Monday, October 26, 2015

Tom's Two Cents: "Zinky Boys" by Svetlana Alexievich



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.


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