Second_Hand

Điểm sách

Second-Hand Time

Số Điểm Sách này, có hai bài thật là tuyệt về Liên Xô.
Một là về Nhà Tù Không Mái. Đọc nó thì mường tượng ra, nếu không nhờ ơn Thiên Triều, thì lũ sĩ quan Ngụy đều chết hết trong cái nhà tù này, với cả vợ con gia đình.
Bởi vì chủ ý của Bắc Kít, là, không thả tù, như Liên Xô, khi thành lập Gulag.
Và bài trên.
Đọc thì đúng là số phận nước Mít sắp tới:
All her life, she tells Alexievich, 'I waited and waited for the good life to come. When I was little, I waited for it ... Now I'm old. To make a long story short, everyone lied, and things only ever got worse.'
That village came to Alexievich's attention after the woman's next-door neighbor went outside to his vegetable patch, doused himself with petrol and burned himself to death.
Từ hồi còn bé tí tôi đã đợi... Bây giờ, tôi già, để cho 1 câu chuyện dài thành ngắn, mọi ngưòi đều nói dối, và sự tình bây giờ thì quá tệ rồi, vô phương cứu chữa!
‘People who have come out of socialism’, she writes, ‘are both like and unlike the rest of humanity – we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes and martyrs. We have a special relationship with death.’
Những người ra khỏi hang Pác Bó, thì giống và không giống phần còn lại của nhân loại... Chúng tôi có 1 liên hệ đặc biệt với cái chết.
'Only a Soviet person can understand another Soviet person,' a former senior of Kremlin official tells her. 'I wouldn't have talked to anyone else.'
This is a very Russian style, originally born of scrappy samizdat publishing and the fear of getting informants into trouble (Solzhenitsyn is similarly impressionistic). Alexievich herself insists that she is a writer rather than a journalist: her work is a 'history of emotions' rather than a history of events. But as well as frustrating the reader, this approach limits her work's evidential value, which is a great pity when Putin is busy building myths and suppressing genuine memory. It is a wonderful thing that Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Second-Hand Time ought to be pressed into the hands of every thinking person. But pruned and more convention- ally presented, her devastating polyphony of voices might reach a wider audience.

House of the Dead

Anna Reid
‘Things only ever got worse’
Second-Hand Time: The Last of Soviets
By Svetlana Alexievich (Translated by Bela Shayevich)
Fitzcarraldo Editions 695pp £14.99 order from our bookshop

Until recently, Svetlana Alexievich was little known outside the world of Russian studies. That changed last October, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first ever Belarussian and the first non-fiction writer since Winston Churchill to receive it. Since the start of her publishing career in the mid-1980s, her theme has been the tragic past of the former Soviet Union, as recounted by multiple individuals in their own voices. Hundreds of subjects are interviewed at length, some repeatedly and over many years. The resulting transcripts are edited down to anything from a one-line snippet to a chapter-length monologue and presented to the reader with minimal biographical information and little or no authorial comment.
    Best known abroad of Alexievich’s books is Zinky Boys, the title taken from the zinc coffins in which Soviet soldiers killed in the Soviet–Afghan War were transported home. Most recent is Voices from Chernobyl, which gathers together first-hand accounts of the nuclear disaster. Ten years in the making, Second-Hand Time is her longest and most ambitious work to date. Her subject, she explains, is the Homo sovieticus or, pejoratively ‘sovok’, meaning someone ineradicably formed by the Soviet Union. ‘People who have come out of socialism’, she writes, ‘are both like and unlike the rest of humanity – we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes and martyrs. We have a special relationship with death.’
    And death, in this collection, is ever present. Interviewees include Gulag and Holocaust survivors, deportees to Siberia and Central Asia, refugees from interethnic violence in the Caucasus, persecuted Tajik migrants, battered women, a young girl disfigured in a Moscow metro bombing, a brutally hazed national serviceman, the bereaved mother of a policewoman killed in mysterious circumstances in Chechnya, and a woman who deserted her husband and children in order to marry a convicted murderer. Many interviewees have tried to commit suicide, while others recount the stories of friends or family members who have done so.
    As sad as any are Alexievich's tales from the villages. One elderly woman endured German occupation and partisan depredation (they took her family's cow and sewing machine), followed by years living in squalid dormitories while working on far-flung construction projects. Now she and her fellow pensioners survive by begging, collecting empty bottles and selling cigarettes and sunflower seeds at the local bus stop. All her life, she tells Alexievich, 'I waited and waited for the good life to come. When I was little, I waited for it ... Now I'm old. To make a long story short, everyone lied, and things only ever got worse.' That village came to Alexievich's attention after the woman's next-door neighbor went outside to his vegetable patch, doused himself with petrol and burned himself to death.
    All this makes for almost unbearably painful but immensely powerful reading. The crowd of overlapping voices evokes the vastness of the suffering (an estimated 29 million Soviets passed through the Gulag and exile systems during Stalin's rule; around 25 million died during the Second World War). It also shows how trauma cascades down the generations.
'My generation', recounts one interviewee, 'grew up with fathers who'd either returned from the camps or the war. The only things they could tell us about was violence. Death. They rarely laughed and were mostly silent. They drank ... and drank ... until finally they drank themselves to death.'
    Unloved children find solace where they can. A woman who spent her childhood in orphanages describes how in adulthood she 'went to all the military parades, I loved big sporting events ... You march in step with everyone else, you're part of something bigger than yourself ... That's where I was happiest. I wasn't happy with my mother.' Others lose themselves in alcohol or, more happily, in religion or nature. In several accounts, lilacs or cherry blossom symbolize fleeting moments of joy.
    The generations are also driven apart by radically different worldviews. The oldest interviewees, who experienced Stalinism directly, suffer from a form of Stockholm syndrome: they came to love a regime that wrecked their lives. An 87-year-old, in youth a fanatical communist, recounts how he and his wife were arrested during the 1937 purges. She died in the camps and he was subjected to years of torture. In 1941 he was able to enlist and, having fought gallantly, was handed back his Party card: 'And I was happy! I was so happy.' Alexievich tells him that she will never understand this. 'Faith!' he upbraids her. 'Our faith will make you jealous! What greatness do you have in your life? Just comfort. Anything for a full belly.' Not long after their meeting he dies, and it turns out that he has willed his flat to the Party instead of to his grandsons.
    The next generation, which came of age in Brezhnev's time, led circumscribed but easier lives, only to be confounded by the Soviet Union's sudden dissolution. For true believers, their whole existence was devalued at a stroke. Some are resigned, others defiant. 'I still take pleasure in writing "USSR"', a former Party official (whose father spent six years in the Arctic camps) declares. 'That was my country; the country I live in today is not. I feel like I'm living on foreign soil.' Although she remembers communism's empty shops, the Russia of the 1990s disgusts and scares her: 'The boxing ring, the jungle ... Thieves running the country.' A doctor recalls her shock at seeing Soviet medals up for sale on tourist stalls and Westerners trying on military greatcoats: 'It felt like we were on some kind of film set. Like we were being pranked ... I stood there and wept.'
    Equally thrown, ironically, were the non-believers - the not-quite-dissidents who dodged Party observances, devoured banned literature, and swapped subversive jokes around cramped kitchen tables. For them, perestroika was a golden time. 'These were wonderful, naive years ... We had faith in Gorbachev like we'll never have faith in anyone ever again ... There was so much joy in the air!' In August 1991 Muscovites poured onto the streets to frustrate a revanchist coup. 'Pure euphoria! Everyone was so beautiful in those days!
We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner.' Economic collapse quickly brought them down to earth. Philosophy dons turned into ice-cream sales-men; army officers became security guards and taxi drivers. Front doors acquired steel cladding as the crime rate soared.
    For those too young to remember the Soviet Union at all, perestroika is ancient history. 'I wanted to tell them about 1991', a man says of his sons, 'but they're not interested. Their eyes would glaze over. The only question they have for me is, "Papa, why didn't you get rich in the nineties, back when it was so easy?'" Not all are shallow consumerists: Alexievich's penultimate interview is with a student who took part in pro-democracy protests in Minsk in 2010. Having been strip-searched in jail and seen friends beaten up by the police, she has lost faith in humanity: 'I used to live in a good, kind world, but it no longer exists, and it never will ever again.' It would be interesting to hear more of what her generation thinks of Put in, whose shadow hangs over the whole book, though he is never directly mentioned.
    This is a passionate, fascinating, humane, deeply insightful and important study - far too rich to summarize adequately in a review. Probably only someone of Alexievich's age and background could have written it. 'Only a Soviet person can understand another Soviet person,' a former senior of Kremlin official tells her. 'I wouldn't have talked to anyone else.'
    It does, however, have weaknesses. First, as a guide to the totality of the former Soviet Union it is unbalanced. Interviewees are nearly all losers from the fall of communism; f we hear little from the growing new business and professional classes. They are also over- whelmingly Russian or Belarussian: there is nothing on the Baltic economic success stories or on the 'color revolutions' in Georgia and Ukraine. Second, the testimonies are somewhat baldly and confusingly presented. Unsurprisingly, most interviewees remain anonymous, but we are also seldom told when or where interviews took place, making it hard to put them into context or track changing viewpoints over time. It is often difficult to tell where one voice ends and another begins, there is no index and section titles are poetic but uninformative.
    This is a very Russian style, originally born of scrappy samizdat publishing and the fear of getting informants into trouble (Solzhenitsyn is similarly impressionistic). Alexievich herself insists that she is a writer rather than a journalist: her work is a 'history of emotions' rather than a history of events. But as well as frustrating the reader, this approach limits her work's evidential value, which is a great pity when Putin is busy building myths and suppressing genuine memory. It is a wonderful thing that Alexievich has been awarded the Nobel Prize. Second-Hand Time ought to be pressed into the hands of every thinking person. But pruned and more convention- ally presented, her devastating polyphony of voices might reach a wider audience.

JULY 2016 Literary Review

Số Điểm Sách này, có hai bài thật là tuyệt về Liên Xô.
Một là về Nhà Tù Không Mái. Đọc nó thì mường tượng ra, nếu không nhờ ơn Thiên Triều, thì lũ sĩ quan Ngụy đều chết hết trong cái nhà tù này, với cả vợ con gia đình.
Bởi vì chủ ý của Bắc Kít, là, không thả tù, như Liên Xô, khi thành lập Gulag.
Và bài trên.
Đọc thì đúng là số phận nước Mít sắp tới: When I was little, I waited for it ... Now I'm old. To make a long story short, everyone lied, and things only ever got worse.
Từ hồi còn bé tí tôi đã đợi... Bây giờ, tôi già, để cho 1 câu chuyện, ngắn, thành dài, mọi ngưòi đều nói dối, và sự tình bây giờ thì quá tệ rồi, vô phương cứu rỗi!