Read this before you decide.” I read it. And I forever parted ways with romantic notions of war.

When Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature this past October, the same man who’d once performed a feat that had in a way set the course of my life—that same man said that Alexievich’s books are all lies, that she slanders Russia (presumably, in the service of the West). Many people cling to this inverted picture of the world, if only so as not to feel a strident loneliness in the midst of general unity.

Others are ready to plunge into the ecstasy of power, the ardor of loyalty—anything so long as they don’t feel the oncoming gloom. And many, of course, are ready to accept once again the propaganda of “Russia arising from its knees,”—She rises!—for that way at least there can be an ersatz future. The search for historical analogues invariably leads to 1937, the year of the Great Terror, when the mechanism of repression was built on the application of direct force—arrests, exile, executions; entire strata of the population were crossed out, subtracted from existence.

But today the practice of large-scale direct violence is no longer called for. With much success, the “soft” violence of the media has taken its place; a sophisticated brainwashing has advanced to a degree that Stalin’s government could never have dreamed of. After all, by 1937 the literacy rate in Russia was 75 percent; now everybody can watch (state-controlled) TV.

Those arrested during the Moscow protests against Putin’s government in the spring of 2012 generally received just a few years of prison time. The Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, arrested two years later in Crimea, got put behind bars for 20 years. The difference in severity can’t be explained by the legal code. This was a signal, a sign of the new times, a new yardstick of risk and fear.

And what’s most important is that today’s Russia already has behind her, in the chain of generations, a giant trauma that gets passed on anew. The physical terror of the 1930s is no longer necessary in Moscow. It’s enough for the past to keep reminding us of itself in order to actualize this atavistic fear; it is repression simply by means of the painful memory of repression. Thus for a person who was tortured long ago, it’s enough from time to time to hear the voice of his torturer, to hear that intonation forgotten long ago, in order to again lose the strength and the will for protest. Perhaps that’s one reason why Putin has set about reviving Stalin’s reputation in history textbooks used by children all around Russia.

Moscow has now become that house sealed in silence. And we are increasingly afraid to touch the switch and illuminate the dark corners of this city.

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Born to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father, Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals in dramatic events, such as World War II, the Afghan War, the Chernobyl tragedy, and the USSR’s collapse. In The Red Cycle, Alexievich creates a unique collage of a wide range of voices through what she calls “conversations,” sometimes conducting many with a single subject in order to break through to a moment of stunning truth. Alexievich was trained as a journalist but breaks new ground in the boundary between reporting and fiction by insisting that her books are “documentary novels.” Her latest book, Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets was recently translated into English (by Bela Shayevich) and published by Random House.

Alexievich’s central message is that post-communist countries like Belarus will not become free and democratic if the citizens of these societies cannot free themselves from the destructive Soviet legacy that affects even young people who have never lived under communism. She was recently hosted at Washington, DC’s National Endowment for Democracy at a standing room only lunchtime event; policymakers, academicians, pundits, and media all came to hear the prize-winning author in conversation with Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor at The New Republic and now a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

(NB: Svetlana Alexievich spoke in Russian; headsets were provided for simultaneous translation, and while any mistakes in translation might be lost, any mistakes in transcription are my own.)

Alexievich began by explaining why she has developed a new way of documenting history. “Life is much faster than any event,” she told Wieseltier. “It involves a lot of people, a lot of witnesses and testimonies.” She said that from her earliest memories, she found her childhood home and village “much more interesting than fiction. Journalism is wonderful, but still limiting. It takes only the upper layer of life. I want to delve deeper, to see the truth of human beings.”

She slowly realized, “Why not compose a novel using live voices? Every person has a deeper truth. . . I never call what I do ‘interviews.’ We speak to each other as neighbors, in a new genre that is required by our time. It is a history of human feelings.”

Wieseltier asked Alexievich to expand on what this “history of human feelings” is, and she responded by talking about details that would be “lost in the scheme of grand history, a tremble of the heart that reveals our true humanity.” She then told the story of a woman she spoke with who had been a combatant in World War II. When Alexievich asked her what she had packed to bring to the front, the woman said she brought “a suitcase full of chocolate bonbons.”

“These are normal women who had their own humanity,” said Alexievich. “I do not collect catastrophes. I collect moments of the human journey.”

Since her new book’s subtitle is “The Last of the Soviets,” Wieseltier and Alexievich spent some time discussing Homo sovieticus, also known as “the sovok:” Citizens of the former USSR who have internalized that lost society’s ideals. “To me the sovok is a tragic notion,” said Alexievich, who explained that her father was “90 years a communist” and always found an explanation for what his government did. Her own “free moment” came when the truth about Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was revealed. “My Dad didn’t have anything to say to that,” she said. “He just cried.”

“If a person doesn’t know what freedom means, they can’t process the information they are getting,” she said. “Freedom is not a holiday, it’s not a feast, it’s not tomorrow. It’s a long journey, and it takes work.” Wieseltier noted that she seems to be examining political versus societal emancipation, “the magnitude of the disorientation and dislocation of a society when a dictatorship falls.” Alexievich agreed: “We were just shown the windows of the Western stores, but we didn’t think about the work of freedom. We didn’t have people who could tell anyone about that work.”

As the formal conversation came to a close, Wieseltier asked Alexievich if it is her intention to use her moral authority as an artist to effect change. She answered by describing the current mood in her country and in the rest of the former Soviet states: “As of now, everyone is in waiting mode.” Many of her closest friends and associates are reading literature written during the 1920s in Germany and in pre-revolutionary Russia, other times of foreboding.

Alexievich was a bit more specific while answering questions from the audience. “I’m not a big fan of revolution,” she told one person. “It is very hard for an artist to step over human life. . . I always think the barricades are a bad place for artists.” When Wieseltier asked her if she is a pessimist, Alexievich told him, “I am not so much a pessimist, but we have been romanticizing notions of freedom for so long. We need to be realists; a new age is upon us.”

Afterwards, I asked Wieseltier where else we might see this new genre that Svetlana Alexievich has created. “People in this country have compared her to Studs Terkel, which is unfair,” He said. “She’s much more profound, much more nuanced, she is herself a kind of spiritual figure, of spiritual intensity. In principle, her methods could be applied to the study or the portraiture of any society. She thinks that art has failed to capture some very significant things about the society that she knows. But it’s not a method that is confined to her society, by any means.”

What about her editing process? Wieseltier emphatically responded that Alexievich’s work “is not journalism. This is literature. It’s only after she’s gotten to know a person, after there’s been some kind of spiritual connection made, that she gives an account of that conversation. But in a book like this, one has to trust her—and she asks for that trust.”

My father would say that he personally started believing in communism after Gagarin was sent into space. We’re the first! We can do anything! That’s how he and my mother raised us. I was a Little Octobrist, I sported the pin with the curly-headed boy; I was a Young Pioneer; a member of the Komsomol [1]. Disillusionment only came later.

After perestroika, we were all impatient for the archives to be unsealed. Finally, it happened. We learned the history that they had been hiding from us…

‘We need to attract ninety million out of the hundred that populate Soviet Russia. It’s impossible to talk to the rest of them–they must be eliminated.’ (Zinoviev, 1918.)

‘We must hang (and it has to be hanging, so that the people will see) no fewer than 1,000 inveterate kulaks, the rich ones… seize their grain, take hostages… Make sure that people hear about it one hundred versts [2] around and tremble from fear…’ (Lenin, 1918.)

‘Moscow is literally dying of hunger.’ (N.G. Kuznetsov to Trotsky.).

‘That’s not hunger. When Titus was taking Jerusalem, Jewish mothers ate their children. When I have your mothers eating their young, then you can tell me you’re starving.’ (Trotsky, 1919.)

People read newspapers and magazines, and sat in stunned silence. They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well. ‘We don’t know our own nation. We don’t understand what the majority of people think about; we see them, we interact with them every day, but what’s on their minds? What do they want? We have no idea. But we will courageously take it upon ourselves to educate them. Soon, we will learn everything and be horrified,’ my friend would say in my kitchen, where we often sat talking. I’d argue with him. It was 1991… A happy time! We believed that tomorrow, the very next day, would usher in freedom. That it would materialize out of nowhere, from the sheer force of our wishing.

From Varlam Shalamov’s Notebooks: ‘I participated in the great lost battle for the true reinvention of life.’ The man who wrote these words spent seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. He continued to yearn for the ideals… I would divide the Soviets into four generations: the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these. It was easier for my generation to accept the defeat of the communist idea because we hadn’t been born yet when it was still young, strong, and alive with the magic of fatal romanticism and utopian aspirations. We grew up with the Kremlin ancients; in Lenten, vegetarian times [3]. The great bloodshed of communism had already been lost to the ages. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was already ingrained in us.

It was during the first Chechen war… At a train station in Moscow, I met a woman from the Tambov area. She was headed to Chechnya to take her son home from the war. ‘I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to kill.’ The government no longer owned her soul. This was a free person. There were not many of them. More often, people were irritated with freedom. ‘I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know everything that you needed to know and understand.’ People were slow to come out from under the narcosis of old ideas. If I brought up repentance, the response would be, ‘What do I have to repent for?’ Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One person would say, ‘I did time, too’, another, ‘I fought in the war’, a third, ‘I built my city up from the ruins, hauling bricks day and night.’ Freedom had materialized out of thin air: everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had really been prepared for it. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables, where, out of habit, people continued to badmouth the government. They reviled Yeltsin and Gorbachev: Yeltsin for changing Russia, Gorbachev for changing everything. The entire twentieth century. Now we would live no worse than anyone else. Be just like everyone else. We thought that this time, we would get it right.

Russia was changing and hating itself for its changes. ‘The immobile Mongol,’ Marx wrote of Russia.

* * * *

The Soviet civilization… I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not an historian. I am fascinated by people.

* * * *

My father is no longer living, so we won’t get to finish one of our conversations… He claimed that it was easier to die in the war in his day than it is for the untried boys to die in Chechnya today. In the 1940s, they went from one hell to another. Before the war, my father had been studying at the Minsk Institute of Journalism. He would recall how often, on returning to college after the holidays, students wouldn’t recognize a single one of their professors because they had all been arrested. They didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever it was, it was terrifying. Just as terrifying as a war.

I didn’t have many honest, open conversations with my father. He felt sorry for me. Did I feel sorry for him? It’s hard to answer that question… We were merciless toward our parents. We thought that freedom was a very simple thing. A little time went by, and soon, we too bowed under its yoke. No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we had hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries… Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living. Today, there’s no longer any use for our experience in war; in fact, it ought to be forgotten. There are thousands of newly available feelings, moods, and responses. Everything around us has been transformed: the billboards, the clothing, the money, the flag… And people themselves. People are now more colourful, more individualized; the monolith has been shattered and life has splintered into a million little fragments, cells, and atoms. It’s like in Dal’s dictionary [4]: free will… free rein… wide-open spaces. The grand old evil is nothing but a distant saga, some political detective story. After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore—instead it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they ‘made’ it or ‘scored’ it. Is all this here to stay? ‘The fact that money is a fiction is ineradicable from the Russian soul,’ wrote Marina Tsvetaeva [5]. But it’s as though Ostrovsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin [6] characters have come to life and are promenading down our streets.

I asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born afterwards do not share a common experience. They’re people from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you’re not afraid of your own desires, it’s having lots of money, so that you’ll have everything; it’s when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

In the 90s… yes, we were elated; there’s no way back to that naiveté. We thought that the choice had been made and that communism had been defeated forever. But it was only the beginning…

Twenty years have gone by… ‘Don’t scare us with your socialism,’ children tell their parents.

From a conversation with a university professor: ‘At the end of the 90s, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were sure that a new future awaited them. Now, it’s a different story… Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution and wear red t-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.’

There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an ‘unrivaled political figure’. A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. ‘Soviet-style cafés’ with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. ‘Soviet’ candy and ‘Soviet’ salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, ‘Soviet’ vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps—on Solovki, in Magadan—as a tourist. The adverts promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterwards, there will be fishing…

* * * *

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the great empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’. They brought back the Soviet anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi [7]; there’s a ruling party and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the General Secretary once was, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

* * * *

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, one hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it should be. Our time comes to us second-hand.

^[1] Little Octobrists, Young Pioneers, and the Komsomol were Soviet youth organizations that most children joined in school. Children were Little Octobrists from age 7 to 9, when they would join the Young Pioneers. At 14, children could elect to join the Komsomol, the ‘youth division of the Communist Party.’

^[2] Obsolete Russian unit of length, equal to approximately 1.07 kilometers, or .7 miles.

^[3] Russian and Soviet modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) coined the term ‘the vegetarian years’ to describe a period when her work was merely suppressed and not published, as opposed to the ‘cannibalism’ of Stalin’s purges, when Soviets, including many fellow poets, were murdered by the millions. It is used colloquially to denote the contrast between Stalinism and what followed.

^[4] Vladimir Dal (1801-1872). Author of the most influential Russian dictionary collecting sayings, proverbs, and bywords compiled during his extensive travels through Russia.

^[5]Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet.

^[6] Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886), prominent nineteenth-century Russian realist playwright whose plays depicting the petite bourgeoisie are still among the most performed in Russia today. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), satirist, novelist, and playwright, whose works criticized Russian officialdom and the prevailing social order of his day.

^[7] Nashi: popular Putinist youth organization; the name means ‘Our People.’

Excerpted from SECONDHAND TIME by Svetlana Alexievich. Copyright © 2016 by Svetlana Alexievich. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a chorus of voices that rise and fall and arrange themselves into symphonic narratives: Here are the voices of Russians scarred by the meltdown of Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl), angered by the shame of Afghan War (Zinky Boys), and now, with Secondhand Time, bewildered by the collapse of communism and assumption they should all be capitalists now.

Alexievich was in some ways born into this task. Both of her parents were teachers and her father once studied journalism himself. At university, Alexievich was exposed to the work of Belarusian writer, Ales Adomovich, who believed the 20th century was so horrific it needed no elaboration.

Unlike Studs Terkel, whose oral histories of American life arrange themselves like transcribed radio interviews, Alexievich’s books are strange creations. They never ask the reader to think to imagine their subjects are representative individuals. When she won the Nobel in 2015, Alexievich described them as novels—which is a fair comparison given the meticulous arrangement required to create such clear and evocative pastiche. Whatever they are, her books are as eerie and beautiful as overheard voices on a crowded train car traveling through the night.

Alexievich came to New York this June for events around Secondhand Time (read an excerpt here), the first of three books that will be translated by Random House in the next three years. I spoke to her in the empty auditorium where she would be interviewed in an hour’s time through a translator.

John Freeman: I’m curious how you became a listener?

Svetlana Alexievich: It happened from early childhood. I lived in the country, in the village, that was after the war. My parents were both village teachers. The village was full of women. And they had to work very hard during the day, there were no men left in the village, and after they were done with work—the village was full of benches—they would all come outside and they would talk. It was scary to listen to them, but it was also very interesting.

They talked about war about death about loss, because some lost their husbands recently and this was much more exciting and much more interesting than reading the books that we had in the house. Our house was filled with books. When I got into journalism school, I tried a lot of different things. I applied myself in fiction, in drama, and I realized there was nothing as interesting as real life voices. And when you are a journalist and you are traveling to different villages, to small towns—Belarus is not a large country it is a small country—that’s how I came to this form.

This idea does exist in the traditional fashion, of folktales, just maybe not in the way I’ve done it, but the tradition of storytelling is obviously there. Every genre of arts, painting or sculpture or music, people are looking for new forms, people are looking for new ideas, and I thought well why not something new in literature. We had a remarkable writer in Belarus, his name is Ales Adamovich, and this is someone who I consider to be my mentor, my teacher, and he also worked in the genre and he always said that there is no need to invent anything, that life is rich enough there is no need for invention.

JF: Throughout this book I sense and I hear from various voices a frustration that literature did not prepare the people you speak to for the changes in Soviet life. Do you feel like this book and the people that you’re speaking to in it are expressing a frustration with the failure of imaginative literature to connect them to life? One character even says, with frustration and realization, “back then books replaced life.”

SA: I think it’s a very good observation because we are a word-centric country. It’s this Russian tendency to live in an idea or that people tend to live by the word and in the book. There has always been this ingrained idea in people’s minds that books are there to teach you how to live, that they create ideals for you to uphold. Especially in the Soviet times, when they were actually remaking a human being, remaking a person, literature was there as a major tool of support.

It’s also a closed country because people did not travel. They almost always saw Russian films. There were very little American films, very little music. So there was very little coming in from the outside world in general, so books really were the only outlet, and that’s why people react to them so intensely. It was a remarkable time. People were so desperate. I remember after Perestroika there were ads, handwritten ads, I will buy a kilo of food. It didn’t specify what food because everything became so scarce and people in that desperation really felt betrayed by their military and ideals.

I also remember how people got rid of Russian writers like Mayakovsky. At some point the bookshops stopped taking his books because they were full and you could go and find them basically in the dumpster and the garbage heap. And you know before people would actually try to assemble a small library and they would go and they would subscribe and the volumes would arrive by subscription and people would have to go and get them; it was a big point of pride to assemble a book collection, a small library and with Perestroika that all changed.

I remember visiting one family. It was supposed to be a family of the intelligentsia, but the woman was apologetically saying how, “Actually, I wanted to show you my new coffeemaker because I am ashamed of the old coffeemaker, and the new washing machine gives me just as much joy as books used to do.” People were apologetic but you could go out into the street markets and find an abundance of books that even a few years before were considered to be scarce. Suddenly, you could find them, you didn’t have to stay in line, and they were there in the bins nobody was interested in. It became a new world of materialism, people got pleasure from new food, from travel, from new things. And the book was defeated.

JF: The word shame comes up a lot in Secondhand Time. People say, “I’m ashamed.”

SA: I think it’s also very characteristic of Russian culture. I recall the story of women who were walking towards the river and the men were trying not to look at the women because they had their periods and they had nothing, no sanitary pads, so they had blood running down their legs and the blood was left on the sand and god knows what it caused later and in their bodies and their systems. But then they came to the river and the men ran and hid and the women were ashamed that they wanted to get into the river and clean themselves; a lot of those women died that day, of cold. On the one hand it’s very patriarchal culture, for the role of women, but on the other hand it’s a very communal culture because in the villages and collective farms a person is always part of a collective and never really an individual.

JF: This book begins with a series of unattributed voices and then gradually moves into acknowledged sources—so I wondered how you chose the people you interviewed for Zinky Boys and Voices From Chernobyl. Those books were about specific and discrete groups of people—survivors and parents of survivors or those who were lost—whereas this book, being about the end of the Soviet era, involves an enormous number of people. How did you choose which voices to record?

SA: I think this is why Secondhand Time was the most difficult book to write. Zinky Boys was really about war and there is such a thing as culture of war and you know in what space you work. But here we deal with a collapse of a huge empire and when it happened people found themselves sitting on its pieces and the pieces were different. In that sense, as a book, shaping its narrative was a challenge.

In the past 30 years I have largely been writing a history of Communism, the Red Communism in Russia, coming from the premise that the most important object was Communism and its disappearance. What was important was to mark the most painful things. What we were and what people were losing from under their feet as it was going away: the history of the war, the history of the camp, the history of the faith… that was the premise. I think it’s very much done not in order to create an exact picture, but a stained-glass window, if you will, as a musician or a composer might try to develop different melodies in order for them to blend in the ensemble and create that effect. I wanted to create the image of the time.

JF: Quite late in the book you speak to a waitress who has attempted suicide, she’s been married once to a man with a limp. How did you meet her?

SA: I don’t recall at this point but it might have been something I saw in the paper because this woman attempted suicide several times. It might also have been that somebody told me about her at the hospital because I came to the hospital to talk about the cases of people trying to commit suicide.

JF: There’s an epidemic it seems.

SA: I think yes, a very pronounced one, much higher than in Germany and most other countries. I think it is related to the fact that people live without being able to eat. Life under socialism gave you or gave a person some sort of a handout, it was the same for everyone, but now people are lost and they are depressed, on their own without any sort of support.

JF: Failure was their own fault.

SA: I think it’s complicated, some people were blaming the people who believed in the idea and they felt that they were betrayed the party. In that circle, a lot of people cannot teach themselves or adapt to living under capitalism. And other people were living with memories of the past, of what they went through and then we had Chechnya, we had people that came back from Afghanistan, so I was trying to kind of find the main or most important themes there.

JF: In one interview that broke my heart you spoke to the mother of a police office who was shot in Chechnya and the woman’s death was declared a suicide. I wonder when you sit and speak with people who have suffered such tremendous loss, I have two questions: one, how do you carry such stories the rest of your life? Does it have a cost to you? And second how do you disengage? These are people whose stories matter and you’re human, so how do you break off contact… or do you? Are you still in touch with many of these people?

SA: That was a woman right? A girl with a son?

JF: Yes.

SA: You know of course it is a cost, and today I have her face in front of me, she was a very beautiful Russian woman. It is hard and I do keep in touch with many of my characters, many women in particular, but a lot of them already passed away and especially the characters from my first book, The Unwomanly Face of War.

But when I consider this question, I actually think that the writers do not claim any special privilege here. Think about for example a pediatric surgeon who sees the terrible suffering of children every day, they then have to go and talk to parents. Imagine announcing the death of a child to a parent? Of course it’s a cost, but there are a lot of costs in many professions. I do not want at all to portray myself as some sort of superhero or suffering woman, but it is difficult.

I’ll tell you a story.

When I was in Afghanistan I received a call from a man. They were very resistant to having women on the battlefield so I got that call and suddenly he asks me, Do you want to see what remained of our boys that got blown up by an Italian mine? And I said, Well, what is left? And basically they’re trying to collect it with spoons so they at least have some DNA they can send to the mothers. Of course it’s 100 degrees outside and he thought I was confused or would be put off, but as a product of Russian culture I couldn’t be deterred. So I went and I saw these remains and I was human and of course I fainted.

Still, I am playing a secondary part here. I’m not the one suffering, I’m sitting in front of somebody, opposite of somebody, who really suffered and she’s sharing it with me, so this isn’t really my place, it’s her place. I stopped believing all the movies and plays where people who are suffering who cry and they yell out. This is absolutely not true. The people who truly suffer, they speak in very small voices, very quietly. They might cry a little but I don’t believe that outpouring, that is not true, that is not what I see. For me, interviewing and getting the story out, there’s a particular challenge because on the one hand I want to strip the story down to its most essential parts, on the other hand I want to go get away from that culture of crying because I want people when they tell the story to be thinking about her story and to not just sit there and cry.

JF: How do you decide who to leave out? Surely there must be five other books here of voices you did not include…

SA: You know it really all depends on the themes and the topics. A big one that is emerging is terrorism. In Secondhand Time there’s a story of a mother whose daughter got caught up in the terrorist attack that we had in our subway and there you have to decide really how the person is talking, whether they want to open up contact with you and have you know what is their process and who do you think this person really is? But I wanted to ask you what if anything grabbed you in the book?

JF: That some people could be funny. One guy says under capitalism, he learned that he had bad taste. Also, the fact that some of the heaviest suffering is born by women.

SA: In our culture this is so.

JF: Most unfortunately, it is true everywhere.

SA: Do you think it’s interesting for American readers?

JF: Absolutely. I think stories that are necessary have a peculiar vibration. My parents were social workers so they listened to people for a living.

SA: I think that they’ve probably heard no less than I did.

“I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer.” These are the words of author Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost 27 family members—including her mother and father—when Hutu throughout her nation murdered 800,000 of their fellow citizens, often brutally with nothing more than a machete.

Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile and her autobiographical work Cockroaches bear witness to these events. Mukasonga applies a feather touch to this history, even when writing about the nightmares of genocide that regularly visit her at night, the deeply ingrained, racist beliefs that fed the Hutus as they rose up in murder, or the systemic, prejudicial violence that built from 1959 forward, ultimately erupting in 1994. The simplicity with which Mukasonga states the truth is the foundation of her literary power: “The first pogroms against the Tutsis broke out on All Saints’ Day, 1959. The machinery of genocide had been put into motion. It would never stop. Until the final solution, it would never stop.”

We can call Mukasonga’s books many things, but first of all they are works that bear witness. Their primary function is to bring readers face to face with events that must be understood, and that must never be forgotten. This is not social science—as Mukasonga has said, she is “not a political writer or a historian”—rather, this is literature that delves into the granular level, bringing readers as close as possible to stories that need to be heard. The author’s literary gift is turned toward conveying a vivid sense of what has happened. Comprehension of these terrible acts—and some assurance that they will never be repeated—only begins when they are seared into the reader’s memory.

This work is of great achievement and grave importance—and it is not at all easy to successfully pull off—but witness-bearing literature has often been overlooked and underestimated. To see this we need only examine the reaction to Svetlana Alexievich’s 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, as she has made a career of this genre. Typical of the mixed praise she received, The New York Times wrote, “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.”

Nonetheless, the Nobel committee did recognize Alexievich; her powerful words are now widely read in the West, and her genre has received a boost. Similarly, audiences in Europe and America have learned greatly from Mukasonga, and her novel Our Lady of the Nile is even now required reading in Rwanda’s schools.

Clearly, these authors do a great deal more than provide a “vehicle for information.” In fact, I would go much farther than that: I side with South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who calls such work one of the writer’s highest callings. This genre of literature has touched me and influenced how I think more than virtually any other kind of literature I read. And I believe that right now this sort of writing is immensely necessary.

Why now? Well, to start, we can observe that some subjects seem to want this treatment more than others. The master works of witness-bearing literature often come out of the great social tragedies, the mass events that define a society and that reveal the breakdown of politics, the failures of power. Here I would point to Massacre in Mexico by the great Mexican author and journalist Elena Poniatowska: this book is nothing more than a collage of voices collectively narrating the events leading up to Mexico City’s 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were murdered by their own government. Poniatowska’s witnesses range from ordinary Mexicans to then-President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and their words collectively form a grand tale of how order disintegrates, enabling horrendous abuses and ending in terrible calamity. The sorcery here is that Poniatowska just listens to people speak—all you will find in this book are quotations from innumerable interviews, news stories, graffiti, and political signs—yet in her method these words become so much more. This is the trick of great witness-bearing literature: it really is made up of the facts—one of its crucial functions is to tell us this has happened—but it tells us things that mere facts are usually ill-equipped to say.

Perhaps when the Nobel committee chose Alexievich in 2015, they sensed that we had entered an era where such literature is now crucial. We are at a point of intense instability, possibly even upheaval: in Latin America, Venezuela has slid toward one-man dictatorial rule, and Brazil has thrown out a democratically elected government, instigating a period of enormous political uncertainty. In Europe, Britain has triggered Article 50, which now gives it two years to negotiate how to leave the European Union, and tension reigns throughout many other member nations. In our own country we are now edging perilously close to war with Syria and maybe even Russia; we are also in the midst of immense protests, massive xenophobia, profound dislocations of immigrants, and uncharted territory as regards Presidential politics. This is a time when the citizens of the world need literary writers to bear witness to the raw history occurring right before our eyes.

One small example: When Donald Trump’s first Muslim Ban was announced on January 27 terrible things began to occur: innocent mothers and children where hauled off flights and into indefinite detention; people with families in the United States were not allowed to come back home; many individuals were even forced into situations that posed grave dangers to their life. As I read of these abuses, one of the first things I began to want was for writers to tell these stories. I felt that it was essential to begin showing the lives that were being destroyed—not only to bring the nation face to face with the consequences of its decision to elect President Trump but also for posterity: so that these lives might become part of the tale history tells of these years.

And indeed, almost instantly reporters began to share 1,000-word articles on people whose lives had been destroyed—or at the least deeply scarred—by the ill-wrought, ultimately illegal ban. These stories are excellent and powerful—they have done immense good in sharing truths that must be seen by all people of this great nation—but they alone are not enough. We must also have a witness-bearing literature of this period that goes beyond the journalistic facts to give a literary understanding of the massive forces that have brought us to this point, and that now determine our politics. We must have our own Alexieviches, Mukasongas, Poniatowskas, and Gordimers to document the lives of this nation and the upheaval that we are going through.

I believe this is a literary task. At the dawn of the modern age, James Joyce wrote that we strive to wake from the nightmare of history, which I take to mean that our societies strive to escape from a world that exists on a tribal, imagistic, mythic sort of order—to leave that world and enter into one that is grounded in peace, justice, and rationality. I do not believe we have yet so escaped, and so long as we continue in this nightmare of history, we will only be able to fully comprehend what is happening with the blessings of art. Writers must help document and explain the endemic forces that have gained momentum and are now drawing us along on their path. They must be witnesses to these deeds for our own sake, so that we can have some meaning and common understanding in this era of confusion, and also so that the future generations will learn from the mistakes we have committed.

Great Works of Witness-Bearing Literature

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Melanie Mauthner)
*
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Jordan Stump)
*
Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Bela Shayevich)
*
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Keith Gessen)
*
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (tr. Stuart Woolf)
*
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
*
Hardly War by Don Mee Choi

This year’s fiction and nonfiction longlists for the Brooklyn Library Literary Prize honor “books which—by subverting literary forms, pushing against established ways of thinking, or otherwise introducing new or challenging ideas—speak to the Library’s ideals. This will connect the prize to the Library’s mission to create a welcoming environment in which all members of the borough’s diverse community—one of the most socially and culturally complex in the country—can come together to contemplate urgent social, political and artistic questions.” The fiction list includes Lesley Nneka Arimah‘s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Mohsin Hamid‘s Exit West, Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, and Lidia Yuknavitch‘s The Book of Joan. Nonfiction candidates include David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Pankaj Mishra‘s Age of Anger, Phoebe Robinson‘s You Can’t Touch My Hair and Sarah Schulman‘s Conflict Is Not Abuse.

A new translation of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich‘s first book is “a frightening and lacerating book — as beautiful as a ruined cathedral,” Joshua Cohen‘s new novel is a “Jewish Sopranos,” Tamara Shopsin‘s memoir “serves up the old, weird Greenwich Village,”  Zizi Clemmons‘s first novel is dubbed “the debut novel of the year,” and Achy Obejas‘s new collection proves her to be “one of the most important Cuban writers of our time.”

Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War

Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” In her first book, newly translated into English by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, she develops her collage-style oral history in interviews with some of the 1 million women who fought in the Red Army during World War II.

Alexievich “writes movingly about the 1 million women who served in the Red Army as snipers, medics, foot soldiers, pilots, tank drivers, mechanics and other vital jobs,” writes Elaine Margolin (Truthdig). “She explores difficult terrain. What is it like to kill someone? What were they most afraid of? How have they dealt with their traumas? What effect has their war experiences had on their children and grandchildren? She observes that women remember war differently. They do not focus on heroics or the intricacies of battle as men do. Little moments remain etched in their memory and change them forever. This is what interests Alexievich, who calls herself a ‘historian of the soul.’”

“The catalogue of horrors and deprivations of this book is so vivid it seems monstrous not to fathom that time puts its most awful pressures on the story of a trauma,” writes John Freeman (Boston Globe). “It carves them into the most true instrument. Alexievich says as much in her introduction. To be so hungry as to eat potato peelings; to watch your children mimic the most deformed and yet courageous bravery. ‘[M]y mama can’t leave,’ a mother recalls her young daughter telling a pilot who wants the two of them to board his plane and escape. ‘She has to fight the fascists.’ Thousands upon thousands of them came home, and in this frightening and lacerating book—as beautiful as a ruined cathedral—Alexievich has turned their voices into history’s psalm.”

Kate Tuttle (Newsday) concludes:

At a time when Americans and Russians once again find ourselves in a strange relationship—not a Cold War, but not the allies we were during World War II—there’s something powerful about such close access to these women’s feelings. The deceptively simple form Alexievich deploys allows for an emotional range from utter despair to a kind of transcendent hope. “Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat,” one army surgeon says, “you look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful.”

Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings

This Year Cohen was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Writers. His new novel showcases his audacious talent. The starred Kirkus Review: “Cohen shows an impressive knowledge of life in the cab of a moving van and in the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. He touches on two wars and two combat zones (counting brief allusions to Afghanistan). He is funny and caustic and has a marvelous snap in his dialogue.”

“Moving Kings is a brilliant book whose brilliance comes via a bait and switch,” writes Mark Athitakis (Los Angeles Times). “It opens as a comic portrait of a midlife crisis, but concludes as a somber cautionary tale frothing with cataclysms, including fire and gunplay. It starts tucked deep into a subculture—in this case the peculiarities of running a New York City-area moving company—but expands to consume whole swaths of race and religion. It comes on as unassuming yet stylish, but circles around tricky questions of occupation and power in the U.S. and Israel. And yet none of it feels messy or overreaching—indeed, it feels master-planned to slowly unsettle your convictions, as the best novels do.”

Ron Charles (Washington Post) notes, “The clash of expectations between a rough American businessman and an Israeli innocent abroad provides the basis for some smart comedy, and Cohen is particular adept with moments of silly absurdity. He also exercises a fantastically agile style that pushes hard against the banisters of traditional grammar. The novel’s voice freely veers into these characters’ minds, picking up their thoughts and accents, mixing with the narrator’s own straight-faced asides. But for all its domestic humor, there’s barbed wire running through this story, stretching tight from New York to the West Bank. The moving business, after all, is not just a matter of transporting happy families to bigger homes. Much of David’s profit is squeezed from evictions: emptying people’s apartments as their lives careen toward ruin.”

James Wood (The New Yorker) calls Moving Kings “a Jewish Sopranos” and concludes:

Moving Kings is a strange, superbly unsuccessful novel. There’s not a page without some vital charge—a flash of metaphor, an idiomatic originality, a bastard neologism born of nothing. You could say that it is patchworked with successes: David King in the Hamptons, Yoav and Uri in the Israeli Army, the King’s Moving crew at work in New York, Avery Luter flailing in his mother’s house. Yet these stories are more convincing than the connections, thematic and formal, offered to bind them. Cohen never finds that deep novelistic form, that tensile coherence, which Woolf idealized. This is a book of brilliant sentences, brilliant paragraphs, brilliant chapters. Here things flare singly, a succession of lighted matches, and do not cast a more general illumination. But Cohen opened his previous novel with a challenge: “There’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” So if his most accessible novel yet, rich in all three despised elements, frustrates conventional satisfactions, is it because he has failed to find the right form or because he is trying to found a new one?

Tamara Shopsin, Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Shopsin offers an insider’s look at a Greenwich Village institution called The Store, her family’s grocery/café at Morton and Bedford Streets. Critical response is rapturous.

Arbitrary Stupid Goal “is a little like a meal at Shopsin’s, her family’s restaurant,” writes Alexandra Schwarz (The New Yorker). “It’s got a bit of everything, in a way that shouldn’t rightly work but does. Antique gumball machines; crossword puzzles; scam artists; perverted supers; foul apartments; fouler mouths; curry mixed into peanut butter; chewing gum stuck in armpits; known celebrities, like John Belushi and Joseph Brodsky, and unknown ones, like Willoughby, a basement-dwelling genius and the de-facto mayor of Morton Street—it’s all thrown into the pot, seasoned salty-sweet with a proprietary blend of so-it-goes nostalgia, and out it comes, delicious.”

Heller McAlpin (NPR) finds Shopsin’s book “neither arbitrary or stupid.”

Arbitrary Stupid Goal is an ode to unconventionality and an elegy to Greenwich Village in the 1970s and 80s, which was crime-riddled but also “a very tolerant place.” Shopsin reminds us that the Village used to attract “fringe people,” whom she was brought up to believe were “the nutrients of New York City.” After describing a period when what the family still calls “The Store” was robbed regularly—including twice in one day—she comments, “It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos. It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred.” That “spirit, life, and community” are exactly what Shopsin conveys in this rich smorgasbord of memories . . .

“Shopsin’s story revolves around her father, whose declining health and mental acuity are heartbreakingly depicted—and Willy, her father’s best friend and mentor, whom she cared for at the end of his life, as Mercer Street changed forever,” writes Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing). “These two larger-than-life characters are the avatars for a different, pre-financialized New York, a lost world where family and art and laughter and craft were more important than mere money, when weirdos could flourish in the cracks and make cities into vibrant and surprising places. Their stories—dirty, funny, criminal, delicious—are a reminder of something we’ve lost in living memory: a moment before the orderliness of long supply chains and complex financial derivatives squeezed the handmade and odd out of the world. They’re the tea-leaves that brewed Make: magazine and the maker movement, avatars of indie-rock and indie culture.”

Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

Clemmons grew up in Philadelphia and studied with Paul Beatty in the MFA program at Columbia. The starred Kirkus Review calls her first novel “A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America.”

“In just a slim 200 pages, Clemmons traverses the rocky terrain of race in both America and South Africa,” writes Kirkus Review’s Stephanie Buschardt. “Thandi, like Clemmons, is mixed-race. Her mother is South African, from Johannesburg, a city still reeling from its violent past, and her father was born in New York but relocated to Philadelphia, where they safely reside nestled in a wealthy, mostly white suburb. For Thandi’s parents—who pride themselves on their education—this is a monumental achievement, whereas Thandi feels like an outsider in a community in which, because of her heritage and light complexion, she’s adrift. ‘American blacks were my precarious homeland—because of my light skin and foreign roots, I was never fully accepted by any race. Plus my family had money, and all the black kids in my town came from the poorer areas,’ Clemmons writes. ‘I was a strange in-betweener.’”

Megan O’Grady (Vogue) calls What We Lose “the debut novel of the year.” “Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. ‘I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,’ reflects Thandi, recalling her mother’s warnings that darker girls will be jealous of her.”

“In its preoccupation with maternal loss, What We Lose recalls Jamaica Kincaid’s wonderful The Autobiography of My Mother, though the latter concerns a much earlier and life-defining loss,” writes Sarah Gilmartin (Irish Times). “Brit Bennett’s recent debut The Mothers also comes to mind. Clemmons and Bennett both offer intelligent perspectives on issues affecting black women in modern America. With its contemplations on race and its collage of genres, there are parallels with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, though What We Lose is in micro form by comparison.This is not to disparage what Clemmons has achieved in her affecting novel. Although disjointed, it is a book brimming with ideas.”

Achy Obejas, The Tower of the Antilles

In her new collection, Obejas, a Cuban-American poet, short story writer, novelist, journalist and translator, traces the complex borders between island homeland and reinvention in the U.S.  Booklist’s Donna Seaman writes: “For all the human tumult and deftly sketched and reverberating historical and cultural contexts that Obejas incisively creates in these poignant, alarming tales, she also offers lyrical musings on the mysteries of the sea and the vulnerability of islands and the body. Obejas’ plots are ambushing, her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization.”

Porochista Khakpour (Electric Literature) selects the story “Kimberle” from this new collection for Recommended Reading, and calls it Obejas’s “masterpiece.”

Sexuality, nationality, gender, ethnicity and race all come together here in those everyday ways that they do in our lives, and then some. The then some is the way this is love story and thriller and horror and folktale and parable all at once, not in some foggy watercolor liminality but in the most stark sunlight and lighting and blood and bruise you can imagine. Obejas is the sort of writer whose gifts are so far beyond mine that the more I study her — I’ve been her reader for more than two decades, now — the more confused I am at how she builds it all. I don’t even get to ask my how does she do it? that the writer in me usually can’t let go of when I read. I lose myself too quickly in her dreams.

Ashley Miller (Atticus Review) writes, “Each story rolls open as a wave and then recedes, ending as abruptly as a wave crashing against the shore, just as another story-wave rushes forward and unfolds. In many instances, like the ex-Cubans of the stories reaching for possibilities, for promise of more, we turn the page, but the next story begins before our mind is ready to let go. In a way, this forces the reader to submerge, to swallow the whole of The Tower of the Antilles in a single gulp, to face the sadness of being adrift and holding our breath as the current takes us under, hoping to break surface and breathe again.”

Christopher R. Alonso (Miami Rail) concludes:

These stories are filled with yearning for an unattainable place, something characters desire yet can never quite grasp—whether they’ve left the island or not. These tales are both nostalgic and entirely new. Obejas sneaks under the skin, revealing emotions tied up at the dock, cuts the rope, and sets them free. The Tower of the Antilles proves, once again, why Achy Obejas is one of the most important Cuban writers of our time.

“Alexievich’s introduction is worth the book’s cost alone. Anyone who has ever elicited important stories or traumatic remembrances ought to read it … Like all soldiers, they lost limbs; sanity fled their minds like messenger pigeons. They also buried brothers, fathers, sisters, cousins, and in some cases, lovers, all this recorded beautifully by Alexievich, who guides us from interview to interview in brief italicized sections. Layering the quotations, and then moving on to a new theme: fear, love, victory, remembrance … Thousands upon thousands of them came home, and in this frightening and lacerating book — as beautiful as a ruined cathedral — Alexievich has turned their voices into history’s psalm.”

–John Freeman, The Boston Globe, July 21, 2017

Read more of John’s reviews here

For two years I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading. What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But… it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words. Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war, but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown to me. Not only to me, to all of us. More than once during my journalistic travels I witnessed, I was the only hearer of totally new texts. I was shaken as I had been in childhood. The monstrous grin of the mysterious shows through these stories… When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: how certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which generals. Women’s stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer, but the earth, the birds, the trees. All that lives on earth with us. They suffer without words, which is still more frightening.

But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown…

I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.

*

After the first encounters…

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine-gunner, commander of an anti-aircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers… Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting.

I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that… They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. And only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front… It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.

I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then… After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war, but her youth. A piece of her life… I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes…

What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out on this path…

*

How do they receive me?

They call me “little girl,” “dear daughter,” “dear child.” Probably if I was of their generation they would behave differently with me. Calmly and as equals. Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. It is a very important point, that then they were young and now, as they remember, they are old. They remember across their life—across forty years. They open their world to me cautiously, to spare me: “I got married right after the war. I hid behind my husband. Behind the humdrum, behind baby diapers. I wanted to hide. My mother also begged: ‘Be quiet! Be quiet!! Don’t tell.’ I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but it makes me sad that I was there. That I know about it… And you are very young. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul. They check it against the words. After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. You don’t want to, and it’s too bad to vanish just like that. Heedlessly. On the run. And when you look back you feel a wish not only to tell about your life, but also to fathom the mystery of life itself. To answer your own question: why did all this happen to me? You gaze at everything with a parting and slightly sorrowful look… Almost from the other side… No longer any need to deceive anyone or yourself. It’s already clear to you that without the thought of death it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

War is an all too intimate experience. And as boundless as human life…

Once a woman (an aviatress) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t… I don’t want to remember. I spent three years at the front… And for three years I didn’t feel myself a woman. My organism was dead. I had no periods, almost no woman’s desires. And I was beautiful… When my future husband proposed to me… that was already in Berlin, by the Reichstag… He said: ‘The war’s over. We’re still alive. We’re lucky. Let’s get married.’ I wanted to cry. To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks… Look at me… Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. I want it so much! I wait for it! I almost hit him… He had one cheek burnt, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still fresh scars… And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’”

“Forgive me… I can’t…”

I understood her. But this was also a page or half a page of my future book.

Texts, texts. Texts everywhere. In city apartments and village cottages, in the streets and on the train… I listen… I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person. I “read” voices.

*

A human being is greater than war…

Memory preserves precisely the moments of that greatness. A human being is guided by something stronger than history. I have to gain breadth—to write the truth about life and death in general, not only the truth about war. To ask Dostoevsky’s question: how much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself? Evil is unquestionably tempting. Evil is more artful than good. More attractive. As I delve more deeply into the boundless world of war, everything else becomes slightly faded, more ordinary than the ordinary. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the solitude of the human being who comes back from there. As if from another planet or from the other world. This human being has a knowledge which others do not have, which can be obtained only there, close to death. When she tries to put something into words, she has a sense of catastrophe. She is struck dumb. She wants to tell, the others would like to understand, but they are all powerless.

They are always in a different space than the listener. They are surrounded by an invisible world. At least three persons participate in the conversation: the one who is talking now, the one that she was then, and myself. My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she is happy or unhappy. Do we talk by ourselves, or is someone else there? Family? If it’s friends—what sort? Friends from the front are one thing, all the rest are another. My documents are living beings; they change and fluctuate together with us; there is no end of things to be gotten out of them. Something new and necessary for us precisely now. This very moment. What are we looking for? Most often not great deeds and heroism, but small, human things, the most interesting and intimate for us. Well, what would I like most to know, for instance, from the life of ancient Greece? From the history of Sparta? I would like to read how people talked at home then and what they talked about. How they went to war. What words they spoke on the last day and the last night before parting with their loved ones. How they saw them off to war. How they awaited their return from war… Not heroes or generals, but ordinary young men…

History through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, that interests me, that I would like to make into literature. But the narrators are not only witnesses—least of all are they witnesses; they are actors and makers. It is impossible to go right up to reality. Between us and reality are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, that each person has her version, and it is from them, from their plurality and their intersections, that the image of the time and the people living in it is born. But I would not like it to be said of my book: her heroes are real, and no more than that. This is just history. Mere history.

I write not about war, but about human beings in a war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of feelings. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times.

They say to me: well, memories are neither history nor literature. They’re simply life, full of rubbish and not tidied up by the hand of an artist. The raw material of talk, every day is filled with it. These bricks lie about everywhere. But bricks don’t make temple! But for me it is all different… It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals.

I build temples out of our feelings… Out of our desires, our disappointments. Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.

__________________________________

From The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich, courtesy Random House. Copyright 2017 by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Beauty hasn’t ever been all about looks. Back in the day, noblewomen didn’t wear corsets just to look slim and pretty: they were also to maintain an upright posture, reflecting the ladies’ high moral standards and self-discipline. Today the corset is considered a symbol of inequality, but little has changed. It has transformed from an item of clothing into a way of conditioning the body: muscles now define a woman’s silhouette. Loose flesh and extra pounds are seen as evidence of a person’s lack of self-restraint. Celebrities ping back into shape mere weeks after having a baby and are admired for it. Superwoman beats nature without losing her fertility—or her waist. Not even Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind (1936) could manage that, but I’m sure she wanted to. She knew her appearance could help save her from penury.

Naomi Wolf argues in the Beauty Myth (1990) that the more legal and material hindrances we have broken through, the more heavily the images of female beauty weigh on us. Western beauty standards have spread globally, to all classes, and the more money women have, the more they can spend on achieving beauty. What bothers me is that this pursuit is seen as vain, making women feel guilty. Studies have shown that attractive women are more likely to get hired. There’s nothing vain about that goal.

The books I’ve chosen below aren’t about what beauty looks like. We have enough movies and magazines lining up aspirational representations of the female body. What these images cannot tell us is how beauty is experienced, or how it hurts.

BEAUTY IS WHITE

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

Tyra Banks had a talk show and in one of the episodes she interviewed little girls of color about hair. The girls were asked to choose the best and worst hair from a row of wigs. They picked the blond wig for the “good” hair. They didn’t think about beauty as such, but they were sure they would have more friends and people would like them more if they were fair-haired. Kinky hair was considered the worst, the “bad” hair. Again, they weren’t trying to define ideals of beauty, but they were sure people would like them less, and that they would be considered poor or lower-class if they had hair like that. The girls were so young, yet they still perceived hair as a symbol of class, economic status, and—simply—love.

In Americanah, Adichie writes about all of this, and asks important questions. For example, would Barack Obama have been elected president if Michelle hadn’t relaxed her hair?

BEAUTY IS A DANGER

Jennifer Clement, Prayers for the Stolen (2014)

Western girls are taught to be afraid of walking alone after dark, but in the Mexican countryside being a girl is dangerous even in broad daylight. In this world the druglords rule and young women live under constant threat of being kidnapped for their entertainment. When a girl is born, the mother cries out “it’s a boy!” to keep the girl safe. Mothers cut their daughters’ hair short, dress them as boys, and dig holes in the ground to hide them when they hear the hum of an approaching car. The girls themselves use markers to blacken their teeth to look as ugly as possible. The prettier the daughter, the more desperate the mother. Future prospects for these girls are narrow and education can’t offer a path to a better life either—teachers don’t dare to come teach at these local schools.

BEAUTY IS GOOD BEHAVIOR

Aino Kallas, The Wolf’s Bride (1928)

The Wolf’s Bride is set in the 17th century, on an Estonian island called Hiiumaa. Aalo, a forester’s young wife, is pretty and tame as lamb during the daytime, but when night falls she cannot resist the call of the wolf pack. The spirit of the forest turns her into a wolf. As a beast, she tastes freedom: from men, and from the social norms and obligations of being a woman.

The narrator of the book is a clerk transcribing this legend of a wife possessed, and he calls the spirit of the forest “Demon.” The story is written in archaic Finnish, and the character Aalo’s own voice is not represented, which is true to the time. Through use of this literary technique, Kallas found a clever way to demonstrate the way female perspectives were excluded in that era. Her method is unique in Finnish literature and she is a unique author: her main body of work is based on Estonian folklore and its focus is on women’s position in the world of men. The book can be read as an allegory of female sexuality, but it also reflects the issues that interested female authors in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of the modern woman.

BEAUTY AT WAR

The Book of Judith

The Book of Judith can be read as the first historical novel, but my main interest is in Judith herself. This beautiful young widow saved her people by seducing the warlord Holofernes and slitting his throat. Afterward she led her life as a respected member of her community, on her own.

As a rule, women who use their charms to change the course of a war have had reputation issues. Judith’s story is an exception. Martin Luther didn’t consider the book fit for his bible, nor did he see Judith as an individual, but rather as a metaphor for the Jewish people. I’m sure this interpretation helped to keep her flag pure and bright. Again, Judith is not the narrator of her own story. We don’t hear her voice. We don’t know if she chose to live alone because she wanted freedom, or because nobody wanted her after she had slept with the enemy, no matter her motives.

In general the role of a woman during wartime has been either victim or keeper of the hearth. Female soldiers might have been welcomed into battle, but when peace came, they often found themselves tainted in the eyes of society. War wounds aren’t becoming to women; the position of hero is reserved for men. Svetlana Alexievich has written about this in War’s Unwomanly Face (1965). Worth a read.

BEAUTY DRIVES YOU MAD 

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children,” Sylvia Plath writes in her poem “The Münich Mannequins.” She gets straight to the point: the ideal female shape is too thin to bear children, and yet it’s still considered something to strive for. In her poems she writes often about the impossibility of being a good woman, but also about the urge to die, female depression, and self-harming. Statistically women harm themselves more than men. Otherwise flawless women cut themselves and starve themselves to death: they turn their aggression inward, toward themselves, whereas men tend to turn their aggression toward the world. Perhaps it’s just politeness. Good girls don’t get into fights.

__________________________________

Sofi Oksanen’s Norma is available now from Knopf.

We continue our year-end countdown of the top 50 literary stories of the year. For 50 through 36, head here; for 35 to 26, click here.

25. The VIDA Count Expands, Shows Slight Improvement

In April, the 2014 VIDA Count was released as well as the new 2014 Women of Color VIDA Count, which count the number of women and women of color, respectively, published in literary journals, magazines, and review outlets over the course of the year. After six years of the count and many proclamations by editors that “we will improve,” a number of journals actually had made progress towards balancing the gender gap in their contributors. Others, though, like The Times Literary Supplement and The Paris Review, still have a way to go.

24. A Nonfiction, Female Writer Wins the Nobel Prize

In October, Svetlana Alexievich became only the 14th woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature—an honor deeply deserved, though rarely extended to nonfiction writers. Many consider Alexievich’s books to belong to an entirely new genre: her “polyphonic writings” combine responses from hundreds of interviews to create sprawling oral histories. The Swedish Academy had this to say about her:

For the past 30 or 40 years she’s been busy mapping the Soviet and post-Soviet individual. But it’s not really a history of events. It’s a history of emotions. What she’s offering us is really an emotional world.

Excerpts from Alexievich’s 2006 book, Voices From Chernobyl, are available online.

23. Paris Finds Solace in Hemingway

Following the horrific terrorist attacks in Paris, Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast became the #1 bestseller in France, and copies of the book are left as a tribute to the victims. In a much-shared interview, a woman identified only as Danielle explained:

It’s very important to see, many times, Hemingway’s book, A Moveable Feast, because we are a very ancient civilization, and we will hold high the banner of our values, and we will show brotherhood to the five million Muslims who exercise their religion freely and kindly.

22. White Guys Deprived of Awards

It was a bad year for bigoted sci fi and fantasy fans. The Sad Puppies, a voting bloc initiated in 2013, campaigned to create an overwhelmingly white and male ballot for the Hugo Awards in response to perceived “affirmative action.” As organizer Brad L. Torgersen believes, awards were given “because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters.” Obviously, the Internet retaliated, and none of their choices received awards; however, the Sad Puppies did succeed in preventing worthy work from ever appearing on the ballot. In similar news, the World Fantasy award decided to change its statuette from a likeness of “avowed racist” H.P. Lovecraft.

21. The Rise of Literary Conspiracy Theories

Desperate to join in on the unpublished manuscript fun (see #33), both the Times Literary Supplement and Harper’s Magazine invented literary discoveries—the former ran a 1,600-word poem “by Philip Larkin” and the latter ran an elaborate evidence board theorizing that Thomas Pynchon had written a book about cows under a pen name. A series of Internet searches proved the author to be a man living in Hawaii who stated over email that there was “definitely no virality here….. :(“

20. Authors Officially Named “Influential”

TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential People for 2015 included Haruki Murakami, described by Yoko Ono as “a writer of great imagination and human sympathy,” as well as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “the rare novelist who in the space of a year finds her words sampled by Beyoncé, optioned by Lupita Nyong’o and honored with the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.”

19. The New Republic Becomes Even Newer

In a dramatic and surprisingly public regime change, one of the country’s grand old magazines saw itself dragged into the 21st century—for some, this occasioned lamentation, for others, more neutral appreciations. Granted, this was toward the end of 2014, but 2015 has seen a series of very smart hires, and the new New Republic has quickly proven to be a strong and vital source for the best cultural and political writing online (and print, too!).

18. Joan Didion Models, Inspires Internet Fights

Joan Didion kicked off the year with an instantly viral appearance in a Celine ad, prompting a question of cultural ownership: does she “belong” more to the lit girls, or the fashion world? Later, the publication of Tracy Daugherty’s Didion biography, The Last Love Song, prompted a wave of thinkpieces about the octogenarian icon, from her legacy of cool to her transformation into a kind of symbolic shorthand.

17. DFW Finally Gets the Movie He Never Wanted

The End of the Tour, a film starring Jason Segel in a bandanna as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as Jesse Eisenberg, came out this year. Although a lot of people were prepared to unload all their vitriol, it turned out to be a very good movie. There were as many thinkpieces as you would expect a movie about DFW featuring the star of The Muppets to generate. Many argued that Wallace would have loathed a dramatization of his life, that it contradicts his personal philosophy and work, that the film was made without the approval of his family and trust, and that his current iteration of fans are literary chauvinists (or, more succinctly: lit-bros).

16. The US Government Surprises No One

In news that is sadly unsurprising, the FBI kept detailed files on James Baldwin (1,884 pages), Gabriel García Márquez (270 pages), and “nearly half of the nationally prominent African-American authors working from 1919 (Hoover’s first year at the Bureau, and the first year of the Harlem Renaissance) to 1972 (the year of Hoover’s death and the peak of the nationalist Black Arts movement).”

Moscow is emptying out. Friends, old flames, are leaving. There’s a strange light in familiar windows. Even the city itself, as a space of the memory, belongs now to a past epoch, estranged from many of us who remain.

Walking the streets of the Russian capital today, those of us who were born in the 1970s and 80s realize we were born in a country that no longer exists. We came of age of the 90s, when the Russia that existed then came to us freely, without conditions, like a gift from history. We were spoiled by fate; we felt it was enough to express ourselves in informal signs of community—we waved white ribbons in 2011 to protest flawed elections, but discovered that ribbons were no match for red tape—than in institutional forms of solidarity and democracy: we started few political parties, joined power in few professional unions or public organizations. And so it turned out it was enough for the atmosphere to change, and all of a sudden our generation could only watch; history closed in on us.

Today, it can be said that history is no longer the past, but is walking each step with us. We increasingly perceive uncomfortable parallels with the 1920s and 30s. That we debate which age we’re closer to—the terror of Lenin or the terror of Stalin—speaks volumes about our present situation.

There are images of life in Moscow today which recall images from an earlier time: “The house is sealed in silence now / Only the ticking of the clock. / But the hand won’t touch the switch / The light disturbs the anguish.” These lines were written by my great aunt, Tatyana Lebedeva, a few years before she died of starvation during the Siege of Leningrad. Her body would be buried in a mass grave in one of the city cemeteries. Her apartment would be ransacked, her belongings would disappear, and there would remain only a slim notebook filled with poetry, safeguarded by a friend.

“The house is sealed in silence now… ” The poem was dedicated to a parting with a beloved, but time impinges upon language, prescribes verbs: sealed. Because in the same months as the poem was written, the Soviet NKVD secret police had “sealed” the apartments of the arrested; exiting onto the stairwell, people saw wax stamps on their neighbors’ doors, doors of apartments from whence residents had been led away.

“The house is sealed in silence now… ” At the end of the 90s, having fallen in love myself, I read these lines, and the metaphor seemed striking. Today, 15 years later, it no longer seems so. It is: it’s my house that’s been sealed in silence.

The first thing that loses its voice is joy. You are swimming in the current of news. At first it horrifies you: whether it’s word of yet another raid on the offices of a human rights organization or a lawless arrest, you feel anger, alarm, indignation, fear. Then the feelings subside. You get used to them. But nonetheless there’s just no place for joy in today’s Moscow. At least not for sober-thinking people, despite the fabulous (though shrinking) wealth that has been amassed by a precious few; life transforms into exhausting slogs along dark Kafkaesque corridors.

Then your friends disappear. In 1998, having finished high school, I thought seriously about joining the army. My older friend, having served in the special forces, gave me a copy of Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. He handed it to me and said, “Read this before you decide.” I read it. And I forever parted ways with romantic notions of war.

When Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature this past October, the same man who’d once performed a feat that had in a way set the course of my life—that same man said that Alexievich’s books are all lies, that she slanders Russia (presumably, in the service of the West). Many people cling to this inverted picture of the world, if only so as not to feel a strident loneliness in the midst of general unity.

Others are ready to plunge into the ecstasy of power, the ardor of loyalty—anything so long as they don’t feel the oncoming gloom. And many, of course, are ready to accept once again the propaganda of “Russia arising from its knees,”—She rises!—for that way at least there can be an ersatz future. The search for historical analogues invariably leads to 1937, the year of the Great Terror, when the mechanism of repression was built on the application of direct force—arrests, exile, executions; entire strata of the population were crossed out, subtracted from existence.

But today the practice of large-scale direct violence is no longer called for. With much success, the “soft” violence of the media has taken its place; a sophisticated brainwashing has advanced to a degree that Stalin’s government could never have dreamed of. After all, by 1937 the literacy rate in Russia was 75 percent; now everybody can watch (state-controlled) TV.

Those arrested during the Moscow protests against Putin’s government in the spring of 2012 generally received just a few years of prison time. The Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, arrested two years later in Crimea, got put behind bars for 20 years. The difference in severity can’t be explained by the legal code. This was a signal, a sign of the new times, a new yardstick of risk and fear.

And what’s most important is that today’s Russia already has behind her, in the chain of generations, a giant trauma that gets passed on anew. The physical terror of the 1930s is no longer necessary in Moscow. It’s enough for the past to keep reminding us of itself in order to actualize this atavistic fear; it is repression simply by means of the painful memory of repression. Thus for a person who was tortured long ago, it’s enough from time to time to hear the voice of his torturer, to hear that intonation forgotten long ago, in order to again lose the strength and the will for protest. Perhaps that’s one reason why Putin has set about reviving Stalin’s reputation in history textbooks used by children all around Russia.

Moscow has now become that house sealed in silence. And we are increasingly afraid to touch the switch and illuminate the dark corners of this city.

In 2015, the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Born to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father, Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals in dramatic events, such as World War II, the Afghan War, the Chernobyl tragedy, and the USSR’s collapse. In The Red Cycle, Alexievich creates a unique collage of a wide range of voices through what she calls “conversations,” sometimes conducting many with a single subject in order to break through to a moment of stunning truth. Alexievich was trained as a journalist but breaks new ground in the boundary between reporting and fiction by insisting that her books are “documentary novels.” Her latest book, Second-Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets was recently translated into English (by Bela Shayevich) and published by Random House.

Alexievich’s central message is that post-communist countries like Belarus will not become free and democratic if the citizens of these societies cannot free themselves from the destructive Soviet legacy that affects even young people who have never lived under communism. She was recently hosted at Washington, DC’s National Endowment for Democracy at a standing room only lunchtime event; policymakers, academicians, pundits, and media all came to hear the prize-winning author in conversation with Leon Wieseltier, the former longtime literary editor at The New Republic and now a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

(NB: Svetlana Alexievich spoke in Russian; headsets were provided for simultaneous translation, and while any mistakes in translation might be lost, any mistakes in transcription are my own.)

Alexievich began by explaining why she has developed a new way of documenting history. “Life is much faster than any event,” she told Wieseltier. “It involves a lot of people, a lot of witnesses and testimonies.” She said that from her earliest memories, she found her childhood home and village “much more interesting than fiction. Journalism is wonderful, but still limiting. It takes only the upper layer of life. I want to delve deeper, to see the truth of human beings.”

She slowly realized, “Why not compose a novel using live voices? Every person has a deeper truth. . . I never call what I do ‘interviews.’ We speak to each other as neighbors, in a new genre that is required by our time. It is a history of human feelings.”

Wieseltier asked Alexievich to expand on what this “history of human feelings” is, and she responded by talking about details that would be “lost in the scheme of grand history, a tremble of the heart that reveals our true humanity.” She then told the story of a woman she spoke with who had been a combatant in World War II. When Alexievich asked her what she had packed to bring to the front, the woman said she brought “a suitcase full of chocolate bonbons.”

“These are normal women who had their own humanity,” said Alexievich. “I do not collect catastrophes. I collect moments of the human journey.”

Since her new book’s subtitle is “The Last of the Soviets,” Wieseltier and Alexievich spent some time discussing Homo sovieticus, also known as “the sovok:” Citizens of the former USSR who have internalized that lost society’s ideals. “To me the sovok is a tragic notion,” said Alexievich, who explained that her father was “90 years a communist” and always found an explanation for what his government did. Her own “free moment” came when the truth about Soviet involvement in Afghanistan was revealed. “My Dad didn’t have anything to say to that,” she said. “He just cried.”

“If a person doesn’t know what freedom means, they can’t process the information they are getting,” she said. “Freedom is not a holiday, it’s not a feast, it’s not tomorrow. It’s a long journey, and it takes work.” Wieseltier noted that she seems to be examining political versus societal emancipation, “the magnitude of the disorientation and dislocation of a society when a dictatorship falls.” Alexievich agreed: “We were just shown the windows of the Western stores, but we didn’t think about the work of freedom. We didn’t have people who could tell anyone about that work.”

As the formal conversation came to a close, Wieseltier asked Alexievich if it is her intention to use her moral authority as an artist to effect change. She answered by describing the current mood in her country and in the rest of the former Soviet states: “As of now, everyone is in waiting mode.” Many of her closest friends and associates are reading literature written during the 1920s in Germany and in pre-revolutionary Russia, other times of foreboding.

Alexievich was a bit more specific while answering questions from the audience. “I’m not a big fan of revolution,” she told one person. “It is very hard for an artist to step over human life. . . I always think the barricades are a bad place for artists.” When Wieseltier asked her if she is a pessimist, Alexievich told him, “I am not so much a pessimist, but we have been romanticizing notions of freedom for so long. We need to be realists; a new age is upon us.”

Afterwards, I asked Wieseltier where else we might see this new genre that Svetlana Alexievich has created. “People in this country have compared her to Studs Terkel, which is unfair,” He said. “She’s much more profound, much more nuanced, she is herself a kind of spiritual figure, of spiritual intensity. In principle, her methods could be applied to the study or the portraiture of any society. She thinks that art has failed to capture some very significant things about the society that she knows. But it’s not a method that is confined to her society, by any means.”

What about her editing process? Wieseltier emphatically responded that Alexievich’s work “is not journalism. This is literature. It’s only after she’s gotten to know a person, after there’s been some kind of spiritual connection made, that she gives an account of that conversation. But in a book like this, one has to trust her—and she asks for that trust.”

My father would say that he personally started believing in communism after Gagarin was sent into space. We’re the first! We can do anything! That’s how he and my mother raised us. I was a Little Octobrist, I sported the pin with the curly-headed boy; I was a Young Pioneer; a member of the Komsomol [1]. Disillusionment only came later.

After perestroika, we were all impatient for the archives to be unsealed. Finally, it happened. We learned the history that they had been hiding from us…

‘We need to attract ninety million out of the hundred that populate Soviet Russia. It’s impossible to talk to the rest of them–they must be eliminated.’ (Zinoviev, 1918.)

‘We must hang (and it has to be hanging, so that the people will see) no fewer than 1,000 inveterate kulaks, the rich ones… seize their grain, take hostages… Make sure that people hear about it one hundred versts [2] around and tremble from fear…’ (Lenin, 1918.)

‘Moscow is literally dying of hunger.’ (N.G. Kuznetsov to Trotsky.).

‘That’s not hunger. When Titus was taking Jerusalem, Jewish mothers ate their children. When I have your mothers eating their young, then you can tell me you’re starving.’ (Trotsky, 1919.)

People read newspapers and magazines, and sat in stunned silence. They were overcome with unspeakable horror. How were we supposed to live with this? Many greeted the truth as an enemy. And freedom as well. ‘We don’t know our own nation. We don’t understand what the majority of people think about; we see them, we interact with them every day, but what’s on their minds? What do they want? We have no idea. But we will courageously take it upon ourselves to educate them. Soon, we will learn everything and be horrified,’ my friend would say in my kitchen, where we often sat talking. I’d argue with him. It was 1991… A happy time! We believed that tomorrow, the very next day, would usher in freedom. That it would materialize out of nowhere, from the sheer force of our wishing.

From Varlam Shalamov’s Notebooks: ‘I participated in the great lost battle for the true reinvention of life.’ The man who wrote these words spent seventeen years in Stalin’s camps. He continued to yearn for the ideals… I would divide the Soviets into four generations: the Stalin, the Khrushchev, the Brezhnev, and the Gorbachev. I belong to the last of these. It was easier for my generation to accept the defeat of the communist idea because we hadn’t been born yet when it was still young, strong, and alive with the magic of fatal romanticism and utopian aspirations. We grew up with the Kremlin ancients; in Lenten, vegetarian times [3]. The great bloodshed of communism had already been lost to the ages. Pathos raged, but the knowledge that utopia should not be attempted in real life was already ingrained in us.

It was during the first Chechen war… At a train station in Moscow, I met a woman from the Tambov area. She was headed to Chechnya to take her son home from the war. ‘I don’t want him to die. I don’t want him to kill.’ The government no longer owned her soul. This was a free person. There were not many of them. More often, people were irritated with freedom. ‘I buy three newspapers and each one of them has its own version of the truth. Where’s the real truth? You used to be able to get up in the morning, read Pravda, and know everything that you needed to know and understand.’ People were slow to come out from under the narcosis of old ideas. If I brought up repentance, the response would be, ‘What do I have to repent for?’ Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One person would say, ‘I did time, too’, another, ‘I fought in the war’, a third, ‘I built my city up from the ruins, hauling bricks day and night.’ Freedom had materialized out of thin air: everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had really been prepared for it. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables, where, out of habit, people continued to badmouth the government. They reviled Yeltsin and Gorbachev: Yeltsin for changing Russia, Gorbachev for changing everything. The entire twentieth century. Now we would live no worse than anyone else. Be just like everyone else. We thought that this time, we would get it right.

Russia was changing and hating itself for its changes. ‘The immobile Mongol,’ Marx wrote of Russia.

* * * *

The Soviet civilization… I’m rushing to make impressions of its traces, its familiar faces. I don’t ask about socialism, I want to know about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Music, dances, hairdos. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. It’s the only way to chase the catastrophe into the contours of the ordinary and try to tell a story. Make some small discovery. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is concerned solely with the facts; emotions are outside of its realm of interest. In fact, it’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. But I look at the world as a writer and not an historian. I am fascinated by people.

* * * *

My father is no longer living, so we won’t get to finish one of our conversations… He claimed that it was easier to die in the war in his day than it is for the untried boys to die in Chechnya today. In the 1940s, they went from one hell to another. Before the war, my father had been studying at the Minsk Institute of Journalism. He would recall how often, on returning to college after the holidays, students wouldn’t recognize a single one of their professors because they had all been arrested. They didn’t understand what was happening, but whatever it was, it was terrifying. Just as terrifying as a war.

I didn’t have many honest, open conversations with my father. He felt sorry for me. Did I feel sorry for him? It’s hard to answer that question… We were merciless toward our parents. We thought that freedom was a very simple thing. A little time went by, and soon, we too bowed under its yoke. No one had taught us how to be free. We had only ever been taught how to die for freedom.

So here it is, freedom! Is it everything we had hoped it would be? We were prepared to die for our ideals. To prove ourselves in battle. Instead, we ushered in a Chekhovian life. Without any history. Without any values except for the value of human life—life in general. Now we have new dreams: building a house, buying a decent car, planting gooseberries… Freedom turned out to mean the rehabilitation of bourgeois existence, which has traditionally been suppressed in Russia. The freedom of Her Highness Consumption. Darkness exalted. The darkness of desire and instinct—the mysterious human life, of which we only ever had approximate notions. For our entire history, we’d been surviving instead of living. Today, there’s no longer any use for our experience in war; in fact, it ought to be forgotten. There are thousands of newly available feelings, moods, and responses. Everything around us has been transformed: the billboards, the clothing, the money, the flag… And people themselves. People are now more colourful, more individualized; the monolith has been shattered and life has splintered into a million little fragments, cells, and atoms. It’s like in Dal’s dictionary [4]: free will… free rein… wide-open spaces. The grand old evil is nothing but a distant saga, some political detective story. After perestroika, no one was talking about ideas anymore—instead it was credit, interest, and promissory notes; people no longer earned money, they ‘made’ it or ‘scored’ it. Is all this here to stay? ‘The fact that money is a fiction is ineradicable from the Russian soul,’ wrote Marina Tsvetaeva [5]. But it’s as though Ostrovsky and Saltykov-Shchedrin [6] characters have come to life and are promenading down our streets.

I asked everyone I met what ‘freedom’ meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born afterwards do not share a common experience. They’re people from different planets.

For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear; the three days in August when we defeated the putsch. A man with his choice of a hundred kinds of salami is freer than one who only has ten to choose from. Freedom is never being flogged, although no generation of Russians has yet avoided a flogging. Russians don’t understand freedom, they need the Cossack and the whip.

For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you’re not afraid of your own desires, it’s having lots of money, so that you’ll have everything; it’s when you can live without having to think about freedom. Freedom is normal.

In the 90s… yes, we were elated; there’s no way back to that naiveté. We thought that the choice had been made and that communism had been defeated forever. But it was only the beginning…

Twenty years have gone by… ‘Don’t scare us with your socialism,’ children tell their parents.

From a conversation with a university professor: ‘At the end of the 90s, my students would laugh when I told them stories about the Soviet Union. They were sure that a new future awaited them. Now, it’s a different story… Today’s students have truly seen and felt capitalism: the inequality, the poverty, the shameless wealth. They’ve witnessed the lives of their parents, who never got anything out of the plundering of our country. And they’re oriented toward radicalism. They dream of their own revolution and wear red t-shirts with pictures of Lenin and Che Guevara.’

There’s a new demand for everything Soviet. For the cult of Stalin. Half of the people between the ages of nineteen and thirty consider Stalin an ‘unrivaled political figure’. A new cult of Stalin, in a country where he murdered at least as many people as Hitler?! Everything Soviet is back in style. ‘Soviet-style cafés’ with Soviet names and Soviet dishes. ‘Soviet’ candy and ‘Soviet’ salami, their taste and smell all too familiar from childhood. And of course, ‘Soviet’ vodka. There are dozens of Soviet-themed TV shows, scores of websites devoted to Soviet nostalgia. You can visit Stalin’s camps—on Solovki, in Magadan—as a tourist. The adverts promise that for the full effect, they’ll give you a camp uniform and a pickaxe. They’ll show you the newly restored barracks. Afterwards, there will be fishing…

* * * *

Old-fashioned ideas are back in style: the great empire, the ‘iron hand’, the ‘special Russian path’. They brought back the Soviet anthem; there’s a new Komsomol, only now it’s called Nashi [7]; there’s a ruling party and it runs the country by the Communist Party playbook; the Russian president is just as powerful as the General Secretary once was, which is to say he has absolute power. Instead of Marxism-Leninism, there’s Russian Orthodoxy…

* * * *

On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, one hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it should be. Our time comes to us second-hand.

^[1] Little Octobrists, Young Pioneers, and the Komsomol were Soviet youth organizations that most children joined in school. Children were Little Octobrists from age 7 to 9, when they would join the Young Pioneers. At 14, children could elect to join the Komsomol, the ‘youth division of the Communist Party.’

^[2] Obsolete Russian unit of length, equal to approximately 1.07 kilometers, or .7 miles.

^[3] Russian and Soviet modernist poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) coined the term ‘the vegetarian years’ to describe a period when her work was merely suppressed and not published, as opposed to the ‘cannibalism’ of Stalin’s purges, when Soviets, including many fellow poets, were murdered by the millions. It is used colloquially to denote the contrast between Stalinism and what followed.

^[4] Vladimir Dal (1801-1872). Author of the most influential Russian dictionary collecting sayings, proverbs, and bywords compiled during his extensive travels through Russia.

^[5]Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941) was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet.

^[6] Alexander Ostrovsky (1823-1886), prominent nineteenth-century Russian realist playwright whose plays depicting the petite bourgeoisie are still among the most performed in Russia today. Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), satirist, novelist, and playwright, whose works criticized Russian officialdom and the prevailing social order of his day.

^[7] Nashi: popular Putinist youth organization; the name means ‘Our People.’

Excerpted from SECONDHAND TIME by Svetlana Alexievich. Copyright © 2016 by Svetlana Alexievich. Excerpted by permission of Random House, A Penguin Random House Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

For the past 30 years, Svetlana Alexievich has been writing one long book about the effect of communism and its demise on people in the former Soviet Bloc. Based on interviews, her books conjure a chorus of voices that rise and fall and arrange themselves into symphonic narratives: Here are the voices of Russians scarred by the meltdown of Chernobyl (Voices from Chernobyl), angered by the shame of Afghan War (Zinky Boys), and now, with Secondhand Time, bewildered by the collapse of communism and assumption they should all be capitalists now.

Alexievich was in some ways born into this task. Both of her parents were teachers and her father once studied journalism himself. At university, Alexievich was exposed to the work of Belarusian writer, Ales Adomovich, who believed the 20th century was so horrific it needed no elaboration.

Unlike Studs Terkel, whose oral histories of American life arrange themselves like transcribed radio interviews, Alexievich’s books are strange creations. They never ask the reader to think to imagine their subjects are representative individuals. When she won the Nobel in 2015, Alexievich described them as novels—which is a fair comparison given the meticulous arrangement required to create such clear and evocative pastiche. Whatever they are, her books are as eerie and beautiful as overheard voices on a crowded train car traveling through the night.

Alexievich came to New York this June for events around Secondhand Time (read an excerpt here), the first of three books that will be translated by Random House in the next three years. I spoke to her in the empty auditorium where she would be interviewed in an hour’s time through a translator.

John Freeman: I’m curious how you became a listener?

Svetlana Alexievich: It happened from early childhood. I lived in the country, in the village, that was after the war. My parents were both village teachers. The village was full of women. And they had to work very hard during the day, there were no men left in the village, and after they were done with work—the village was full of benches—they would all come outside and they would talk. It was scary to listen to them, but it was also very interesting.

They talked about war about death about loss, because some lost their husbands recently and this was much more exciting and much more interesting than reading the books that we had in the house. Our house was filled with books. When I got into journalism school, I tried a lot of different things. I applied myself in fiction, in drama, and I realized there was nothing as interesting as real life voices. And when you are a journalist and you are traveling to different villages, to small towns—Belarus is not a large country it is a small country—that’s how I came to this form.

This idea does exist in the traditional fashion, of folktales, just maybe not in the way I’ve done it, but the tradition of storytelling is obviously there. Every genre of arts, painting or sculpture or music, people are looking for new forms, people are looking for new ideas, and I thought well why not something new in literature. We had a remarkable writer in Belarus, his name is Ales Adamovich, and this is someone who I consider to be my mentor, my teacher, and he also worked in the genre and he always said that there is no need to invent anything, that life is rich enough there is no need for invention.

JF: Throughout this book I sense and I hear from various voices a frustration that literature did not prepare the people you speak to for the changes in Soviet life. Do you feel like this book and the people that you’re speaking to in it are expressing a frustration with the failure of imaginative literature to connect them to life? One character even says, with frustration and realization, “back then books replaced life.”

SA: I think it’s a very good observation because we are a word-centric country. It’s this Russian tendency to live in an idea or that people tend to live by the word and in the book. There has always been this ingrained idea in people’s minds that books are there to teach you how to live, that they create ideals for you to uphold. Especially in the Soviet times, when they were actually remaking a human being, remaking a person, literature was there as a major tool of support.

It’s also a closed country because people did not travel. They almost always saw Russian films. There were very little American films, very little music. So there was very little coming in from the outside world in general, so books really were the only outlet, and that’s why people react to them so intensely. It was a remarkable time. People were so desperate. I remember after Perestroika there were ads, handwritten ads, I will buy a kilo of food. It didn’t specify what food because everything became so scarce and people in that desperation really felt betrayed by their military and ideals.

I also remember how people got rid of Russian writers like Mayakovsky. At some point the bookshops stopped taking his books because they were full and you could go and find them basically in the dumpster and the garbage heap. And you know before people would actually try to assemble a small library and they would go and they would subscribe and the volumes would arrive by subscription and people would have to go and get them; it was a big point of pride to assemble a book collection, a small library and with Perestroika that all changed.

I remember visiting one family. It was supposed to be a family of the intelligentsia, but the woman was apologetically saying how, “Actually, I wanted to show you my new coffeemaker because I am ashamed of the old coffeemaker, and the new washing machine gives me just as much joy as books used to do.” People were apologetic but you could go out into the street markets and find an abundance of books that even a few years before were considered to be scarce. Suddenly, you could find them, you didn’t have to stay in line, and they were there in the bins nobody was interested in. It became a new world of materialism, people got pleasure from new food, from travel, from new things. And the book was defeated.

JF: The word shame comes up a lot in Secondhand Time. People say, “I’m ashamed.”

SA: I think it’s also very characteristic of Russian culture. I recall the story of women who were walking towards the river and the men were trying not to look at the women because they had their periods and they had nothing, no sanitary pads, so they had blood running down their legs and the blood was left on the sand and god knows what it caused later and in their bodies and their systems. But then they came to the river and the men ran and hid and the women were ashamed that they wanted to get into the river and clean themselves; a lot of those women died that day, of cold. On the one hand it’s very patriarchal culture, for the role of women, but on the other hand it’s a very communal culture because in the villages and collective farms a person is always part of a collective and never really an individual.

JF: This book begins with a series of unattributed voices and then gradually moves into acknowledged sources—so I wondered how you chose the people you interviewed for Zinky Boys and Voices From Chernobyl. Those books were about specific and discrete groups of people—survivors and parents of survivors or those who were lost—whereas this book, being about the end of the Soviet era, involves an enormous number of people. How did you choose which voices to record?

SA: I think this is why Secondhand Time was the most difficult book to write. Zinky Boys was really about war and there is such a thing as culture of war and you know in what space you work. But here we deal with a collapse of a huge empire and when it happened people found themselves sitting on its pieces and the pieces were different. In that sense, as a book, shaping its narrative was a challenge.

In the past 30 years I have largely been writing a history of Communism, the Red Communism in Russia, coming from the premise that the most important object was Communism and its disappearance. What was important was to mark the most painful things. What we were and what people were losing from under their feet as it was going away: the history of the war, the history of the camp, the history of the faith… that was the premise. I think it’s very much done not in order to create an exact picture, but a stained-glass window, if you will, as a musician or a composer might try to develop different melodies in order for them to blend in the ensemble and create that effect. I wanted to create the image of the time.

JF: Quite late in the book you speak to a waitress who has attempted suicide, she’s been married once to a man with a limp. How did you meet her?

SA: I don’t recall at this point but it might have been something I saw in the paper because this woman attempted suicide several times. It might also have been that somebody told me about her at the hospital because I came to the hospital to talk about the cases of people trying to commit suicide.

JF: There’s an epidemic it seems.

SA: I think yes, a very pronounced one, much higher than in Germany and most other countries. I think it is related to the fact that people live without being able to eat. Life under socialism gave you or gave a person some sort of a handout, it was the same for everyone, but now people are lost and they are depressed, on their own without any sort of support.

JF: Failure was their own fault.

SA: I think it’s complicated, some people were blaming the people who believed in the idea and they felt that they were betrayed the party. In that circle, a lot of people cannot teach themselves or adapt to living under capitalism. And other people were living with memories of the past, of what they went through and then we had Chechnya, we had people that came back from Afghanistan, so I was trying to kind of find the main or most important themes there.

JF: In one interview that broke my heart you spoke to the mother of a police office who was shot in Chechnya and the woman’s death was declared a suicide. I wonder when you sit and speak with people who have suffered such tremendous loss, I have two questions: one, how do you carry such stories the rest of your life? Does it have a cost to you? And second how do you disengage? These are people whose stories matter and you’re human, so how do you break off contact… or do you? Are you still in touch with many of these people?

SA: That was a woman right? A girl with a son?

JF: Yes.

SA: You know of course it is a cost, and today I have her face in front of me, she was a very beautiful Russian woman. It is hard and I do keep in touch with many of my characters, many women in particular, but a lot of them already passed away and especially the characters from my first book, The Unwomanly Face of War.

But when I consider this question, I actually think that the writers do not claim any special privilege here. Think about for example a pediatric surgeon who sees the terrible suffering of children every day, they then have to go and talk to parents. Imagine announcing the death of a child to a parent? Of course it’s a cost, but there are a lot of costs in many professions. I do not want at all to portray myself as some sort of superhero or suffering woman, but it is difficult.

I’ll tell you a story.

When I was in Afghanistan I received a call from a man. They were very resistant to having women on the battlefield so I got that call and suddenly he asks me, Do you want to see what remained of our boys that got blown up by an Italian mine? And I said, Well, what is left? And basically they’re trying to collect it with spoons so they at least have some DNA they can send to the mothers. Of course it’s 100 degrees outside and he thought I was confused or would be put off, but as a product of Russian culture I couldn’t be deterred. So I went and I saw these remains and I was human and of course I fainted.

Still, I am playing a secondary part here. I’m not the one suffering, I’m sitting in front of somebody, opposite of somebody, who really suffered and she’s sharing it with me, so this isn’t really my place, it’s her place. I stopped believing all the movies and plays where people who are suffering who cry and they yell out. This is absolutely not true. The people who truly suffer, they speak in very small voices, very quietly. They might cry a little but I don’t believe that outpouring, that is not true, that is not what I see. For me, interviewing and getting the story out, there’s a particular challenge because on the one hand I want to strip the story down to its most essential parts, on the other hand I want to go get away from that culture of crying because I want people when they tell the story to be thinking about her story and to not just sit there and cry.

JF: How do you decide who to leave out? Surely there must be five other books here of voices you did not include…

SA: You know it really all depends on the themes and the topics. A big one that is emerging is terrorism. In Secondhand Time there’s a story of a mother whose daughter got caught up in the terrorist attack that we had in our subway and there you have to decide really how the person is talking, whether they want to open up contact with you and have you know what is their process and who do you think this person really is? But I wanted to ask you what if anything grabbed you in the book?

JF: That some people could be funny. One guy says under capitalism, he learned that he had bad taste. Also, the fact that some of the heaviest suffering is born by women.

SA: In our culture this is so.

JF: Most unfortunately, it is true everywhere.

SA: Do you think it’s interesting for American readers?

JF: Absolutely. I think stories that are necessary have a peculiar vibration. My parents were social workers so they listened to people for a living.

SA: I think that they’ve probably heard no less than I did.

“I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer.” These are the words of author Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost 27 family members—including her mother and father—when Hutu throughout her nation murdered 800,000 of their fellow citizens, often brutally with nothing more than a machete.

Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile and her autobiographical work Cockroaches bear witness to these events. Mukasonga applies a feather touch to this history, even when writing about the nightmares of genocide that regularly visit her at night, the deeply ingrained, racist beliefs that fed the Hutus as they rose up in murder, or the systemic, prejudicial violence that built from 1959 forward, ultimately erupting in 1994. The simplicity with which Mukasonga states the truth is the foundation of her literary power: “The first pogroms against the Tutsis broke out on All Saints’ Day, 1959. The machinery of genocide had been put into motion. It would never stop. Until the final solution, it would never stop.”

We can call Mukasonga’s books many things, but first of all they are works that bear witness. Their primary function is to bring readers face to face with events that must be understood, and that must never be forgotten. This is not social science—as Mukasonga has said, she is “not a political writer or a historian”—rather, this is literature that delves into the granular level, bringing readers as close as possible to stories that need to be heard. The author’s literary gift is turned toward conveying a vivid sense of what has happened. Comprehension of these terrible acts—and some assurance that they will never be repeated—only begins when they are seared into the reader’s memory.

This work is of great achievement and grave importance—and it is not at all easy to successfully pull off—but witness-bearing literature has often been overlooked and underestimated. To see this we need only examine the reaction to Svetlana Alexievich’s 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, as she has made a career of this genre. Typical of the mixed praise she received, The New York Times wrote, “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.”

Nonetheless, the Nobel committee did recognize Alexievich; her powerful words are now widely read in the West, and her genre has received a boost. Similarly, audiences in Europe and America have learned greatly from Mukasonga, and her novel Our Lady of the Nile is even now required reading in Rwanda’s schools.

Clearly, these authors do a great deal more than provide a “vehicle for information.” In fact, I would go much farther than that: I side with South African Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, who calls such work one of the writer’s highest callings. This genre of literature has touched me and influenced how I think more than virtually any other kind of literature I read. And I believe that right now this sort of writing is immensely necessary.

Why now? Well, to start, we can observe that some subjects seem to want this treatment more than others. The master works of witness-bearing literature often come out of the great social tragedies, the mass events that define a society and that reveal the breakdown of politics, the failures of power. Here I would point to Massacre in Mexico by the great Mexican author and journalist Elena Poniatowska: this book is nothing more than a collage of voices collectively narrating the events leading up to Mexico City’s 1968 Tlatelolco massacre—hundreds of innocent Mexican citizens were murdered by their own government. Poniatowska’s witnesses range from ordinary Mexicans to then-President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, and their words collectively form a grand tale of how order disintegrates, enabling horrendous abuses and ending in terrible calamity. The sorcery here is that Poniatowska just listens to people speak—all you will find in this book are quotations from innumerable interviews, news stories, graffiti, and political signs—yet in her method these words become so much more. This is the trick of great witness-bearing literature: it really is made up of the facts—one of its crucial functions is to tell us this has happened—but it tells us things that mere facts are usually ill-equipped to say.

Perhaps when the Nobel committee chose Alexievich in 2015, they sensed that we had entered an era where such literature is now crucial. We are at a point of intense instability, possibly even upheaval: in Latin America, Venezuela has slid toward one-man dictatorial rule, and Brazil has thrown out a democratically elected government, instigating a period of enormous political uncertainty. In Europe, Britain has triggered Article 50, which now gives it two years to negotiate how to leave the European Union, and tension reigns throughout many other member nations. In our own country we are now edging perilously close to war with Syria and maybe even Russia; we are also in the midst of immense protests, massive xenophobia, profound dislocations of immigrants, and uncharted territory as regards Presidential politics. This is a time when the citizens of the world need literary writers to bear witness to the raw history occurring right before our eyes.

One small example: When Donald Trump’s first Muslim Ban was announced on January 27 terrible things began to occur: innocent mothers and children where hauled off flights and into indefinite detention; people with families in the United States were not allowed to come back home; many individuals were even forced into situations that posed grave dangers to their life. As I read of these abuses, one of the first things I began to want was for writers to tell these stories. I felt that it was essential to begin showing the lives that were being destroyed—not only to bring the nation face to face with the consequences of its decision to elect President Trump but also for posterity: so that these lives might become part of the tale history tells of these years.

And indeed, almost instantly reporters began to share 1,000-word articles on people whose lives had been destroyed—or at the least deeply scarred—by the ill-wrought, ultimately illegal ban. These stories are excellent and powerful—they have done immense good in sharing truths that must be seen by all people of this great nation—but they alone are not enough. We must also have a witness-bearing literature of this period that goes beyond the journalistic facts to give a literary understanding of the massive forces that have brought us to this point, and that now determine our politics. We must have our own Alexieviches, Mukasongas, Poniatowskas, and Gordimers to document the lives of this nation and the upheaval that we are going through.

I believe this is a literary task. At the dawn of the modern age, James Joyce wrote that we strive to wake from the nightmare of history, which I take to mean that our societies strive to escape from a world that exists on a tribal, imagistic, mythic sort of order—to leave that world and enter into one that is grounded in peace, justice, and rationality. I do not believe we have yet so escaped, and so long as we continue in this nightmare of history, we will only be able to fully comprehend what is happening with the blessings of art. Writers must help document and explain the endemic forces that have gained momentum and are now drawing us along on their path. They must be witnesses to these deeds for our own sake, so that we can have some meaning and common understanding in this era of confusion, and also so that the future generations will learn from the mistakes we have committed.

Great Works of Witness-Bearing Literature

Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Melanie Mauthner)
*
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Jordan Stump)
*
Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Bela Shayevich)
*
Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich (tr. Keith Gessen)
*
Survival in Auschwitz by Primo Levi (tr. Stuart Woolf)
*
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans
*
Hardly War by Don Mee Choi

This year’s fiction and nonfiction longlists for the Brooklyn Library Literary Prize honor “books which—by subverting literary forms, pushing against established ways of thinking, or otherwise introducing new or challenging ideas—speak to the Library’s ideals. This will connect the prize to the Library’s mission to create a welcoming environment in which all members of the borough’s diverse community—one of the most socially and culturally complex in the country—can come together to contemplate urgent social, political and artistic questions.” The fiction list includes Lesley Nneka Arimah‘s What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, Mohsin Hamid‘s Exit West, Michelle Tea’s Black Wave, and Lidia Yuknavitch‘s The Book of Joan. Nonfiction candidates include David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, Pankaj Mishra‘s Age of Anger, Phoebe Robinson‘s You Can’t Touch My Hair and Sarah Schulman‘s Conflict Is Not Abuse.

A new translation of Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich‘s first book is “a frightening and lacerating book — as beautiful as a ruined cathedral,” Joshua Cohen‘s new novel is a “Jewish Sopranos,” Tamara Shopsin‘s memoir “serves up the old, weird Greenwich Village,”  Zizi Clemmons‘s first novel is dubbed “the debut novel of the year,” and Achy Obejas‘s new collection proves her to be “one of the most important Cuban writers of our time.”

Svetlana Alexievich, The Unwomanly Face of War

Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” In her first book, newly translated into English by Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear, she develops her collage-style oral history in interviews with some of the 1 million women who fought in the Red Army during World War II.

Alexievich “writes movingly about the 1 million women who served in the Red Army as snipers, medics, foot soldiers, pilots, tank drivers, mechanics and other vital jobs,” writes Elaine Margolin (Truthdig). “She explores difficult terrain. What is it like to kill someone? What were they most afraid of? How have they dealt with their traumas? What effect has their war experiences had on their children and grandchildren? She observes that women remember war differently. They do not focus on heroics or the intricacies of battle as men do. Little moments remain etched in their memory and change them forever. This is what interests Alexievich, who calls herself a ‘historian of the soul.’”

“The catalogue of horrors and deprivations of this book is so vivid it seems monstrous not to fathom that time puts its most awful pressures on the story of a trauma,” writes John Freeman (Boston Globe). “It carves them into the most true instrument. Alexievich says as much in her introduction. To be so hungry as to eat potato peelings; to watch your children mimic the most deformed and yet courageous bravery. ‘[M]y mama can’t leave,’ a mother recalls her young daughter telling a pilot who wants the two of them to board his plane and escape. ‘She has to fight the fascists.’ Thousands upon thousands of them came home, and in this frightening and lacerating book—as beautiful as a ruined cathedral—Alexievich has turned their voices into history’s psalm.”

Kate Tuttle (Newsday) concludes:

At a time when Americans and Russians once again find ourselves in a strange relationship—not a Cold War, but not the allies we were during World War II—there’s something powerful about such close access to these women’s feelings. The deceptively simple form Alexievich deploys allows for an emotional range from utter despair to a kind of transcendent hope. “Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat,” one army surgeon says, “you look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful.”

Joshua Cohen, Moving Kings

This Year Cohen was named one of Granta’s Best Young American Writers. His new novel showcases his audacious talent. The starred Kirkus Review: “Cohen shows an impressive knowledge of life in the cab of a moving van and in the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. He touches on two wars and two combat zones (counting brief allusions to Afghanistan). He is funny and caustic and has a marvelous snap in his dialogue.”

“Moving Kings is a brilliant book whose brilliance comes via a bait and switch,” writes Mark Athitakis (Los Angeles Times). “It opens as a comic portrait of a midlife crisis, but concludes as a somber cautionary tale frothing with cataclysms, including fire and gunplay. It starts tucked deep into a subculture—in this case the peculiarities of running a New York City-area moving company—but expands to consume whole swaths of race and religion. It comes on as unassuming yet stylish, but circles around tricky questions of occupation and power in the U.S. and Israel. And yet none of it feels messy or overreaching—indeed, it feels master-planned to slowly unsettle your convictions, as the best novels do.”

Ron Charles (Washington Post) notes, “The clash of expectations between a rough American businessman and an Israeli innocent abroad provides the basis for some smart comedy, and Cohen is particular adept with moments of silly absurdity. He also exercises a fantastically agile style that pushes hard against the banisters of traditional grammar. The novel’s voice freely veers into these characters’ minds, picking up their thoughts and accents, mixing with the narrator’s own straight-faced asides. But for all its domestic humor, there’s barbed wire running through this story, stretching tight from New York to the West Bank. The moving business, after all, is not just a matter of transporting happy families to bigger homes. Much of David’s profit is squeezed from evictions: emptying people’s apartments as their lives careen toward ruin.”

James Wood (The New Yorker) calls Moving Kings “a Jewish Sopranos” and concludes:

Moving Kings is a strange, superbly unsuccessful novel. There’s not a page without some vital charge—a flash of metaphor, an idiomatic originality, a bastard neologism born of nothing. You could say that it is patchworked with successes: David King in the Hamptons, Yoav and Uri in the Israeli Army, the King’s Moving crew at work in New York, Avery Luter flailing in his mother’s house. Yet these stories are more convincing than the connections, thematic and formal, offered to bind them. Cohen never finds that deep novelistic form, that tensile coherence, which Woolf idealized. This is a book of brilliant sentences, brilliant paragraphs, brilliant chapters. Here things flare singly, a succession of lighted matches, and do not cast a more general illumination. But Cohen opened his previous novel with a challenge: “There’s nothing worse than description: hotel room prose. No, characterization is worse. No, dialogue is.” So if his most accessible novel yet, rich in all three despised elements, frustrates conventional satisfactions, is it because he has failed to find the right form or because he is trying to found a new one?

Tamara Shopsin, Arbitrary Stupid Goal

Shopsin offers an insider’s look at a Greenwich Village institution called The Store, her family’s grocery/café at Morton and Bedford Streets. Critical response is rapturous.

Arbitrary Stupid Goal “is a little like a meal at Shopsin’s, her family’s restaurant,” writes Alexandra Schwarz (The New Yorker). “It’s got a bit of everything, in a way that shouldn’t rightly work but does. Antique gumball machines; crossword puzzles; scam artists; perverted supers; foul apartments; fouler mouths; curry mixed into peanut butter; chewing gum stuck in armpits; known celebrities, like John Belushi and Joseph Brodsky, and unknown ones, like Willoughby, a basement-dwelling genius and the de-facto mayor of Morton Street—it’s all thrown into the pot, seasoned salty-sweet with a proprietary blend of so-it-goes nostalgia, and out it comes, delicious.”

Heller McAlpin (NPR) finds Shopsin’s book “neither arbitrary or stupid.”

Arbitrary Stupid Goal is an ode to unconventionality and an elegy to Greenwich Village in the 1970s and 80s, which was crime-riddled but also “a very tolerant place.” Shopsin reminds us that the Village used to attract “fringe people,” whom she was brought up to believe were “the nutrients of New York City.” After describing a period when what the family still calls “The Store” was robbed regularly—including twice in one day—she comments, “It is easy to cite the bad in the filthy chaos of New York before luxury condos. It is harder to express the spirit, life, and community that the chaos and inefficiency bred.” That “spirit, life, and community” are exactly what Shopsin conveys in this rich smorgasbord of memories . . .

“Shopsin’s story revolves around her father, whose declining health and mental acuity are heartbreakingly depicted—and Willy, her father’s best friend and mentor, whom she cared for at the end of his life, as Mercer Street changed forever,” writes Cory Doctorow (Boing Boing). “These two larger-than-life characters are the avatars for a different, pre-financialized New York, a lost world where family and art and laughter and craft were more important than mere money, when weirdos could flourish in the cracks and make cities into vibrant and surprising places. Their stories—dirty, funny, criminal, delicious—are a reminder of something we’ve lost in living memory: a moment before the orderliness of long supply chains and complex financial derivatives squeezed the handmade and odd out of the world. They’re the tea-leaves that brewed Make: magazine and the maker movement, avatars of indie-rock and indie culture.”

Zinzi Clemmons, What We Lose

Clemmons grew up in Philadelphia and studied with Paul Beatty in the MFA program at Columbia. The starred Kirkus Review calls her first novel “A compelling exploration of race, migration, and womanhood in contemporary America.”

“In just a slim 200 pages, Clemmons traverses the rocky terrain of race in both America and South Africa,” writes Kirkus Review’s Stephanie Buschardt. “Thandi, like Clemmons, is mixed-race. Her mother is South African, from Johannesburg, a city still reeling from its violent past, and her father was born in New York but relocated to Philadelphia, where they safely reside nestled in a wealthy, mostly white suburb. For Thandi’s parents—who pride themselves on their education—this is a monumental achievement, whereas Thandi feels like an outsider in a community in which, because of her heritage and light complexion, she’s adrift. ‘American blacks were my precarious homeland—because of my light skin and foreign roots, I was never fully accepted by any race. Plus my family had money, and all the black kids in my town came from the poorer areas,’ Clemmons writes. ‘I was a strange in-betweener.’”

Megan O’Grady (Vogue) calls What We Lose “the debut novel of the year.” “Boldly innovative and frankly sexual, the collage-like novel mixes hand-drawn charts, archival photographs, rap lyrics, sharp disquisitions on the Mandelas and Oscar Pistorius, and singular meditations on racism’s brutal intimacies. ‘I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless,’ reflects Thandi, recalling her mother’s warnings that darker girls will be jealous of her.”

“In its preoccupation with maternal loss, What We Lose recalls Jamaica Kincaid’s wonderful The Autobiography of My Mother, though the latter concerns a much earlier and life-defining loss,” writes Sarah Gilmartin (Irish Times). “Brit Bennett’s recent debut The Mothers also comes to mind. Clemmons and Bennett both offer intelligent perspectives on issues affecting black women in modern America. With its contemplations on race and its collage of genres, there are parallels with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, though What We Lose is in micro form by comparison.This is not to disparage what Clemmons has achieved in her affecting novel. Although disjointed, it is a book brimming with ideas.”

Achy Obejas, The Tower of the Antilles

In her new collection, Obejas, a Cuban-American poet, short story writer, novelist, journalist and translator, traces the complex borders between island homeland and reinvention in the U.S.  Booklist’s Donna Seaman writes: “For all the human tumult and deftly sketched and reverberating historical and cultural contexts that Obejas incisively creates in these poignant, alarming tales, she also offers lyrical musings on the mysteries of the sea and the vulnerability of islands and the body. Obejas’ plots are ambushing, her characters startling, her metaphors fresh, her humor caustic, and her compassion potent in these intricate and haunting stories of displacement, loss, stoicism, and realization.”

Porochista Khakpour (Electric Literature) selects the story “Kimberle” from this new collection for Recommended Reading, and calls it Obejas’s “masterpiece.”

Sexuality, nationality, gender, ethnicity and race all come together here in those everyday ways that they do in our lives, and then some. The then some is the way this is love story and thriller and horror and folktale and parable all at once, not in some foggy watercolor liminality but in the most stark sunlight and lighting and blood and bruise you can imagine. Obejas is the sort of writer whose gifts are so far beyond mine that the more I study her — I’ve been her reader for more than two decades, now — the more confused I am at how she builds it all. I don’t even get to ask my how does she do it? that the writer in me usually can’t let go of when I read. I lose myself too quickly in her dreams.

Ashley Miller (Atticus Review) writes, “Each story rolls open as a wave and then recedes, ending as abruptly as a wave crashing against the shore, just as another story-wave rushes forward and unfolds. In many instances, like the ex-Cubans of the stories reaching for possibilities, for promise of more, we turn the page, but the next story begins before our mind is ready to let go. In a way, this forces the reader to submerge, to swallow the whole of The Tower of the Antilles in a single gulp, to face the sadness of being adrift and holding our breath as the current takes us under, hoping to break surface and breathe again.”

Christopher R. Alonso (Miami Rail) concludes:

These stories are filled with yearning for an unattainable place, something characters desire yet can never quite grasp—whether they’ve left the island or not. These tales are both nostalgic and entirely new. Obejas sneaks under the skin, revealing emotions tied up at the dock, cuts the rope, and sets them free. The Tower of the Antilles proves, once again, why Achy Obejas is one of the most important Cuban writers of our time.

For two years I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading. What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But… it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words. Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war, but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown to me. Not only to me, to all of us. More than once during my journalistic travels I witnessed, I was the only hearer of totally new texts. I was shaken as I had been in childhood. The monstrous grin of the mysterious shows through these stories… When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: how certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which generals. Women’s stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting, and its own range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer, but the earth, the birds, the trees. All that lives on earth with us. They suffer without words, which is still more frightening.

But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown…

I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.

*

After the first encounters…

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine-gunner, commander of an anti-aircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers… Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting.

I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that… They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. And only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front… It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.

I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then… After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war, but her youth. A piece of her life… I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes…

What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out on this path…

*

How do they receive me?

They call me “little girl,” “dear daughter,” “dear child.” Probably if I was of their generation they would behave differently with me. Calmly and as equals. Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. It is a very important point, that then they were young and now, as they remember, they are old. They remember across their life—across forty years. They open their world to me cautiously, to spare me: “I got married right after the war. I hid behind my husband. Behind the humdrum, behind baby diapers. I wanted to hide. My mother also begged: ‘Be quiet! Be quiet!! Don’t tell.’ I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but it makes me sad that I was there. That I know about it… And you are very young. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul. They check it against the words. After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. You don’t want to, and it’s too bad to vanish just like that. Heedlessly. On the run. And when you look back you feel a wish not only to tell about your life, but also to fathom the mystery of life itself. To answer your own question: why did all this happen to me? You gaze at everything with a parting and slightly sorrowful look… Almost from the other side… No longer any need to deceive anyone or yourself. It’s already clear to you that without the thought of death it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

War is an all too intimate experience. And as boundless as human life…

Once a woman (an aviatress) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t… I don’t want to remember. I spent three years at the front… And for three years I didn’t feel myself a woman. My organism was dead. I had no periods, almost no woman’s desires. And I was beautiful… When my future husband proposed to me… that was already in Berlin, by the Reichstag… He said: ‘The war’s over. We’re still alive. We’re lucky. Let’s get married.’ I wanted to cry. To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks… Look at me… Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. I want it so much! I wait for it! I almost hit him… He had one cheek burnt, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still fresh scars… And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’”

“Forgive me… I can’t…”

I understood her. But this was also a page or half a page of my future book.

Texts, texts. Texts everywhere. In city apartments and village cottages, in the streets and on the train… I listen… I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person. I “read” voices.

*

A human being is greater than war…

Memory preserves precisely the moments of that greatness. A human being is guided by something stronger than history. I have to gain breadth—to write the truth about life and death in general, not only the truth about war. To ask Dostoevsky’s question: how much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself? Evil is unquestionably tempting. Evil is more artful than good. More attractive. As I delve more deeply into the boundless world of war, everything else becomes slightly faded, more ordinary than the ordinary. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the solitude of the human being who comes back from there. As if from another planet or from the other world. This human being has a knowledge which others do not have, which can be obtained only there, close to death. When she tries to put something into words, she has a sense of catastrophe. She is struck dumb. She wants to tell, the others would like to understand, but they are all powerless.

They are always in a different space than the listener. They are surrounded by an invisible world. At least three persons participate in the conversation: the one who is talking now, the one that she was then, and myself. My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she is happy or unhappy. Do we talk by ourselves, or is someone else there? Family? If it’s friends—what sort? Friends from the front are one thing, all the rest are another. My documents are living beings; they change and fluctuate together with us; there is no end of things to be gotten out of them. Something new and necessary for us precisely now. This very moment. What are we looking for? Most often not great deeds and heroism, but small, human things, the most interesting and intimate for us. Well, what would I like most to know, for instance, from the life of ancient Greece? From the history of Sparta? I would like to read how people talked at home then and what they talked about. How they went to war. What words they spoke on the last day and the last night before parting with their loved ones. How they saw them off to war. How they awaited their return from war… Not heroes or generals, but ordinary young men…

History through the story told by an unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, that interests me, that I would like to make into literature. But the narrators are not only witnesses—least of all are they witnesses; they are actors and makers. It is impossible to go right up to reality. Between us and reality are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, that each person has her version, and it is from them, from their plurality and their intersections, that the image of the time and the people living in it is born. But I would not like it to be said of my book: her heroes are real, and no more than that. This is just history. Mere history.

I write not about war, but about human beings in a war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of feelings. On the one hand I examine specific human beings, living in a specific time and taking part in specific events, and on the other hand I have to discern the eternally human in them. The tremor of eternity. That which is in human beings at all times.

They say to me: well, memories are neither history nor literature. They’re simply life, full of rubbish and not tidied up by the hand of an artist. The raw material of talk, every day is filled with it. These bricks lie about everywhere. But bricks don’t make temple! But for me it is all different… It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals.

I build temples out of our feelings… Out of our desires, our disappointments. Dreams. Out of that which was, but might slip away.

__________________________________

From The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich, courtesy Random House. Copyright 2017 by Svetlana Alexievich, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Beauty hasn’t ever been all about looks. Back in the day, noblewomen didn’t wear corsets just to look slim and pretty: they were also to maintain an upright posture, reflecting the ladies’ high moral standards and self-discipline. Today the corset is considered a symbol of inequality, but little has changed. It has transformed from an item of clothing into a way of conditioning the body: muscles now define a woman’s silhouette. Loose flesh and extra pounds are seen as evidence of a person’s lack of self-restraint. Celebrities ping back into shape mere weeks after having a baby and are admired for it. Superwoman beats nature without losing her fertility—or her waist. Not even Scarlett O’Hara from Gone with the Wind (1936) could manage that, but I’m sure she wanted to. She knew her appearance could help save her from penury.

Naomi Wolf argues in the Beauty Myth (1990) that the more legal and material hindrances we have broken through, the more heavily the images of female beauty weigh on us. Western beauty standards have spread globally, to all classes, and the more money women have, the more they can spend on achieving beauty. What bothers me is that this pursuit is seen as vain, making women feel guilty. Studies have shown that attractive women are more likely to get hired. There’s nothing vain about that goal.

The books I’ve chosen below aren’t about what beauty looks like. We have enough movies and magazines lining up aspirational representations of the female body. What these images cannot tell us is how beauty is experienced, or how it hurts.

BEAUTY IS WHITE

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013)

Tyra Banks had a talk show and in one of the episodes she interviewed little girls of color about hair. The girls were asked to choose the best and worst hair from a row of wigs. They picked the blond wig for the “good” hair. They didn’t think about beauty as such, but they were sure they would have more friends and people would like them more if they were fair-haired. Kinky hair was considered the worst, the “bad” hair. Again, they weren’t trying to define ideals of beauty, but they were sure people would like them less, and that they would be considered poor or lower-class if they had hair like that. The girls were so young, yet they still perceived hair as a symbol of class, economic status, and—simply—love.

In Americanah, Adichie writes about all of this, and asks important questions. For example, would Barack Obama have been elected president if Michelle hadn’t relaxed her hair?

BEAUTY IS A DANGER

Jennifer Clement, Prayers for the Stolen (2014)

Western girls are taught to be afraid of walking alone after dark, but in the Mexican countryside being a girl is dangerous even in broad daylight. In this world the druglords rule and young women live under constant threat of being kidnapped for their entertainment. When a girl is born, the mother cries out “it’s a boy!” to keep the girl safe. Mothers cut their daughters’ hair short, dress them as boys, and dig holes in the ground to hide them when they hear the hum of an approaching car. The girls themselves use markers to blacken their teeth to look as ugly as possible. The prettier the daughter, the more desperate the mother. Future prospects for these girls are narrow and education can’t offer a path to a better life either—teachers don’t dare to come teach at these local schools.

BEAUTY IS GOOD BEHAVIOR

Aino Kallas, The Wolf’s Bride (1928)

The Wolf’s Bride is set in the 17th century, on an Estonian island called Hiiumaa. Aalo, a forester’s young wife, is pretty and tame as lamb during the daytime, but when night falls she cannot resist the call of the wolf pack. The spirit of the forest turns her into a wolf. As a beast, she tastes freedom: from men, and from the social norms and obligations of being a woman.

The narrator of the book is a clerk transcribing this legend of a wife possessed, and he calls the spirit of the forest “Demon.” The story is written in archaic Finnish, and the character Aalo’s own voice is not represented, which is true to the time. Through use of this literary technique, Kallas found a clever way to demonstrate the way female perspectives were excluded in that era. Her method is unique in Finnish literature and she is a unique author: her main body of work is based on Estonian folklore and its focus is on women’s position in the world of men. The book can be read as an allegory of female sexuality, but it also reflects the issues that interested female authors in the 1920s and 1930s, and the rise of the modern woman.

BEAUTY AT WAR

The Book of Judith

The Book of Judith can be read as the first historical novel, but my main interest is in Judith herself. This beautiful young widow saved her people by seducing the warlord Holofernes and slitting his throat. Afterward she led her life as a respected member of her community, on her own.

As a rule, women who use their charms to change the course of a war have had reputation issues. Judith’s story is an exception. Martin Luther didn’t consider the book fit for his bible, nor did he see Judith as an individual, but rather as a metaphor for the Jewish people. I’m sure this interpretation helped to keep her flag pure and bright. Again, Judith is not the narrator of her own story. We don’t hear her voice. We don’t know if she chose to live alone because she wanted freedom, or because nobody wanted her after she had slept with the enemy, no matter her motives.

In general the role of a woman during wartime has been either victim or keeper of the hearth. Female soldiers might have been welcomed into battle, but when peace came, they often found themselves tainted in the eyes of society. War wounds aren’t becoming to women; the position of hero is reserved for men. Svetlana Alexievich has written about this in War’s Unwomanly Face (1965). Worth a read.

BEAUTY DRIVES YOU MAD 

Sylvia Plath, Ariel (1965)

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children,” Sylvia Plath writes in her poem “The Münich Mannequins.” She gets straight to the point: the ideal female shape is too thin to bear children, and yet it’s still considered something to strive for. In her poems she writes often about the impossibility of being a good woman, but also about the urge to die, female depression, and self-harming. Statistically women harm themselves more than men. Otherwise flawless women cut themselves and starve themselves to death: they turn their aggression inward, toward themselves, whereas men tend to turn their aggression toward the world. Perhaps it’s just politeness. Good girls don’t get into fights.

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Sofi Oksanen’s Norma is available now from Knopf.