Just when I thought, after finishing "The
Nightingale," that I was leaving the subject of war behind, I realize that
I'm still mired in it. For some time I've
been trying to get a handle on the complex causes of WWI (Remember Barbara
Tuchman's "The Guns of August "?), and now I've started a new work on
that war from the Russian point of view, "The End of Tsarist Russia,"
which deals not only with Russia's role in the First World War, but the
revolution and civil war that overlapped and followed. Now comes the news that the Nobel Prize for
Literature has been awarded to a Russian woman journalist, Svetlana Alexievich,
for major contributions in a relatively new genre, "literary
non-fiction." As far as I know,
only a few women, and only two Americans, Pearl Buck and Toni Morrison, have
won the Nobel, in both cases for their fiction.
Svetlana Alexievich is a bit of an anomaly. Most of her work falls under the category of
journalistic "reportage," and her major subjects have been war,
disaster, i.e., the nuclear one in Chernobyl, and the effects of such on human
survivors, especially those of Russian nationality. Though she writes in the first sentence of
her 1990 "Zinky Boys," the story of Russia's nine-year war in
Afghanistan, "I never want to write another word about...war," that
[after her last book on WWII] I could ... be upset by the sight of a child with
a nosebleed", she has doggedly continued to produce book after book of
mostly interviews from soldiers/participants in war, their families and the
devastation wreaked on all concerned.
For this she has been both condemned (mostly by the Russian government)
and applauded (by the World Community).
"Zinky Boys" seems to me to be a hybrid: it's certainly not fiction, but it doesn't
really seem to fit the new category of "narrative non-fiction,"
either. (See the current exhibit at the
Library, just past the Librarian's office, on the right.). Narrative non-
fiction is just that--a true story, with a definite narrative or narrative
elements. Eric Larsen's "Dead
Wake" comes immediately to mind.
But Svetlana Alexievich does not follow this pattern: after a personal introduction of twelve very
gripping and moving pages, she goes into a recording of voices from the war
followed by voices from home, in three chapters, all framed (and in a sense
unified) by a phone conversation from a protestor, who takes issue with her
whole, essentially objective, approach to the Soviet War in Afghanistan.
If one doesn't wish to quibble about such questions as
what genre she is writing in and concentrates strictly on what she has to say,
one would have to conclude that her writing is both horrific and heartrending
at the same time. But is it literature? I really don't know. The subject of war in literature goes all the
way back to Homer and "The Iliad".
Many superb novels, "War and Peace," and "Gone with the
Wind," to mention only two, have dealt with it, both from the participants
and indirect participants point of view.
As a young man I read "From Here to Eternity" and "The
Naked and the Dead," both huge literary best-sellers, and long before
that, there was "Red Badge of Courage," "All Quiet on the
Western Front," and "A Farewell to Arms." Some of these were written from first or
second hand experience and/or involvement in war itself, but all had a
narrative structure, character(s), and conflict. Svetlana Alexievich touches another kind of
nerve, one so sensitive and so terrible that she is chastened by some of her
readers that "such things should not be written about."
I don't have a comment about that, other than to say that
we seem to live in an age in which no holds are barred. Is it necessary or advisable to go to the
brink to make a statement of belief or non-belief? Is Svetlana Alexievich a voice crying in the
wilderness, and if she is, is that voice a necessary one in literature, despite
its refusal to be categorized? The Nobel
Committee obviously thinks so.
ADDENDUM: The
October 26 issue of The New Yorker has a very informative article called
"The Memory Keeper" on Alexievich.
The book reviewed above is called "Boys of Zinc," referring to
the sealed zinc caskets that bodies from the Afghanistan War were returned to
the USSR in.
