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HIRO MIYAZAKI: Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Hiro Miyazaki, director of the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. It is my pleasure to welcome you all to this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellowship Lecture. The Henry and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship is one of the Einaudi Center's signature programs. It was founded by Hank and Nancy Bartels in 1984 to foster a broader understanding of international affairs among students and others in our Cornell community.
Today, we have a perfect speaker to accomplish that task. Svetlana Alexievich, the winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, joins an impressive list of Bartels' fellows including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. Today's lecture is not just the latest in our Bartels Fellowship Lecture Series. It is also part of an energetic effort at the Einaudi Center to address pressing global issues from international and interdisciplinary perspectives.
One of the issues we have been discussing together this year is nuclear energy. We have hosted, since March, a series of events to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the disaster in Fukushima, Japan and the 30th anniversary of the disaster at Chernobyl. In her book, Voices from Chernobyl, as it is known in this country-- but soon there will be another new edition of the book, a more authentic edition will be published-- and the original title is The Chernobyl Prayer-- A Chronicle of the Future, which is very different from the title I just mentioned. But in her book, Svetlana Alexievich provided an eloquent and terrifying account of that disaster told not from the perspective of experts but from the perspective of the people who lived through it.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Professors Matt Evangelista and Anindita Banerjee for suggesting we invite this special speaker to Cornell. I'd also like to thank my colleague Heike Michelsen for bringing all this together so nicely. I'd also like to extend my special welcome to those of you for our presidential councillors today. It's very privileged to have you here at this special occasion.
Our interim president Hunter Rawlings will introduce Svetlana Alexievich, who will deliver her lecture in Russian. We will project a translation on the screen as she speaks. Our translator today is Raissa Krivitsky, a senior lecturer in our Russian language program. We thank her for her service today. After the lecture, Anindita Banerjee, associate professor of comparative literature and a specialist of Russian science fiction, will moderate a Q&A session. Again, Raissa Krivitsky will translate.
After the event, I hope you will all join us for a reception in the foyer. Svetlana Alexievich has kindly offered to sign books. And I hope you brought your own. And I have mine here already. But if you don't, you'll be able to purchase copies of her numerous books in the foyer.
Thank you all so much for coming. And please join me in welcoming our interim president, Hunter Rawlings.
[APPLAUSE]
HUNTER RAWLINGS: Thank you very much, Professor Miyazaki. And good afternoon to everyone. We have a high privilege this afternoon, an opportunity to hear one of the most remarkable people in the world. And it reminds me of the time when I introduced Bishop Tutu. These are moments that are quite special, quite memorable. And it's an opportunity for you, the Cornell community, to hear from someone who's making an enormous difference in the world.
We welcome today the first nonfiction writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in more than half a century, one whose remarkable books address the crises and tragedies of the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia through the voices of ordinary people. Svetlana Alexievich has grappled with the experiences of Soviet women in World War II, the sufferings of Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan and of their families at home, the horrors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union. It's very difficult for us to put ourselves in the shoes of Russians who have lived through those episodes. Her works are oral histories, the products of countless hours of deep interviews-- sometimes as many as 20 interviews with the same person-- edited and shaped into lyrical portraits of lives caught up in vast events beyond their control.
The 2015 Nobel Prize committee called her work, quote, "a monument to suffering and courage in our time." And if you've read Russian literature, I think you know that, over the centuries, it has been specializing in suffering. That is what many Russian authors-- great authors-- have focused their attention upon. And they noted that, "by all the means of her extraordinary method of carefully-composed collage of human voices, Alexievich deepens our comprehension of an entire era."
The daughter of a Belorussian father and a Ukrainian mother, she was born in Ukraine but grew up in Belarus, where her parents were teachers. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked as a teacher, journalist, and editor. Her first book, published in 1985, was War's Unwomanly Face, a series of monologues by Russian women who had combat roles in World War II. It has sold over 2 million copies.
After the publication in 1990 of Zinky Boys about Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan-- the title refers to their zinc coffins-- she was tried on charges of defaming the Soviet Army. Although she was acquitted, over the course of her career her criticism of regimes in the Soviet Union and Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad. Her 1997 book Voices from Chernobyl was banned for years in Belarus, whose people suffered terribly from the radiation released in the nuclear disaster of 1986.
She writes only in Russian. But since the awarding of the Nobel Prize, publication of her books in other languages has accelerated. Earlier this year, her 2013 book Secondhand Time-- The Last of the Soviets was published in English translation. She's at work on two new books, one focused on aging and one on love.
In her Nobel lecture, she discussed her approach. "I collect the everyday life of feelings, thoughts, and words. I collect the life of my time. I'm interested in the history of the soul, the everyday life of the soul, the things that the big picture of history usually omits or disdains." In so doing, she has illuminated for us the seminal experiences of Russians of her generation.
Let's give her the warmest possible welcome to Cornell.
[APPLAUSE]
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I love life in it's living form-- life that's found on the street, in human conversations, shouts and moans. That sort of life is genuine, not yet shaped by someone else's ideas or talents. This probably comes from my childhood. My parents were village teachers, and there were always plenty of books at home. But in the evenings, I was drawn away from books to the benches outside where the women of the village gathered.
It was the post-war period when young boys were still getting themselves blown up in the forest by German and partisan mines. As far as I remember, only women lived in the village. No man had returned from the war. In the evenings after milking the cows and finishing up the housework, the women would sit outside and talk about life and death. They talked about the war, how they saw their loved ones off, how they waited for them, how they believed the gypsy women who promised the miracles.
It seemed to me that I learned everything there was to know about love from their stories. Their stories affected me more than books. Life seemed mysterious and frightening.
It took me a long time to find a genre that would correspond to the way I viewed the world, to the way my eyes saw and ears heard-- a genre that corresponded to my memory. I chose the genre of the human voice. In my books, ordinary people-- the ones we still refer to as the little men or women-- talk about themselves.
I discover my books on the street. I hear them outdoors. Sometimes I spend an entire day with one person. It's important to catch words in flight as they're born. It's important not to miss the conversational part of life, which we often neglect, dismiss as unimportant, leaving it to disappear in the bustle of life, in the darkness of time. It seems surprising that this could be literature. But I want to make every bit of our life into literature including ordinary, everyday words.
For over 30 years, I chronicled the Red Empire. This unprecedented communist project spanned a vast territory and affected an enormous number of people, over 200 million. The Russian Bolsheviks attempted to remake man, ancient Adam into a new type of human being, Homo Soveiticus. The Red Man that I write about is a creation of the Soviet idea-- the builder of communism, as he called himself.
This chronicle comprises five books, but they are really one book about the history of the Russian Soviet soul.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: They cover a period of almost 100 years and nearly a dozen generations. I managed to speak to people who had seen Lenin and Stalin, who did time in Stalinist labor camps but believed in Stalin, cherished their party membership cards, those little red booklets with the leaders' profiles embossed on the cover. I remember an old woman who seemed to me to have risen from the dead. She was a communist who had spent 17 years-- her entire sentence-- in a distant corner of Siberia and miraculously survived. And yet she threatened to denounce me to the KGB because I was slandering the great leader and a great heroic era. Communism was their religion.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: For most of my life, I lived among them, lived the same life. My father was one of them. He believed in the party until the end and asked that his party card be buried with him. This was the last generation to be mortally infected with communism, bewitched by utopia. We are their children, but we don't understand them.
The protagonists of my more recent books are different. They talked about fighting in Afghanistan but didn't understand what cause they were supposed to be dying for. They talked about shoveling melted graphite off the roof of the Chernobyl reactor, doing work that should be done by robots, about the collapse of the mighty Red Empire and how they were left behind, disoriented in this new world.
I'm interested in domestic socialism, not heroic, pompous public displays but the socialism that lives in human souls. I reduce the great and grand to human scale. I'm a historian of the soul. For me, feelings are also documents. I study missing history, the things that history usually overlooks. History is often arrogant and dismissive of what is small and human.
A whole choir sounds in each of my books, but the individual human voice can always be heard. For me, human beings exist simultaneously in two worlds-- in a specific time and in the universe, the eternal.
I spent five to seven years writing each book and, in each case, recorded somewhere between 500 to 700 people of different ages and different professions because the woman who fired a machine gun saw one war. And the woman piloting a bomber may not have seen a single person die during the war. She only saw the sky. The machine gunner talked about hand-to-hand combat when a human isn't human anymore, just an animal who wants to live, a creature that slices and stabs at the eyes, the heart, the stomach.
I gather my books from hundreds of details, nuances, shades, and tints. Sometimes an entire day of conversation produces only a single phrase-- but what a phrase. "I was so little when I left for the front that I got taller during the war."
Once I sat for four hours with a woman who was a submachine gunner during the war. And all I heard from her were banal newspaper platitudes. "The war began, and we Soviet girls rushed to the front along with the men. That's how the motherland raised us." I wanted to leave the house. I couldn't see how I could possibly break through the cliches, the propaganda, the male canon.
Often, the women I spoke to wanted to tell their stories like men. But I was looking for specifics-- for smells and subtleties, the kinds of things that distinguish a woman's war from a man's. And then, when I was putting on my coat just about ready to leave, the same woman said, "Stay a bit longer. Let me tell you. You could never imagine how frightening it is to die at dawn.
"The birds are singing. It's quiet. And in a few minutes, you'll get the order, fire! The grass is so clean and the air is so pure, but you have to die." This is where literature begins.
And later, at the end of the conversation, she told me, "After the battle, we would walk through the fields and look for the living. Maybe someone had survived somehow. Soldiers were scattered across the trampled wheat like potatoes. They just stared at the sky-- Germans and our soldiers, too. They were all so young, handsome. We felt sorry for all of them."
It was never my goal to put together a collection of horror stories to overwhelm the reader. I was collecting the human. Dostoevsky asked the question, "How much of the human is there in a human being? How can the human in this human being be protected?" That's the question I am looking to answer.
I collect the human spirit. You may say it's an ephemeral thing, too elusive. But art attempts to capture it. And every era has its own answers. It takes a long time and a great deal of work to put together an image of a period from different stories. What kind of people lived at this time? What did they believe in? What were their fears, their superstitions, their perplexed speculations about the meaning of life?
I always asked everyone who fought, how can a person live one on one with the idea that he has the right to kill another human being, to kill and not to go mad? People died too easily and killed too easily for grand ideas.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: In order to hear something new, you have to ask in a new way. I have to be interesting to the person. I, too, have to tear myself away from the predatory clutches of my time, to stand at least a little bit to the side.
All of my books have had a hard time. Some, like War's Unwomanly Face, weren't published for many years. Others were taken to court in trials presided over by actual judges. Boys in Zinc was the subject of a lawsuit. When I saw Natasha M. in the courtroom, I was very surprised. I went up to her. "Why are you here, Natasha?" I asked. "You wanted me to write the whole truth, and I wrote it."
I remember her son's small coffin, which could barely fit in the nine square meters of the barracks. She sat next to it mad with grief, alternately sobbing quietly or shouting. "The coffin is so small, and you were so big-- almost two meters tall. Is that you in there, son? Answer your mama."
She told me that they hadn't been able to find any valuables in the house in order to buy her son out of the war. "I would have given everything. I would have paid like others did, but I didn't even have a pair of gold earrings. I want you to write that my son was a carpenter," she said, crying. "He was drafted into the army. And on the very first day, he was sent to renovate the general's dachas, not for training. They didn't even teach him how to shoot. He was killed the first month."
"What are you doing here, Natasha?" I couldn't believe it. "I wanted my son to be a hero. And you wrote that he was a killer. You wrote about how they killed." What could I reply if even all the suffering she endured had made her free? We weren't just slaves. We were slavery's romantics.
War's Unwomanly Face wasn't published for three years. I was accused of naturalism and pacifism. The censors were particularly indignant about an episode describing 200 young women soldiers marching. The men marching behind them tried not to look down at the sand where there were drops of blood. It was the time of the month for many of the women, and they needed cotton or something. But the Soviet army didn't issue those sorts of things. The women were ashamed.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: When they reached a ford crossing a river, the Germans began bombing. The men all hid. But the women rushed into the water to wash themselves, making an excellent target. Almost all of them were shot from the air.
"Why are you bringing biology into it? You should be describing the heroism," the censors shouted at me. I tried to argue that humans are made up of many things, including biology. I'm interested in the body as a connection between nature and history.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Ideals can be made of plaster like monuments. In the end, the page was cut out of the first edition. I was able to reinstate it only 10 years later during perestroika.
The censor even deleted the following scene. I asked a woman-- a former sniper-- what she took to the war with her. Her answer, "a suitcase full of candy. I spend my entire last paycheck buying chocolates." And we laughed.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: "You call this history, these candies?" The censor was angry. "Yes, it's history," I replied. These kinds of details make a huge impression.
Sometimes I am reproached because the people in my books are said to speak too beautifully. In love and in contact with death, people always speak beautifully. At these moments, they transcend their ordinary selves. They rise up on tiptoe.
This is the kind of person I keep watch for. I look out for life, for people who have been shaken to the core by life, by the everyday. In telling his own story, a person creates. He doesn't copy reality, he creates.
Memories are living creatures. People put their entire lives into their memories-- what they read, what they thought about, whether they were happy or not. Documents evolve along with a human soul. It would be naive to think that they represent canonical knowledge, something immobile that is mechanically transferred from one time to another.
After perestroika, many of my subjects added entire pages to their stories. They became freer and looked into themselves more profoundly-- profoundly and with greater courage. I would receive letters saying, "At the time I was afraid. You know how dangerous it was to talk about Stalin. We couldn't even tell the whole truth about the war. But now I've decided to write."
I, too, have changed over the years. I know more about people and have better intuition. Feelings are not a simple, linear, naked thing. A document can tell a story, elevate everything. But it has always tormented me that the truth doesn't fit into one heart or mind. The truth is so fragmented. There is a lot of it, and it's scattered about the world.
I don't agree when people tell me that documents cannot tell us anything about the personal, the sacred. They're difficult subjects to write about, but it can be done. Who will believe a person without this, without the heart?
My subjects would often say things like, "I can tell you because you're Soviet. And a Soviet person can understand another Soviet person. You know what I mean." The Russian soul is an enigma. We live together in a country where we were taught to die beginning in childhood. We learn death and dying.
We weren't taught that humans are born for happiness or love. It was drilled into us that humans exist in order to give of themselves, in order to burn, to sacrifice. We were taught to love people with weapons.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I have traveled this road for decades. I didn't always have the strength for it. Human beings have delighted me and frightened me. If I had grown up in another country, I couldn't have followed this path.
Evil is merciless. You have to be vaccinated against it. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents were afraid and didn't tell us everything-- and most of the time they didn't tell us anything at all-- still the very air we breathed was poisoned. Evil always kept its eyes on us.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: My first book, War's Unwomanly Face, is about war as it was seen and described by women. Why war? Because war has always been at the center of our lives. We're people of war. We have either been fighting or preparing to fight.
Everything we know about the war we know from a male voice. We are always captive to male ideas and the male experience of war, male words. When women tell stories, they tend to adapt to the male canon to describe man's war, not women's.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: In my journalistic travels, I often met women serving in the military. If I was able to pry them away from the cliches, the monstrous grimace of the mysterious could be glimpsed from through their stories. It was a totally new kind of text. When women spoke, there was little or none of the usual narrative-- one group of people heroically kills another group of people and declares victory or defeat-- little about kind of weapons and what generals were present. Women's stories are different, and they talk about different things.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: They have their own colors, space, and the lighting, their own words. There aren't any heroes or officially-sanctified heroic exploits. There are just people, people who are engaged in the human business of inhumanity. And everything living suffers, not only people. Birds, trees, animals-- they suffer without words, which is even more terrible.
The grandiose predatory world of war was revealed to me through their stories. How can a person live through history and write about it at the same time? You can't grab just any old bit of life or existential dirt by the collar and drag it into a book, into history. You have to transcend the time and seize the spirit.
Men are hostages to the culture of war, but women are freer. Women's stories always contain the idea that, when all is said and done, war is about killing. It's always about killing, no matter what. I found texts, literature everywhere-- in city apartments and village huts, on the street, in the train. I learned how to listen, how to turn myself into one big ear.
After War's Unwomanly Face, I decided to follow the times, to follow human beings. How has this man changed? What is happening to this woman? What is happening to them that is to us? The story of one person is fate. The story of hundreds of people is history.
Boys in Zinc began with one little girl. I couldn't forget her. In the Municipal Cemetery in Minsk, they were burying officers brought back from Afghanistan in zinc coffins. There were grandiose, combative speeches, wraths. A little girl tore away from the grownup's hand like a bird and cried out, "Papa! Papa! I drew lots of boats for you just like you asked. Where are you?"
That is when I realized I had to go to Afghanistan. Even though I thought that I could never write about war again, on television they were showing our troops planting trees and building houses in Afghanistan. They talked about international obligations, state interests. Finally, there I was in the middle of the war.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: The first time I drove along the streets of Kabul, I saw familiar posters. "Communism is our bright future." "Kabul is a city of the world." "The people and the party are united." It felt like I was in Minsk, not in Kabul.
Then, for the first time, I saw a person who had been killed not by lightning, not by the elements but by another person. I saw Grad rockets turn clay villages into plowed fields. I visited an endless Afghan cemetery where an old Afghan woman howled like a wounded creature. It reminded me of the village near Minsk where they brought the zinc coffins into the house and the mother howled in the very same way. It wasn't a human cry, and it wasn't the cry of an animal.
My first thought was, how will I ever find words for this? What sustained my hope? Witnesses-- only the words of witnesses were equal to what I saw and what I wanted to write about.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Today I see the witness as the main protagonist in literature. People say to me, well, you know, memories-- recollections-- that's not history and not literature, either. It's just life, rubbish that the artist hasn't polished. It's the raw material of conversation, just chit chat.
But I see things differently. It is there in the live human voice, in the life reflection of reality that the mystery of our presence is hidden and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare-- life's scares and passion, its singularity, inscrutability. Shouts and sobs can't be polished or the main thing will be neither the tears nor shouts but the polish. I'm building temples from our feelings, our desires, and disappointments, our reveries from things that should not be allowed to disappear.
Before Afghanistan, I believed that we were building socialism with a human face. That is what my father taught me. I returned from Afghanistan free of all illusions. "Forgive me, Father," I said when I arrived home. "You raised me to believe in communist ideals. But once you've seen our soldiers killing people they don't know in a foreign land, all those ideals turn to dust." My father cried.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Life itself is unimaginably artistic all on its own. As cruel as this may sound, human suffering is especially artistic. This is the dark side of art. I'm always dealing with materials that lead right to the edge of the impossible where you are one on one with reality.
I spent 10 years writing the book about Chernobyl. After that experience, I can truly say that I don't write my books. I live through them.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Chernobyl was a sudden leap into a new reality. What happened there surpassed not only our knowledge but our imagination. Everyone I talked to said the same thing, I've never seen anything like it. I've never read about anything like this. I've never seen this in any film. No one has ever told me about anything like this.
Everything was just as it had been. But the world had completely changed, including our knowledge about the horrors of war. In Chernobyl, the trees were blooming. Everything was growing. The birds were flying, but people could feel that death was present everywhere-- unseen, unheard, death with a new countenance. The past was powerless to help us with any of it.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I went to Chernobyl. What I saw was cause for silence. People looked dazed, almost mad. We watched the top layer of contaminated earth being cut away and buried in special ditches. Earth has being buried in the earth.
Soldiers washed the roads, the houses, the trees, the firewood. And they buried, buried, buried. They buried things-- eggs, milk, contaminated animals that had been shot. In the newspapers, information about Chernobyl consisted entirely of military words-- explosions, heroes, soldiers, evacuation.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Military equipment was headed for Chernobyl carrying soldiers with automatic weapons. The system worked as it was supposed to in extreme circumstances, lots of machines and lots of soldiers. But a soldier with an automatic weapon was tragic in this new world. The only thing he could do was absorb huge doses of radiation and die when back at home.
People were used to the idea of atomic war but not atomic peace. They didn't yet realize that the atoms of war and peace are colleagues. They kill in exactly the same way.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I remember the evacuation of a village. The people got onto buses, but the dogs and cats ran loose. They were left behind. Humans saved only themselves.
An old woman stood next to an old house holding an icon and refused to get on the bus. When she saw me, she came over and said, "I know what war looks like. But here the sun is shining. Everything's in bloom. I even saw a mouse today. Why should I leave my cottage? How could this be war?"
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: "Yes, this is war. This is probably how the wars of the future will begin," I thought. Yes, it's war-- a different kind of war unknown to us. An old beekeeper told me that the bees hadn't left their hives for a week. And the fishermen remembered that they couldn't find any worms. They had all gone deep into the earth. Bees, worms, and insects knew something that people didn't.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I realized that I didn't have any instruments. I didn't know how to approach the subject. The event was still outside of our culture. At the time, I heard "We are Belorussians, black boxes recording information for the future."
All around me I heard completely unknown texts. For example, the wife of a fireman who helped extinguish the fire on the roof of the reactor the first night kept repeating what doctors told her. "You can't get close to your husband. You can't touch him or kiss him. He has severe radiation poisoning." The doctors wouldn't let her see him. "He isn't your beloved husband anymore," they said. "He's an object requiring decontamination."
You couldn't see radiation. Your eyes weren't any help. It didn't have a smell. You couldn't touch it. You couldn't hear it. All our faculties-- eyes, ears, fingers-- nothing was of any use. New words were needed, and none were to be found.
Not far from the reactor, I saw village boys on bicycles. They had come in the evening to look at the fire, to gaze at the dark pink glow emitted by the smoking reactor. The sky really was beautiful. Beauty and death were shoulder to shoulder, but we didn't know it yet.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: The churches were full of people, but the only thing they found there was consolation. However, in order to survive, you have to understand. How can you resist something you don't know? People became philosophers. Faced with this mystery, each person was left alone with himself. Chernobyl condemned each of us to endless solitude.
Evil took place on such a scale that we surpassed our limits but still couldn't understand it. Consciousness capitulated. Science capitulated.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: But the subconscious began to work. People were afraid of particular monsters. They told stories of children with five heads, of headless, wingless birds. They scared each other with fantasies. Thousands of corpses are being buried in secret locations.
Belarus is an archaic agrarian country. The peasants live close to nature. Simple tools are still used on the land-- the axe, shovel, plow. What did I discover? Scholars, politicians, and the military were thoroughly baffled. But the old country folks' image of the world wasn't disturbed. I don't know what helped them. Perhaps it was their acceptance of the idea that they could disappear along with nature.
Nothing like this ever happened in Chekhov or Tolstoy. One teacher told me, "Everyone sought his or her own point of reference in this new world. Official propaganda, culture, and philosophy were paralyzed. They kept quiet. If we had truly processed the meaning of Chernobyl, much more would have been written about it. The knowledge of our lack of knowledge hinders us."
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Chernobyl changed our understanding of time. Many radioactive particles will live for 100, 200, 1,000 years, thereby altering space. A few days after the accident, radioactive clouds were detected over Africa. Concepts like "our own" and "foreign" were obliterated. Borders don't exist for radiation.
In short, people were stunned. And I hurried to listen and to write everything down. I didn't feel I was writing down the past. I was taking notes on the future. While you're talking about the catastrophe, you can't help thinking about the story of the catastrophe, how to go about finding the right language.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: We all have many languages. We talk to ourselves in one language, to children in another, to someone we love in a third. And then there's the language we speak to animals or to God.
Conversational language isn't burdened. It isn't preconceived. It goes its own way and celebrates with syntax, intonation, accent. Feeling is resurrected accurately. I follow feelings. I am a historian of things that leave no trace.
In Afghanistan, a soldier talked about how exciting it was to kill in a group and how unpleasant it was to execute someone, especially if you'd seen his eyes. In Chernobyl, children came up to me and asked, "Miss, you're a writer. You must know, will the trees have leaves next year? Will there be little baby fish?"
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: I heard a young mother crying. Her little girl had been born sick and lived less than a year. "She only had three fingers on each hand. I put her little body in the coffin and thought, I wish she at least had all her fingers. I mean, she's a little girl, after all."
Will this remain in history? History would turn its back. But I'm astounded. If I hadn't read Dostoevsky, I would be in despair over the human soul, its limitlessness.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: Afghanistan and Chernobyl buried the empire. We said farewell to the life we had lived, which was called socialism. My cycle of books was coming to an end.
In the last book, Secondhand Time, I tried to listen honestly to all the participants in the communist drama. I didn't have to look for characters. We were all protagonists. The empire fell, but we remained. All of us-- the people who came out of socialism-- are and are not like other people. We have our concept of good and evil, heroes and martyrs. We have our own relationship to death.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: The words "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," "firing squad," and "10 years without the right to correspond"-- which means being arrested and disappearing-- constantly arise in these stories. All are full of hatred and prejudice. We lived in a labor camp. A man may walk out the gate of a camp, but it doesn't mean that he'll be a free man tomorrow. All he knows is the camp. The value placed on human life also comes from the camps.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: The writer Varlaam Shalamar, who spent almost 20 years in the camps and left us fundamental documents about them, wrote, "The experience of the camp corrupts the executioner and the victim." In the '90s, the archives were opened. And we were faced with those internal Russian questions. What is to be done? And who is to blame-- Stalin, Beria? In my view, good and evil are at the root of our problems.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: In Secondhand Time, one of the characters tells the story of how he was in love with his Aunt Olya. She had a beautiful voice and beautiful hair. Later, when he was in university, perestroika began. And his mother admitted to him that, during the Stalinist purges, Aunt Olya-- her own sister-- had written a denunciation of their brother, that he had rotten away somewhere in the camps of Kolyma.
When the storyteller came home from the holidays, he asked Aunt Olya what she remembered about 1937, when her brother was arrested. "Oh, it was a marvelous time," Aunt Olya answered. "Everyone loved me, and I was in love." The young man asked another question. "But what about your brother?" "You couldn't find an honest person during Stalinist time. That's just the way things were," was her answer.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: What I want to say is that there is no chemically pure form of evil. Evil is Stalin and pretty Aunt Olya, too. The truth was terrifying and dangerous. Our past frightened us, and the archives were soon closed.
Communist monuments are still standing just like they were. Plaster Lenins are everywhere. His body lies in the mausoleum, a Pyramid of Cheops build in the 20th century. The Communist Party was never put on trial. There was no lustration. The past didn't let go of us. Our heads are crammed with it.
I don't like to call what I do interviews. It's conversation about life. I come to people as a friend. We talk about everything-- a new blouse, love, and war. The conversation shouldn't be artificial. There shouldn't be any barriers. We just talk about good and evil, about socialism and capitalism, about freedom.
I've heard hundreds of answers to my questions. All of them represent us as we are at this moment.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: In answer to the question, what kind of country should this be-- a strong country or an admirable one where people live a good life-- eight out of 10 respondents choose a strong country. During perestroika, we were romantics who thought that freedom would arrive tomorrow. We had that naive certainty. Today we know that the road to freedom is long and hard. Many dangers and temptations await us along that road.
We don't have any experience of freedom. The only experience we have is of labor camps. Books pile up in the bookstores and markets by the hundreds. Everything has been published-- Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, Yevgenia Ginzburg. At one time, people were imprisoned for having these books. They were dismissed from universities. Nowadays, people hurried past them.
We are flooded with material goods. You can buy a new coffee grinder, a washing machine. There are dozens of kinds of sausage and cheese in stores, all available and ready for the trying. The pinnacle of people's dreams is a used car from Europe, a Schengen VISA, and a vacation in Turkey or Egypt. No one stands in line all night for books anymore. We were all sick, unhappy. People want to live-- just live-- to experience the joy of pretty things, of clothes.
The Red Empire's collapse was a unique historical occurrence. The sharp turn from socialism to capitalism shook people profoundly. They weren't prepared for it. This was the first time in history such a turn had taken place. The country was divided.
Some remember perestroika as a great time. I remember how people's faces changed immediately, even the flow of their movements. The air of freedom was intoxicating. My generation was ecstatic. It wanted to destroy communism, and it was destroyed.
Others think that it was a geopolitical catastrophe. I remember how wonderful it was to sit in our kitchens and dream about a free country. But when we were thrown out of that closed circle into the world-- into a common reality-- we were frightened. We imagined freedom as a holiday. We walked along the streets and plazas chanting, "freedom, freedom," but had no idea what freedom was.
I ask people I talk to, "How did you imagine freedom in the '90s?" We thought we would have the same kinds of stores they had in the west. There would be a lot of everything, no shortages. No one imagined freedom as work. When they understood, everyone was unsettled-- intellectuals as well as politicians.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
VALZHYNA MORT HUTCHINSON: They didn't think that freedom would demand free individuals, which we were not. We didn't let the world in. We closed ourselves off. Now we scare everyone. Russians are good soldiers. They'll do anything. Life is cheap over here. We only know one way of making others respect us. They must fear us. Putin came on the scene, and the world is afraid of us.
I am not a politician nor an economist. I'm an artist. I had to organize all this chaos and feel out the energy lines of the time and do it through art. I needed to let each person shout out his own truth in order to understand who we all are. Executioners and victims speak in this book, young and old.
Answers are born at the intersection of all these views and questions, more questions. How did Putin manage to resurrect the Stalinist machine so quickly? Once again, the FSB-- formerly the KGB-- can burst into any home, confiscate computers, put bloggers on trial for a post supporting Ukraine. Supposed spies are being hunted down and put on trial throughout the country-- schools, teachers, military personnel. People are frightened, and we don't know what is really happening in society or what it really thinks.
It's hard to understand. And there is one question I have never found an answer to. Why is it that our suffering doesn't convert into freedom? I follow the times and the human being.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
[APPLAUSE]
ANINDITA BANERJEE: Miss Alexievich has very kindly offered to field spontaneous questions. I will be the moderator. In other words, I will try to direct the order of the questions. And Dr. Krivitsky will interpret. So please be patient and put your questions in manageable segments for the interpreter. So we can start, I think.
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
ANINDITA BANERJEE: Please.
SPEAKER 1: Are you welcome in the Soviet Union now?
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: The Nobel Prize doesn't serve as any kind of positive argument for the dictatorship in Belarus or in Russia. Moreover, the other authorities have never liked the Nobel Laureates.
SPEAKER 2: After, especially, the last book-- the Secondhand Time-- I read both different reviews in Russian and in English. And the Russian reviews are especially interesting. Some of them are extremely nice. And they're really praising the book. And you feel proud.
But the majority of them are extremely negative. That's upsetting for me, to be honest, as a Russian-speaking person. But why do you think there is such a negative reaction? Because, especially, you know, all of those people-- especially those who have access to the internet-- they're all different. So there should be some people who think different. But, unfortunately, it's just a very small amount of them.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: OK, that's OK. I'll do it.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: I am translating from the first person, OK? So I am criticizing Putin. I support Ukraine. I am a Russophobe. I am the [INAUDIBLE] of, like, fan.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: We all sort of overlooked the moment with Putin because we believe that he is a follower of Democrats and he will be a democratic kind of leader. But instead he counsels in support of the darker forces in the society.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: These are dark and tumultuous times in our society when people are brought up in hatred to Ukraine, to Europe and filled with a sensation that we are a besieged fortress.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: We-- the Democrats, the liberals-- couldn't understand why Democrats are speaking to people and the people remain silent.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: But when Putin spoke that we are put on our knees, we are humiliated. But we are a great country. The people began talking. And that is frightening.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: I had a conversation with an educated woman, a professor who told me with admiration that she'd heard about the lethal weapon that can destroy very distant targets. And she reiterated that now they will be afraid of us.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And when I heard that from this person, I finally realized that we liberals-- [SPEAKING RUSSIAN].
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: --that we missed our chance.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: We're like one another. We spoke to each other. But we didn't have any idea what the people are like.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Perestroika was initiated by Gorbachev and a small number of people who supported him. And the people hadn't been part of it. They didn't want it.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: We invented the people. We had some idea of the people. But we didn't see the real picture.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: We were talking about freedom, and people just wanted to live better.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And then it's the eternal Russian problem, everything had been stolen. Everything had been transferred to the West and the people left with nothing and were angry, of course.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And it's the classic method in Russia to redirect people's anger, to route it to another, someone else-- to Europe, to the West.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And now people blame everything on the liberals. And the word "liberal" has become a derogatory word.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And the books of the kind I am writing, they raise discussions that do not make an attempt to understand what's going on and what is happening in this society. But this is a discussion. They just bring the criticism.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: It is not possible to write the truth about the war, about Stalin, anymore.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And just recently, when another anniversary of Russian aggression in Afghanistan was celebrated, Putin said that this was a heroic act of Soviet soldiers. And if we didn't invade Afghanistan, it would have been a disaster.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And my diagnosis is it's a closed time, a time of prohibition.
ANINDITA BANERJEE: So the next question, please.
SPEAKER 3: So my question is-- so my father came here with me from Soviet Russia. And he carries a deep hatred or dislike for communism. And my question, is in your interviews, is there a difference between-- so my family's Jewish. And is there a difference in people's lives--
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Excuse me? Can you speak a little further from the microphone? Yeah, maybe.
SPEAKER 3: Sorry. So my question is, in your interviews, is there a difference in people's feelings or experiences between Russians and Jews or even other religions?
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: So it's a question of whether, in the interview, there are these questions, right?
SPEAKER 3: I guess if people of different backgrounds--
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: In my book, Secondhand, there are stories about how people would be denounced about hiding Jews for a bag of flour and how the Jews were rejected by the partisans when they tried to join the partisan group and-- [SPEAKING RUSSIAN].
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: --how the local population in Ukraine, Lithuania, and Poland killed their Jewish neighbors.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: It is just impossible to avoid this topic.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: For the Belorussian, it is a cultural catastrophe that all the Jewish population had been destroyed.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: It was a thin layer of culture in our society.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: There were Jewish newspapers, magazines, schools, theaters.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: The Jews were a part of the intelligensia-- teachers, doctors, professors.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And this had been such a trauma that, until now, we do not have an intellectual elite, the one that could resist the authoritarian regime.
SPEAKER 4: War is one of the main topics of your books. And as a Ukrainian, I want to ask you, do you plan to write a book about the Russian-Ukrainian war, which is now going on 100 kilometers from my home city?
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: I am often asked this question. And I believe that this book should be written by an Ukrainian author. However, I am half Ukrainian. My mother is Ukrainian. Someone has to be immersed in that life to write about it.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Because writing such a book is not just a process of collecting information, you need to have the philosophy. You have to develop views. And, for that, you should be part of this life.
SPEAKER 5: Thank you. On the topic of war, later you also introduced the concepts of good and evil. So when you are covering war, first, do you make the distinction between just and unjust war? And in the war itself, do you make the distinction between the good side or the evil side if such a distinction could be make?
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: This is a prejudice of our time that the wars can be viewed as just and unjust.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: But I think that, in 100 years, people will be just baffled how people could kill one another and view this is a sort of cannibalism.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: My conviction is that the ideas should be killed, not people.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
[APPLAUSE]
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And I think of one person as an exemplar human who was an old soldier who fought in the war. And he begat his war a medals-- of which he had many-- not to a museum, as was pretty common at the time, but to a church. And he said that he fought in the just war, but he had killed.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: But unfortunately we live in the times where it's very hard to pry this pretty toy of war from male hands.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: I have been at war only once. It was in Afghanistan. I saw people who were killed. And, to me, it's a total madness.
SPEAKER 6: I live my life with at least 10 disabilities. And I know that the treatment of the disabled in the post-Soviet sphere leaves a lot to be desired. Do you have any comments or hopes, perhaps?
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: About the treatment of disabled soldiers or just disabled people?
SPEAKER 6: Anyone-- mentally and physically disabled.
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: OK.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: The life of disabled people is like a war because they have to fight to survive, too.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: But, little by little, slowly things change for the better.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Unfortunately, the ideas-- the way people think-- do not change as fast as the technology changes.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: The problem of treating the disabled is not limited to just a separate particular problem. It's a part of a bigger problem of treating people and people's lives.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: What would you expect in the country where people would go fight in Ukraine for money and for being paid for that? And when they are killed, their remains are brought back to Russia. And their mothers would never raise a voice speaking about them because they are afraid that they will not be paid like for what they're supposed to.
SPEAKER 7: [INAUDIBLE] you've lived in places where the flow of information is very regulated yet--
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Can you speak louder please?
SPEAKER 7: --yet your profession as a journalist requires the free flow and access to information. So what's it like being a journalist back in Soviet Russia and even now when there still isn't total freedom of the press and speech in Russia and Eastern Europe?
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: My life has always been difficult.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: If you tried to live as an honest person and as an honest journalist, it will be difficult for you anywhere and everywhere--
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
[APPLAUSE]
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: --because you were the one who articulates new meanings of things. You're the first one to do that. And no one is ready for that yet.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: The world is such that it's happy and satisfied. People are happy and satisfied with banality. But if you're a real writer, it's certainly not enough for you.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: To speak the truth about a human being and about the complexities of the modern world is not easy.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: You may not believe it, but for me one of the most difficult problems is how to tell about all the disasters, about the--
SPEAKER 8: Horrors?
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Horror-- about the horror that is happening. Thank you, audience.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: It is not my goal to overwhelm people with horrors.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: But I want to make people think about what is going on.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: And so I think a lot about the beautiful, about the things that are aesthetically beautiful--
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: --because when you turn on the TV, you can really get mad from what you see. So you are trying to hide from these things.
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: [SPEAKING RUSSIAN]
RAISSA KRIVITSKY: Thus, it's difficult to be telling the truth not only because of the harsh authorities but also because of the psychological filter of humans, of people.
ANINDITA BANERJEE: [RUSSIAN].
[APPLAUSE]
HIRO MIYAZAKI: Thank you. Thank you very much. On behalf of Cornell University and the Einaudi Center, I'd like to present this certificate recognizing you as this year's Bartels World Affairs Fellowship.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you so much for everything.
[APPLAUSE]
Nobel prize-winning journalist and nonfiction writer Svetlana Alexievich presented the 2016-17 Bartels World Affairs Fellowship Lecture at Cornell on Sept. 12. Alexievich, who grew up in Belarus, described how she developed her unique literary style, a collage of human voices that collectively tell the story of tragedy and preserve the history that otherwise leaves no trace – the stories of average survivors. The lecture was delivered in Russian using projected subtitles in English. In this video, the Russian is dubbed over in English by Valzhyna Mort Hutchinson, assistant professor of English.
The Bartels program, sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, brings prominent international leaders to Cornell to foster a broadened world view among Cornell students.
