Got distracted by Russian oral histories
I watched the HBO series Chernobyl a few months ago, and found it sufficiently diverting. But after it was over, I wanted to know more about the regular people under the radioactive cloud who were told everything was fine, then were told to leave for a few days, then were told that they could never go home. There’s one shot of them getting on the buses to leave. What were they thinking?
So I Googled, and found a Masha Gessen article that first convinced me that the show was actually bad (Gessen argued that it was good at details but terrible on truth), and then told me where the truth could be found: Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history of Chernobyl, in which she presents monologues from the people I’d hoped to hear more about.
Gessen said the book contained some of the most memorable reading she has ever done. I put it on hold at the New York Public Library, but I was at the bottom of a long hold list, so in the meantime, I borrowed the English translations of Alexievich’s other books: her oral history of the last of the Soviet people, her oral history of women soldiers in World War II, her oral history of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, her oral history of children in World War II.
I read them back to back all summer, finally finishing in July with the Chernobyl book. My summer of reading about Russian suffering.
Reading about Russia is a lesson in complexity. In fact, even saying the books are Russian is a misnomer. Alexievich is Belorussian; Chernobyl was located in Ukraine; and the people who Alexievich spoke to lived throughout the former Soviet Union. But the books were written in the Russian language, and Moscow looms large over all of the stories, so I think of them as being Russian, even though they aren’t, technically, always.
“Oral history” is also a bit of a misnomer; Alexievich doesn’t use the term. Instead she says her books are a new nonfiction genre, “a chorus of voices.” I like that, and it evokes the experience of reading them, the crescendo. One person’s story is shocking, two people’s stories doubly so, but only in aggregate does one think, “I think I might understand something about what’s going on here.” But only the very tiniest thing. Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature for her work in 2015. The prize was given “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Alexievich’s subjects talk about their quotidian life during the Soviet Union, during the purges, in the work camps, in the cities, on the farms. They tell of war at the front and war back at home, of sieges and starvation. For so many of the people in her books, it wasn’t just one thing that went horribly wrong, it was thing after thing after thing, an entire lifetime of horror.
Before Alexievich, I think I bought quite heavily into the idea that life was mostly good, except for those terrible, isolated cases where it wasn’t. Or maybe what I’m actually talking about is the feeling of life being mostly good. Rationally of course I knew the black and white of racism, fascism, genocide, war, famine. I knew that life for some people was very bad. But I think my inherent feeling was that if only this government would get it together, if these people would accept those people, if this disease could be cured, then we could all be safe and healthy and happy, as we all deserve to be.
These books changed that feeling, shifted it. At the end of this particular rabbit hole was not a great understanding of Russian history or the Russian psyche but instead the deep, sure feeling that life, for many people, maybe even for most, is pain from day one until death. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. If it’s not Stalin’s purges, it’s the front. If it’s not starvation, it’s sepsis. If it’s not the military police, it’s the Nazis. Alexievich has gathered stories from generations of people in Russia and the former Soviet Union, and none of them are good.
The result of reading these books, for me, has been that shift in understanding. Human tragedy isn't an anomaly, it's the state of affairs. Having a secure home, ample food, freedom — that's the anomaly, in human history.
I have long known I am extremely privileged, in race, class, nationality, education, love. I was grateful in theory, of course, and grateful even in practice, when confronted with others who were less fortunate in life, in print, or on film. But these books shifted something massive, opened me up to a new awe for the absolute rarity of it, the incredible luck to have been born in the circumstances I was, to the family that I was, to be able to worry about career and purpose and meaning instead of food, water, and just staying alive.
I feel a bit like Scrooge on Christmas morning, laughing at the absolute incredulity that I get to live in Manhattan and shop for just the right shower curtain, and spend time nurturing house plants and baking cakes and chatting on the phone and reading books and having revelations about my emotional shifts.
Several people, in the course of telling their stories to Alexievich, said, “Not one good thing has happened in my life.” Others framed it, “This is the one good thing that happened in my life.”
There’s one woman in one of the books I’ve thought about often since I read her words. She was an orphan and so horribly treated that I’ve blocked it from my brain, but for one anecdote that closed her monologue. She was a child being bathed in an orphanage. She almost slipped, and a nurse kept her from falling, held her, and called her “my little chickadee.” She tells this story of the rarity of somebody caring about her to Alexievich, and then closes with, “I saw God.” I get chills now, thinking of that woman, of this one moment of kindness she experienced as a child, of her sharing it with an interviewer decades later.
By the time I read her words, I knew she was not one lone sufferer, that the details of cruelty and neglect in her life were not rare or isolated but ordinary, part of the chorus of suffering. Her moment of grace changed me. I thank god for her, and for Svetlana Alexievich. And for the moments of kindness that we are all able to share with each other in this world, however rare they may be.
Watercolor by Matt Davis
Referenced:
“What HBO’s Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong,” by Masha Gessen
“Voices from Chernobyl,” by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Keith Gessen)
“Secondhand Time,” by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Bela Shayevich)
“The Unwomanly Face of War,” by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
“Last Witnesses,” by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)
“Zinky Boys,” by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Julia Whitby and Robin Whitby)