black square adventures in the post soviet world sophie pinkham

The state’s regime of silence allows citizens to cling to long-cherished myths of cultural and moral superiority. A poet who served in the war tells her that no one wants to hear him and his fellow veterans talk: their mouths are full of blood. Perhaps worst of all, no one will listen to them. For her, the “zinky boys” sent home in zinc coffins are relatively lucky: far worse to be left crippled, begging on crutches in railway stations, or to be driven insane, like the boy who can’t stop digging trenches, even in the soil of potted ficus plants. Instead, she worries about the ethics of writing about soldiers. She’s the only journalist who isn’t dying to go to the front and “do a bit of shooting,” something to brag about later.

“I can’t rid myself of the feeling that war is a product of the male nature,” she writes.

The other journalists and writers covering the Afghan war, which was conducted under a veil of secrecy and lies from 1979-1989, are “fairytale merchants.” Alexievich is the only woman in the group. She doesn’t want to write about war again, but she must. Suddenly everything was unbearable: a child’s nosebleed, the bulging eyes of a fish caught on a line. Now even one more drop would make her overflow. In the process of writing two books about World War II, she filled herself to the brim with other people’s suffering. Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, starts with Alexievich not wanting to write about war. Although her work paints a lovingly detailed picture of Soviet and post-Soviet reality, her concerns transcend historical particularities. It will be a pity if she is understood as a strictly anti-Soviet or anti-totalitarian writer. Like Dostoevsky, Alexievich is concerned not only with national realities, but with universal human values. Like Dostoevsky, Alexievich uses seemingly artless prose, littered with ellipses, to give us truth, conveyed through the gathering strength of many voices. She shares his belief that compassion is the greatest hope for humankind, and his rejection of the cycles of revenge that have dictated so much of human history. Alexievich was originally a journalist, and says that she learned early on that “the best way to learn about life was through the sound of human voices.” In War’s Unwomanly Face, about the experiences of Soviet women who served during World War II, she writes, “In apartments and cottages, on the street and in the train…I listen…More and more, I turn into one large ear, always turning to another person.” Alexievich has said that her work is inspired by the Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, who wrote “collective novels” or “epic choruses” about the horrors of war.Īnother of Alexievich’s clear influences is Dostoevsky, whom she mentions often. But Alexievich’s work is more complicated than the political narrative suggests.

Black square adventures in the post soviet world sophie pinkham