Svetlana Alexievich and Her Pain

“I want to fill my books with what is missing from most historical analysis: the human emotions. Not the horrors! But rather what sustains the human soul, what makes us human… and what dehumanizes us”

Svetlana Alexievich, Belarusian writer and Nobel Prize winner

Her gaze reflects a sad, wise, melancholy serenity. Light eyes, surrounded by a sea of wrinkles that bare her suffering. She looks old because she has lived so many lives, through the hundreds of personal histories that breathe through her work.

Svetlana Alexievich has covered wars, revolutions, natural disasters… and catastrophes caused by the small-mindedness of humans, such as the Chernobyl disaster. She considers her work literature because, surprisingly, she does not introduce a clear value judgment about what she narrates. By creating a space for all of these life stories, independently of her opinion, she weaves a polyphonic tapestry that transcends journalism and historical analysis.

The audience is anxious. They have gathered during normal working hours on a Tuesday, for the opportunity to listen to the Nobel laureate in Literature who irritates Moscow most. And they will not be disappointed, because she punctuates the paradox in the best possible way: with a true story that turns into flesh and blood.

The sadness in Svetlana’s eyes intensifies when she starts to speak, illustrating the life of her protagonist: a member of the party imprisoned during one of the Stalin purges prior to World War II.

Fallen from grace and transferred to Siberia, with his wife in another political prison camp, he convinced military officials to let him to fight against the Nazis. He returned a decorated soldier, earning a pardon and readmission into the Party. He regained his membership card.

Sixty years had gone by, yet the protagonist was still tearful as he told Svetlana his story. There was nothing more valuable in the world for that man, no moment in his life more memorable than being welcomed back into the Party, into the great organization outside of which there was only death and oblivion…

“What about your wife?”

His surprised reaction escalates into a more visceral anger. Had Svetlana not asked, he may never have explained what happened to the love of his life. A cruel fate had befallen her: She died in a Gulag forced-labor camp, before her husband returned from the war. Apparently, he got the news at the same time he learned of his readmission into the Party.

Now it is Svetlana who gets emotional as she finishes telling the story. The man reproached her for looking astonished. He felt judged by her gaze of serenity, through the visible pain in the interviewer’s eyes. How could a man reminisce on that moment as the most memorable? How could he value a membership card, a miserable piece of paper, more than the love of his life?

“If you had lived then, you would not judge us. If you had seen the sparkle in the eyes of the great communist leaders and visionaries, you would understand my reaction.”

Right then and there, the entire audience realizes why Svetlana’s work truly is literature, and not merely journalism or history; and why the author herself claims that she delves deeper into human nature than any historical analysis could.

A thousand descriptions of the effects of ideology on a man’s psyche could not delve deeper or convey as much as the memoir shared by this man. His story helps us better understand what it means to be dominated by ideology, and what it does to a man: the feeling of powerlessness when he falls into disgrace with the institution; the loss of meaning upon being expelled from the reality to which he has devoted his life; the alienation of his own family; the lack of any hint of criticism of the methods and results of an ideology, the loss of his independence, the joy of readmission that eclipses the pain of losing his wife…

Svetlana has seen violence in the eyes of many of her protagonists. An internal violence that surfaces in their eyes, and in their voices. It pains her deeply to see how the society that she believed was liberated by the fall of the Soviet empire is now entangled in another ideology, the nationalism embodied by a power-hungry megalomaniac: Putin. And she concludes that those same intellectuals who endured the Gulags, who fought for the freedom of the Russian people, have now succumbed to the test of the commodification of society. They’re afraid to speak up because it’s harder to give up everything when they have something than when they had nothing to lose…

The Nobel laureate, meanwhile, continues with her work: giving a voice to all, so that everyone may better understand what has happened in Russia since the Wall came down. Because the usual analyses become obsolete. But the living, breathing examples, the true stories of so many people, always preserve the clairvoyance of the real, the authentic. Because they talk about the person, not just the ideas or the markets. And they are the true antidote against any ideology driven to invade everything.

Alexievich’s journey invites us to reflect on these three things, at the very least:

• Sometimes it is the humblest of people who have the most heartrending and inspiring stories to tell.
• It is an incredible act of charity to use a gift such as writing to serve those voices to the detriment of one’s own voice.
• Nothing is more moving than pain expressed in its most pure, unadulterated form.