Memoria, Alexievich, and a New Genre: a Collage of Human Voices

Cheryl Wiltse 1

Memoria, Alexievich, and a New Genre: A Collage of Human Voices:

An Annotated Bibliography

(N. B. Because there are four different spellings for Alexievich’s last name and two different spellings for her first name, all from reputable sources, I have chosen to use the most commonspelling within the annotations for consistency.)

Primary Sources:

Alexievich, Svetlana. “I Love and I Will Love Again.” Chtenia: Readings from Russia, vol. 1,

no. 2, 2008, pp. 121-126. Alexievich records a memoir from 1988 that deals with the ethnic cleansing (pogrom) between the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Turks in Baku, Azerbaijani SSR, Soviet Union, reminiscentof the holocaust of 1915.The young woman speaking recalls everyone living together in peace: Azerbaijanis, Russians, Armenians, Ukrainians, and Tatars. She says that they all had one nationality, Soviet, and all spoke Russian. She even falls in love with an Azerbaijani named Abulfaz whom she eventually marries. The village is a happy place with everyone celebrating the Persian New Year. No one locks the doors and all are welcomed with “milky pilaf and red tea with cinnamon or cardamom” (52). After high school, she works as a clerk in the telegraph office. She is well known and is never stopped or asked for papers, until one day. There is a new guard and he asks, but she has forgotten her documents at home. They call her boss to vouch for her and she is very angry with the guard. A few days later, he shows up at the office and asks her to the movies. She discovers that they like the same movies and their relationship begins. She goes to her father and says she is in love. The father asks if he is a good boy. She responds, “Very. But his name is Abulfaz” (55). Her father is silent because the boy is a Muslim. Their brief happiness is soon shattered. Muslimsbegin gathering in the square “all dressed in black, dancing and singing”: “Death to unbelievers! Death” (54). This goes on for several months with it becoming more and more dangerous for Armenians. In Sumgait, 30 kilometers way, the horrors of the ethnic cleansing begins. One girl who also works in the telegraph office starts sleeping in the storeroom and will not say why. Eventually, she relates what happened to her relatives. Her mother is stripped and set fire in the courtyard and her pregnant sister’s throat and stomach are slit open. Her father is killed with an axe, only being identified by his boots. Yet, television, radio, and newspapers say nothing about the violence. Shortly, the young woman’s Aunt Zeynab is hiding in a neighbor’s house and all her belongings being stolen. Abulfaz is threatened with violence from friends and family for his Armenian wife.By the time the unrest reaches Baku, the young woman is pregnant and a girlfriend risks her husband and two children in order to hide her. The savagery is such that the Muslims were killing any Armenians. Russian troops do arrive and stop the violence, but the scenes of carnage are such that “[the troops] fainted from what they saw” (59).The young woman, her mother, and Abulfaz flee to Moscow, where the woman gives birth. Out of respect, Abulfaz visits his Muslim family often, eventually not returning to his wife and child for seven years. When he does finally return, “he walked into the apartment and put his arms around [their] daughter” and collapses (61). However, Moscow is not easy either. They “are not registered . . . [they] have no rights . . . . And there are thousands like [them]” (63). Armenians clean toilets, lay bricks, carry bags of cement and avoid the skinheads with swastikas. Now, with capitalism and a new sense of nationalism, Russia is for Russians, not them.

Alexievich, Svetlana. The Last Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabys. Molodaya Gvardiya, 1985.(Excerpt) Alexievich interviews people who were children during WWII. Alexievich notes that there were 26,900 WWII orphans raised in Belarus, but that a total of thirteen million children die during that time. Although very old now, the survivors’ memories tell of the horrors, loss, fear, hunger, and death. Some have few memories of their original parents. For example, a five-year-old boy sees his mother kissing his father and instinctively knows it will be the last time he will see him. Eventually, his mother is found lying by the highway. She is buried where she fell. Another girl is only three and is found beside her dead mother. She is put on a train for Khvalynsk and the Cherkasovs adopt her. She has no memories of her real parents. However, Alexievich is surprised by how much othersdo remember. In 1943, a ten-year-old boy remembers bombs being dropped on his village. SS troops march into their village and begin killing all the dogs and cats, even chickens. The civilians race into the forest to hide, while the Germans burn their town. His family has hidden in them a ditch. They can hear dogs barking, foreign words, and shooting. Their father has managed to conceal a grenade. If the soldiers find them, he will pull the pin and everyone will die, but the German voices go further and further away. In the evening, they meet a larger group of town folk. An old man asks if the boy would like sweets or a piece of bread. They little boy replies, “A handful of cartridges.” Another child is a twelve-year-old girl from Leningrad. Her entire school is evacuated to the Urals. She says that they are marched into the park where they “ate it.” They have learned about edible grasses and the shoots from small pine trees. It is 1942 and there is terrible famine. The children’s home in the Urals has a hard time feeding them. She also remembers seeing her first German. He is a prisoner brought to work in the coal mines. When the German prisoner sees them, smells them, his jaw starts moving involuntarily. He’s starving too. One child has a leftover piece of bread and gives it to him. Although hungry themselves, the children start saving morsels for the German. By 1943, things are getting better and the home has good bread and plenty of porridge for the children. Years later as an adult watching TV, she sees Palestinian refugees queuing up, hungry, with little metal bowls and become hysterical. The memories of hunger never leave. Children may not be heartless, but it seems the Germans were. A seven-year-old girl recalls her mother working as a scout and leaving four children alone in a cabin: the girl, her little brother, and two cousins (a boy and a girl). They are quiet in the darkness, hoping no one will find them, then they hear “Germans, Germans.” Someone says in Russian to come outside and they obey. A German all in black walks up and aims a machine-gun at them. The seven-year-old does not even get a chance to embrace the little ones. She wakes to the sound of her mother crying while digging a hole. The little girl makes a small cry and the mother races to her. The mother cradles the girl in her arms; all the other children are dead. The child has 9 bullet wounds but is alive. Alexievich’s book notes the tragedies and the immediate loss of innocence when WWII devastated the Soviet Union.

Alexievich, Svetlana. “On the Centenary of Revolution.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian &

Eurasian History, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring2017, pp. 229-235. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1353/kri.2017.0016.The piece commemorates the centenary of the Russian Revolutions of 1917. Historiansacknowledge that “commemoration of the past is fundamentally shaped by the politics of the present” (229).Such commemorations are accompanied by debates about the connectedness of the past and the present, as well as the relationship between “academic history” and “contemporary politics” (230). Because of the mass action and violent upheaval in 1917, Putin does not believe the revolution provided much useful history. However, he does celebrate the prerevolutionary imperial regime and has encouraged nostalgia for the tsars. He acknowledges Russia’s successes and ignores its failures. Also, Putin rises to power after the devastating decade of the 1990s, with economic crisis, poverty, and new criminal element. However, the 1990s do usher in a new openness, the opening of archives and the hope for new histories. That enthusiasm is short-lived as Putin orders archives shut. Alexievich’s Secondhand Time records “the history that they [Putin’s regime] had been hiding” (235).

Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time – The Last of the Soviets: An Oral History.Translated by BelaShayevich,Random House, 2016.Secondhand Time is Alexievich’s biggest undertaking to date. It covers the decades of 1991-2001 and 2002-2012. It is the tumultuous time that ushered in the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the eruption of ethnic cleansing in parts of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the ten-day standoff between the supporters of Yeltsin and the supporters of the Russian Parliament, Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, and Russia’s forceful annexation of Crimea. Although two consecutive decades, there is an interesting divide between the mindsets and values of the older and the younger generations. Moreover, the stories are intimate accounts of serving, suffering, and hustling. Alexievich organizes the book into two sections: Part One the Consolation of the Apocalypse-Ten Stories in a Red Interior and Part Two the Charms of Emptiness-Ten Stories in the Absence of an Interior.The Red Interior narratives the 10 years immediately after the end of the Cold War, a time when Alexievich was growing up.Alexievich refers to these as “kitchen” stories, anecdotes from the ordinary man. The kitchen is the center of life for Russians. The kitchen “is not just where we cook, it’s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox” (18). Those who disagree with the politics of the time are called “kitchen dissidents,” because the privacy of the kitchen was the only safe place to share honest opinions. However, the people were not all anti- Soviet, instead they just want more blue jeans, VCRs, cars, nice clothes, and good food. These are things that most Soviets never had. The stories open with “On the Beauty of Dictatorship and the Mystery of Butterflies Crushed against the Pavement,” an account from Elena Yurievna, third secretary of the district party committee, 49 years old. She boldly states that she is a communist, but no one wants to listen to her anymore. To her, “Lenin was a gangster, and . . . Stalin” a criminal (41). She says, what the world sees is Moscow, but “Russia isn’t Moscow” (42). People still live very poorly. They feel lied to, “that no one had told them that there was going to be capitalism; they thought socialism was just going to be fixed” (42). She remembers the beginning of perestroika, with people being communists one day and ultra-democrats the next. Yet, she loves the word “comrade” (43) and will “never stop loving it” (43). She “takes pleasure in writing ‘USSR.’ She says that was my country; the country Ilive in today is not. I feel like I’m living on foreign soil” (43). She talks about her father who fought in the Russo-Finnish War. He is at war for six months but is never the same again. Upon arrive back in Russia alive, he is agreed as a traitor. The soldiers are accused of “saving [their] own skin” (44). He is sentenced to six years in a prison camp for “betraying the Motherland” (45). He endures hard labor building a “railway over the permafrost” (45). He is so changed that his own mother does not recognize him. Yet, Elena’s father does not “hold a grudge” (46). He considers himself and what happened to him “a product of the era” (46). Elena grows up to be a Young Pioneer,and besides a school education she is taught “how to plow, to mow the grass . . . how to load a cart with hay and how to make a haystack” (47). As an adult, she is proud of her humble upbringings and does not understand Russians today that are“chasing after the good life . . . ” (47). She states that Russians were “fooled by the shiny wrapper” of capitalism, “but heaps of salami have nothing to do with happiness” (48). For Russians, having salami, good salami and a lot of it, is a sign of wealth or prosperous times. She remembers the lines and the quotas. “Stores were completely empty . . . . Stores would run out of milk within an hour of opening . . . . If they put out salami, it’d be sold out in seconds” (49-50). She claims at least “socialism isn’t just labor camps . . . .Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules” (51). Now, instead of free people, there are gangsters and they are not afraid of anything. For example, she asserts a businessman “was shot to pieces” in broad daylight (54). Eventually, as an avowed communist, Elena loses her job and begins to worry about her own safety. She looks for a long time for a job before returning to teaching. None of her colleagues from the district party committee fare much better. One instructor kills himself; another has a nervous breakdown. Some go “into business . . . . The second secretary runs a movie theater” (72). She closes by musing that maybe too she “could have another life” (72). She just is not sure what it would be like. In the second half of Secondhand Time, Alexievich writes “On a Loneliness That Resembles Happiness,” about Alisa Z., an advertising manager, 35 years old. For her, the twenty-first century is “money, sex, and two smoking barrels . . . .” (337). According to Alisa, it is the first time people got their hands on some real money, so she is in no hurry to marry and have kids. She values her career and herself. She feels that “men consider women games, war trophies, prey, and themselves hunters” (337). However, Russian women want “their knight in shining armor to come galloping” with “a sack of gold” (337). Alisa is brought up in a typical poor Russian family, but is an unusual person. In school, boys are taught to drive cars and girls are taught make meat patties. Alisa always burns them. While being reprimanded, Alisa declares she will not be making “anyone meat patties,” as she is “going to have a housekeeper” (338). This generation is embracing the dreams of capitalism. Capitalism is nothing her parents understood or wanted, but it excited people like Alisa. When of age, Alisa leaves home and rushes to Moscow with “two hundred dollars and a few rubles in [her] pocket” (339). The adventure is intoxicating, “enterprise, risk . . . .The mighty dollar” (339).She is in Moscow in August of 1991 when the putsch takes place. The television and radio do not carry any news about the potential coup. Alisa admits that the putsch was the most important event of her life. Now, many factories are not paying their employees with money, instead people at “meatpacking plants paid workers in salami – candy or sugar” (340). The people are bartering for everything, like trading frying pans for irons. Many foods are rationed. There are lines of people everywhere. Meanwhile, Alisa starts working for a newspaper. By then, “foreign cars appeared . . . . The first McDonald’s on Pushkin Square . . . Polish makeup . . . [and] the first commercial on TV for Turkish tea” (341). A new class of businessmen is rising: technocrats, bandits, and venture capitalists” (341). As a young, beautiful 22-year-old woman, she would be the one sent out to “interview these capitalists” (342). She finally meets her knight, older man with a wife and two sons. For Alisa, “love is also a kind of business, everyone is taking their own measure of risk” (343). He is a big spender and makes sure that she has everything: “a big house, an expensive car, Italian furniture. And a daughter [that she] adores,” yet she lives alone (343). The pregnancy ends the relationship, but he is never happy. For these ultra-rich, normal activities no longer satisfy them. They have developed “special entertainment,” like playing prisoner or street beggar (347). Of course, their “bodyguards [are just] around the corner” (347).They even hunt and kill human beings for sport. “Some unlucky homeless guy is handed a thousand bucks . . . . All you have to do is pretend to be an animal. If you make it out alive, that’s fate . . .” (347). The games are sick and perverted beyond belief. Meanwhile, Alisa is fine. She works for an advertising agency because it pays better and her daughter is grown. Alisa has become part of the successful working class in Moscow. She says that one of her closest friends is also single, but he juggles “three cellphones . . . works thirteen to fifteen hours a day. No weekends, no vacation” (349). When asked about happiness, she replies, “Are they happy? [This is] a different world . . . . Loneliness is a kind of happiness” (349).