Svetlana Alexievich Masha Gessen

Svetlana Alexievich | Masha Gessen

June 13, 2016

LIVE from the New York Public Library

www.nypl.org/live

Celeste Auditorium

(applause)

MASHA GESSEN: Thank you. It is a huge honor and pleasure to be here. I’m actually going to start to ask questions in English, and Svetlana will answer in Russian and Anatoli will translate.

So this is not what I thought we were going to start with when I was first getting ready for this event. But you come here at a moment of great tragedy and fear. And you are a specialist in both tragedy and fear. Can you talk about what you’re sensing in New York over the last two days that you’ve been here?

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: (replies in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: Of course I don’t speak the language, so I cannot really get in contact with people in the street and I have to kind of feel and live it within myself, but a thought that frightens me is that we really are at the mercy of loners, of alone people.

MASHA GESSEN: Over the last couple of years a lot of LGBT people have come to this country from our part of the world, looking for safety and finding safety here, and yesterday a lot

1 of them went to the vigils because of the Orlando shooting. I think another thing that you are a specialist in is talking to people who look for safety, who find safety, who lose safety.

TRANSLATOR: Well, I think that feeling of security is perhaps lost and is an illusion. In

Belarus we have a woman who basically fled to Israel for security and then to Spain, and in

Spain she got caught up in this horrible terrorist act that happened there, so there is not really a place where you can run to.

MASHA GESSEN: You left Belarus at one point.

TRANSLATOR: I left Belarus for perhaps more complicated reasons than just political ones, because for a writer, the world is a more complicated space.

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: (continues in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: Of course it was a political protest, but there were other things. At one point I went into a writer’s home, and it was a time when the democrats would go out on the streets and sometimes clash with policeman and at some point somebody in their house said, “Well, that was

2 good. We clashed with them and we drew blood,” and for me that appeared to be a very frightening.

TRANSLATOR: I would not want to be a writer who is celebrating anybody’s blood. And this barricade culture is very much a catch for all of us because when you’re an artist on the barricade, you see a target, and a person ceases to become multicolor and ceases to become a person.

TRANSLATOR: And I wanted to also get my eyesight back, get the apple of my eye back, and live in a world without the divisions, and us and them, our national traitors and our people, and that was very important for me.

TRANSLATOR: But I would like to live at home, and after eleven years I came back home.

TRANSLATOR: Home was even scarier and a lot worse.

3 MASHA GESSEN: What do you mean you want to live at home?

(laughter)

TRANSLATOR: I want to live in Minsk, even though I live in a city, I was born in a country, in a village, and I don’t think I would survive, I would go crazy on Broadway.

MASHA GESSEN: I remember we talked when you had been living in Europe I guess for about ten years, and you said a line that really stayed with me, you said, “ I thought I was going to sit him out,” meaning Lukashenko, “but now I’ve realized that’s not going to happen.” Can you talk about how that evolved, your understanding of what kind of regime you’re living with?

TRANSLATOR: I’m not going to sit him out, it’s a bit different.

TRANSLATOR: It’s silly to be murdered in an entryway, in an entry alley.

4 SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: (continues in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: And it was necessary to do some sort of gesture of protest, to make a gesture of protest.

TRANSLATOR: But the books that I’m writing, you can write them only when you are amongst your people.

TRANSLATOR: Where everything is changing, even the lexics—the words are changing.

TRANSLATOR: And you’re not going to find it on the Internet, you’re not going to kind of catch it, you’re not going to hear it.

TRANSLATOR: And perhaps in the United States, in Europe, people are more accustomed to live in different places, maybe Europe more so than here, but in our culture, the idea of living out

5 in the world is perhaps not yet there and when I came back I bought myself a house near a forest with a river running close by and essentially bought myself my childhood back.

TRANSLATOR: And perhaps it is my way to find a way to escape that nightmare that I have been studying for the past thirty years.

TRANSLATOR: I am also a biosystem, a biohuman, and I need some ways of protection.

MASHA GESSEN: So you’ve actually, you’ve lived through two periods in your life of sort of sudden, extreme fame. In the eighties, your—your books suddenly started being published by the millions, you became a household word, and then the Nobel, and so you’ve experienced that heightened scrutiny to yourself and the publicity, twice. What’s that like?

TRANSLATOR: It’s a nightmare, it’s a nightmare, Masha.

6 TRANSLATOR: You know, you find yourself on a plane with your classmate from college and then the next day you find the conversation printed in the paper.

TRANSLATOR: If you buy a house and they mention I bought a house, then the entire country discusses how much it cost and what—

TRANSLATOR: And, you know, I am a person of alone, calm work. I am not a public person, I don’t like it.

TRANSLATOR: And then it’s very difficult on a human level energetically because even love directed at you requires a lot of strength.

TRANSLATOR: And this year especially it’s kind of expected to do a tour, world tour, and it’s been seventeen countries, and my desk became this unattainable dream.

TRANSLATOR: Aloneness is the best state.

MASHA GESSEN: Maybe sometimes you get to be alone in a hotel room, but that kind of attention in a country like Belarus also gives you some protection and also perhaps a pulpit.

TRANSLATOR: In terms of the pulpit, yes.

TRANSLATOR: I can say things that other people can’t.

(laughter)

TRANSLATOR: In terms of protection I don’t really know. I’m not sure our government knows what a Nobel Prize is.

(laughter)

8 MASHA GESSEN: Maybe that’s why Lukashenko congratulated you.

TRANSLATOR: You know he did congratulate me the next day and he said that I am libeling the Russian and Belorussian people.

TRANSLATOR: Because you know all those authoritarian rulers, dictators, they in the end are narcissistic.

TRANSLATOR: They don’t tolerate any figures next to them. That’s impossible.

TRANSLATOR: It’s been told that Fidel Castro whenever on a television a handsome male announcer would appear who would challenge him somehow, he would fire this person.

9 TRANSLATOR: They are people, too, and they have their own complexes.

TRANSLATOR: We’re just simply demonizing them.

MASHA GESSEN: Speaking of dictators, (laughter) we’ve watched Russia and Belarus take sort of parallel paths, and repeat many of the same episodes, and then there’s a third neighbor,

Ukraine, that seems to be on a different road, a very problematic one, but a different one. What’s the difference between them?

TRANSLATOR: You know it’s an interesting question because within me I have two plots; my mother is Ukrainian, my father is Belorussian.

TRANSLATOR: And I want to tell you that my mother was ruling the house.

(laughter)

TRANSLATOR: And Ukrainians have very strong characters, and they’re people with a very free spirit.

TRANSLATOR: Even Stalin did not manage to handle them and to tackle them, and he finally did so by arranging what is known as Holodomor, mass famine in the 1920s, and millions of people died.

TRANSLATOR: And Belarusians are much more quieter, a much more quiet people, and they were always on the way of invasions into Russia, invasion outside of Russia, and it created a certain feeling of victimhood that became part of the nation.

TRANSLATOR: And Russia always needs a super idea.

11 TRANSLATOR: And, you know, in my travels when the book I was collecting material for,

Secondhand Time, I was traveling around Russia a lot, and one thing that was amazing is that you would meet an old man sitting next to his hut that is just falling apart without a fence, but nonetheless it was impossible to tell him anything against Russia, and he would talk about all those geopolitical issues.

TRANSLATOR: And I was asking constantly a question, “Which country would you like to live in: a great one or a normal one?” and in 80 percent of the cases the answer was, “in a great one.”

TRANSLATOR: And if you listen to Russian radio or television there is perpetually this message that we might not have your French Camembert, but we are still great and we are going to make you respect us. It’s unclear to respect us for—what for to respect us.

MASHA GESSEN: This idea of humiliation is actually something that lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from this demand for respect. What is this humiliation about? What are people humiliated by, and how does that connect to Soviet nostalgia?

12 TRANSLATOR: I think we need to start here from afar, from the 1990s when we were all big romantics.

TRANSLATOR: And both our elite and us, we were sitting talking in our kitchens, and we were imagining our people and we had this notion of our imaginary people and it turned out we didn’t know our people.

TRANSLATOR: And when we left our kitchens and went out into the street, it became clear that we don’t have anything to tell our people and that the people are not interested to hear what we have to say.

TRANSLATOR: And book street vendors had mounds of volumes by Solzhenitsyn and

Shalamov, things that were difficult to get before, but now people were no longer interested in them.

13 TRANSLATOR: Imagine a person leaving prison, they would not be interested to read about prison again, they would want to go and run and explore the life that is unknown to them.

TRANSLATOR: And that’s what happened. People wanted to travel the world, people wanted to buy, try new food, and get at least an old used car, and they escaped that Russian, ascetic,

Soviet ascetic situation and that’s what was driving them.

TRANSLATOR: Yes, we repeated that mantra, “Freedom, freedom,” when we were running around the squares, but nobody really knew what it is.

TRANSLATOR: And even to me, my friends came who were preaching for freedom, but it was completely acceptable not to pay taxes to the state.

14 TRANSLATOR: So there was no notion that freedom is something that needs to be made and nobody really knew what that freedom should be and what it meant.

TRANSLATOR: And intelligentsia was at a loss and didn’t know what to do, and the only organized part of society were criminals, were bandits, who started making money.

TRANSLATOR: And then they started dividing the Russian pie, this enormous country, the oil pipeline.

TRANSLATOR: The point is that a person who spent his years living in a camp, his life living in a camp, is not going to get free by getting out the next day.

TRANSLATOR: And unfortunately we understood it too late when we suffered a defeat.

15 TRANSLATOR: And when history will give us another chance like that it’s difficult to imagine.

MASHA GESSEN: You said once that—possibly more than once, that the camp demeans both the victim and the executioner. Could you unpack that statement for me?

TRANSLATOR: You know, what is our history? It is a continuous civil war.

TRANSLATOR: Either with arms or spiritually with words.

TRANSLATOR: In order to put several million people in a camp you would need a million people who denounced them, you would need a million people who would guard them, so you need a lot of those small executioners.

16 TRANSLATOR: And, you know, those who went through this kind of sledgehammer, and survived, very often, they would come back and they would still have to live with those executioners. They would sit in the same offices, they would go and celebrate the same

Communist holidays, and life would go on.

TRANSLATOR: And the executioners, they always disappear. The people who remain are victims.

TRANSLATOR: But the spreading philosophy of people who also took part in all of us, it touched all of us, it touched every one of us.

TRANSLATOR: I talk to people a lot and I was trying to understand what it means, who is that small executioner? Actually the main actor of history.

17 TRANSLATOR: And they’re absolutely normal, everyday people who would say, “Well that’s just a job, times are difficult,” and they would find a million different excuses for themselves.

TRANSLATOR: and we have always lived in that upside-down world where good and evil were mixed up.

MASHA GESSEN: We were just talking backstage about something extraordinary that’s happened in Russia where there was a museum of the GULAG outside of Perm, a city in the

Urals, that has been taken over by the authorities and a lot of the news reports have said that it’s now used as a museum that glorifies the GULAG, and I promised to tell you what I found on my recent trip there, which is it’s not actually a museum that glorifies the GULAG, it’s something much stranger than that, it’s a museum that completely mixes up everything, it sort of shows everything is the moral equivalent of everything else.

For example, the tour begins with the tour guide pointing at a portrait of a dissident who served time there, and saying, “This is a very important place, because this very important person served time here,” with an unmistakable sense of pride. And I think that you have—you were just talking about the switch, good and evil switching places, but you’ve also talked about the lack of chemically pure evil in the world, and I want you to talk about the mush that good and evil turn into, especially when we’re dealing with Soviet memory.

18 SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: (replies in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: In this book, Secondhand Time, there is a metaphoric tale about this.

TRANSLATOR: A man tells a story how when he was a boy he was in love with his aunt Olga.

TRANSLATOR: And all children loved her, she had beautiful hair, a beautiful voice.

TRANSLATOR: And he was a student already during perestroika, his mother confessed to him that in 1937 Aunt Olga denounced her own brother.

TRANSLATOR: And that brother died in camps.

19 TRANSLATOR: And for that young man it was very important in order to understand something in life, about life to talk to Aunt Olga.

TRANSLATOR: And during his school break, he went to see Aunt Olga, and he asked her,

“Well, why did you denounce him? Why did you do this?”

TRANSLATOR: And Aunt Olga came back with a classic answer. She said, “Well, I would like to see you go and find an honest man during the Stalin times.”

TRANSLATOR: And then he asked her, “And what do you remember about 1937?”

TRANSLATOR: And he saw her smile and she said, “Well, that was the best time of my life.”

20 TRANSLATOR: I was loved, I loved back, and I loved in return.

TRANSLATOR: So you see how a person is protected from everything by their own story.

TRANSLATOR: And evil is not Stalin and Beria that we can put aside and that we can delegate evil to them.

TRANSLATOR: Evil is in a beautiful Aunt Olga.

TRANSLATOR: And the danger is not to distinguish between good and evil, because evil is present in our lives always.

21 TRANSLATOR: And today I don’t think we need to demonize Putin and say “Putin, Putin,” all the time. I travel a lot nowadays and I see caricatures where Putin is portrayed as Hitler.

TRANSLATOR: We’re talking about a collective Putin, we’re talking about a Putin that is in every human being.

TRANSLATOR: And this Putin is in every Russian person, a person who’s been deceived, who’s been robbed, and what they do, they do the same thing as Putin.

TRANSLATOR: What Hannah Arendt referred to as murky times or unclear times and it’s an epidemic of evil and that’s what we’re living through in Russia.

TRANSLATOR: I’ve recently been in Moscow and it is very difficult to talk to people, people you know, people who are friends, intellectuals, without hearing “Crimea is ours.”

TRANSLATOR: Because you immediately realize that you’re on different sides of the barricades.

(laughter)

TRANSLATOR: And one very good friend of mine who’s a very good poet and we got out and we went to have a coffee with her and while we were sitting down in café, she said, “So let us be absolutely clear: Crimea is not ours.”

TRANSLATOR: And those are the markings or the signals by which we recognize very few remaining people who are standing outside that.

TRANSLATOR: And I hear in different countries this question: “What kind of people are you

Russians? You got freedom and you basically refused it.”

TRANSLATOR: And where and why this Putin?

TRANSLATOR: And then after reading the book and understanding this mixture of passions and faiths in that Russian pot, it became understandable why and how it happened.

TRANSLATOR: And that’s what I wanted to tell in the book.

TRANSLATOR: What kind of people we are, and in the 1990s when we got out of the gate from that camp, we did not became immediately different. That’s impossible.

TRANSLATOR: Look at the Germans and how many years they are trying to deal with their history.

TRANSLATOR: And they are constantly reflecting, they are constantly talking about it, and in

Russia we have legislature, you can’t talk about church, you can’t talk about war, and what did it bring us? Where have we come with this?

TRANSLATOR: You can only come to the point where we end up, and this is the beginning of resurrection of something resembling the Soviet Union.

TRANSLATOR: To the new Cold War.

TRANSLATOR: Somewhere in Vladivostok they were burning the effigy of Obama.

TRANSLATOR: How they would write on Solzhenitsyn’s monument, “traitor.”

TRANSLATOR: Of course it’s a civil war.

TRANSLATOR: And it seems like a little bit more and everything will explode.

MASHA GESSEN: You’ve used the term the “Red Man” to describe the person, the character that’s been formed by the Soviet century, which is probably similar to this concept of Homo

Sovieticus that the sociologist Yuri Levada uses. But can you describe the Red Man? What’s he like?

TRANSLATOR: I do not want to speak in banalities. Let me tell you about my father.

TRANSLATOR: He was a very gifted man and he started before the war at the department of journalism and when he was in the second year school of journalism he left for the war.

26 TRANSLATOR: And there during the most scary battle of the war, the Stalingrad battle, he joined the party.

TRANSLATOR: And when he came back from the war, he became a principal of a village school, and up to his very last days—he died recently at around ninety—he remained a communist.

TRANSLATOR: And he was raising us children, we were three in the family, by telling us that we live in the best country and that we should be prepared to sacrifice our lives for it at first notion, and that’s how most of the children grew up.

TRANSLATOR: And I have to say that we seldom saw our father. He was always doing something, building a school, and he never lived for himself.

27 TRANSLATOR: And his excuse for how poor we lived—he always would say, “we do live like that because there was a great war.”

TRANSLATOR: And when perestroika happened, for some time he was at a loss.

TRANSLATOR: And then he was hopeful, like many people were hopeful, because even the word capitalism was not acknowledged. We were not building capitalism, it were sort of shamefully put aside, we talked about market.

TRANSLATOR: We all thought that we are going to build a socialism with a human face.

TRANSLATOR: So even for me in my worst dream, I could not imagine that it would be this bad capitalism, it would be some sort of form of socialism.

28 TRANSLATOR: And, you know, it’s very difficult after socialism to see an elderly retired teacher being able to afford only two or three eggs and subsiding on milk and perhaps bread.

TRANSLATOR: And there was no plan and people were left alone to think about it all.

TRANSLATOR: And people did not really understand what was happening with them.

TRANSLATOR: I remember when I was writing a book about Afghanistan and I went there and I was so shaken by what I saw there, I came back and I told my father, “Dad, we’re murderers.”

TRANSLATOR: We’re not this great beautiful country that you all our lives told us we are.

29 TRANSLATOR: And my father had no argument, he could not say anything back to me, he just started crying.

TRANSLATOR: And I do not like this notion of sovok or Soviet or Homo Sovietus or Soviet mass, I think that’s very snobbish, because I see the face of my father, who I felt was a very honest and very clever man.

TRANSLATOR: And what I was doing when I was writing this book about a Red Man, about communism in Russia, in order to tell a story about what happens when people are attempting to build a paradise on earth very prematurely.

TRANSLATOR: And it was quite in vain that we thought in 1990s that Communism is over, it’s dead, it’s finished. It’s not finished, it’s very much here, and it’s going to return again and again.

30 TRANSLATOR: Those words, equality, fraternity, they brought a lot of blood and they will bring a lot of blood again.

TRANSLATOR: But those are beautiful words.

MASHA GESSEN: I want to talk about your method for a second. What you just described is the most powerful cultural myth in Russian culture, the myth of the Great Patriotic War, which

Russians call the Soviet part of World War II, which sort of legitimizes everything that came before and everything that came after, and it establishes the Soviet Union as the great superpower, and you also describe what happens when you break through that cultural myth, you describe your father crying, but of course your method is the method of breaking through these cultural layers. How do you actually do it?

TRANSLATOR: It’s quite a good question, right, to live for thirty years and do it and then tell you here quickly about this.

(laughter)

31 MASHA GESSEN: Tell me about the mechanics. How many times do you talk to somebody?

TRANSLATOR: Let’s start with the fact that almost surely, assuredly behind the story is a deep trauma from childhood.

TRANSLATOR: I lived in a village after the war in the country and in that village there were only women living there, almost only women.

TRANSLATOR: And Belarusians had a very strong resistance, a guerrilla movement and every fourth man was killed.

TRANSLATOR: And I do not remember any other questions in my childhood other than conversations about death and about loss. About a death of a husband, about a death of a son, these were all constant continuous conversations.

TRANSLATOR: And then I would come back into the house from the street and it was a Slavic village where a lot of street life was happening, people were sitting on the benches and talking. It would appear that the books that filled the house were not as interesting as the conversations outside.

TRANSLATOR: And when I graduated from the school of journalism and started to work as a journalist and travel around the country, what was most impressive for me, was most striking, were the stories told by people.

TRANSLATOR: And of course what was most interesting for me was not at all required by the paper.

TRANSLATOR: But always in my mind there was a very powerful chorus of the people.

33 TRANSLATOR: And tradition to record oral history, maybe not quite in the way that I do it, it exists in the Russian literature.

TRANSLATOR: And it seemed to me that one can write a novel from those voices, from the sounds of the life around you.

TRANSLATOR: And to make a character out of a small person that often disappears without a trace.

TRANSLATOR: Nobody ever questions this person, they are just building material for history.

TRANSLATOR: And what do I do? I come to see a person and I don’t come to interview them.

I come to them as a friend, I come to them as a neighbor in time, and it’s not an interview; we talk about life.

TRANSLATOR: And if we talk about war, for example, this is not just exclusively about the war, about Chernobyl, it’s really a conversation about everything, about life, about love, about betrayal, and of course about war, too.

TRANSLATOR: But of course it’s not that easy, you don’t just come in, you listen, put it down to paper, and that’s it.

TRANSLATOR: And first of all you have to be interesting to that person. You have to make them say something that they always wanted to say but didn’t know how.

TRANSLATOR: And each one of us has things in life that we don’t quite know and didn’t quite explain. And we wanted if not someone to explain it to us but at least someone to talk to about them.

TRANSLATOR: I had two problems, really. The first one is to rid people of banality, because very often, people are quite happy to kind of limit themselves on that top layer of banality.

TRANSLATOR: And the second most challenging is to break through that culture of suffering, the culture of crying, to make people reflect, to make people think.

TRANSLATOR: Because the culture of suffering is a very powerful thing, and it validates certain things for people and they think that if they tell you about the suffering, that’s it, that’s their life.

TRANSLATOR: And you offer the person a conversation why our suffering does not convert into freedom.

36 TRANSLATOR: And then a person starts to think and at that point it’s interesting to talk to them.

TRANSLATOR: But, Masha, it’s crazy work.

MASHA GESSEN: Do you ever wonder about the ethics of this kind of work? Because you do come to the person as a friend, as a confidant, and you get them to get to their raw selves in order to publish it.

(laughter)

TRANSLATOR: No, what I wanted to say, no, Masha, not quite that way.

TRANSLATOR: It’s not at all like that because I love a person and I cannot let them down.

37 TRANSLATOR: And if people did not feel that love they would not talk to me in that way.

TRANSLATOR: But on the other hand, I do feel that a document could tell about everything and there are no limits for it.

TRANSLATOR: The other point is that I need to protect this person. I need to change their name, I need to do something that if a person feels that they are under a threat or under some sort of pressure that they do not feel that.

TRANSLATOR: For example, when I published the book Zinky Boys I got a list of people of names but under separate stories I would only put “a private,” or “an officer,” or “a grenade launcher,” so that KGB would not go after those people and they would go after me, which did happen.

38 TRANSLATOR: And my characters are amazing people and they tell things about themselves that to be perfectly honest I wouldn’t have told about myself.

TRANSLATOR: And in my book about Chernobyl, I write about a person who was liquidating the Chernobyl disaster, who was a rescuer, and he was dying a very horrible death and it was a literally a deterioration of the body, his wife had to scoop his insides, it was a horrible death and he was screaming all through the night and screaming during the day.

TRANSLATOR: And nothing helped, the medicine didn’t help, and the ambulance stopped coming, and she was pouring vodka down him or something else and amazingly at night, she came to him and they made love, she loved him.

TRANSLATOR: And when she told me about this she was taken aback, she said, “Oh my goodness, you might think I am some sort of a maniac, but this was really the only way I could help him.”

39 TRANSLATOR: And she said that she never told anybody about this before.

TRANSLATOR: And it was before I published the book but I published an excerpt somewhere in a magazine and they changed her name, her last name.

TRANSLATOR: And she called me in a few days and she said, “Why did you change my last name?”

TRANSLATOR: And she said, “Valya, I can’t just feed you to the dogs, to this common man there, to the everyday man.”

TRANSLATOR: And she said, “No, I suffered so much and he suffered so much. Put my real name in.”

TRANSLATOR: And very often I was taught such lessons.

TRANSLATOR: But there is a dark side to art, because very often death is highly artistic, and suffering is highly artistic, as is evil.

TRANSLATOR: And one has to be very careful and not aestheticize neither that one, neither the former nor the latter.

TRANSLATOR: But art is always kind of snooping, is listening in.

TRANSLATOR: There is—I am told that Leo Tolstoy when he was writing his amazing stories, including “Death of Ivan Ilyich,” he would go to acquaintances’ houses and sit there for a very long time watching people dying, faces changing, movements changing, and even at one point,

41 one elderly man chased him away, he said, “Go away, you evil guy, this is my personal business,

I’m doing it alone.”

TRANSLATOR: But because of that a genius story was written and of course appeared.

TRANSLATOR: And I don’t think we should be deceived that art is such a moral thing.

MASHA GESSEN: Before we open it up for questions, I’ll you one question that has a little bit of a history between us because last time I interviewed Svetlana was the day after she won the

Nobel Prize, and what had happened—I have her permission to tell this story. What had happened was that I called her and it was very difficult to get hold of her, and so I finally got hold of her late at night, after the announcement, and I said, “I’m in Kiev, can I come to Minsk now to interview you?” And she said, “No, no, you can’t come to Minsk, because I’m not going to go to bed anyway, I have to get on the plane at three in the morning to fly to Berlin for the press conference.” I said, “Well, no problem, I’ll come to Berlin.”

So we met up in Berlin in the morning, but then Svetlana had a press conference, and then there was a lunch, and then there were friends, and then we didn’t sit down for the interview until seven o’clock in the evening, and I couldn’t believe she was still functioning and so about twenty

42 minutes into the interview I asked, “How do you write about love? Because you have been wanting to write a book about love for years, and what’s the holdup, how are you writing about love?” And Svetlana closed her eyes to sort of what I thought was to think of the answer.

(laughter) And then I realized she had gone to sleep.

(laughter)

How do you write about love?

TRANSLATOR: Masha, I have to confess that it was only out of interest to you that I agreed to the meeting because my just biophysical function gets exhausted.

TRANSLATOR: And perhaps I closed my eyes when I heard a question in sheer horror, because, you know, how long can one keep telling this, keep telling this story, how can you tell this story?

TRANSLATOR: That that of course is a degree of trust on my part.

TRANSLATOR: But now I do write a book about love, and it’s a book about a love of a man and a woman, a man and a man, a woman and a woman, and everything that exists in life and love.

TRANSLATOR: And this idea that dominated people and that kept people is gone and I want to explore what happens when people live without it.

TRANSLATOR: And of course, you know, the government, the powers to be, they try not to leave people alone, they always get people, throw something at people, now this new idea about the Russian world.

TRANSLATOR: But more and more often I hear conversations about love, about home, about happiness from getting new things, and those conversations are still new in our culture.

TRANSLATOR: But of course it’s a risky adventure, because, you know, how do you tell about love?

TRANSLATOR: It’s something very changing, very fleeting, it’s not something that you can just study in this continuum.

TRANSLATOR: So now I am still, in my working situation I am still thinking.

MASHA GESSEN: Thank you, let’s take questions.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: So we’re going to take questions from this mic. We’re going to ask people to ask questions, only good questions, so you’re going to come up to the mic, and a question can be asked in about thirty seconds.

Q: As you said, an evil regime survives because millions small little men obey the orders and if we do not see what a little man can do rather than obeying orders, how he can resist, then it’s all

45 hopeless, so did you think about it? What an honest little man could do to resist this system, to fight it?

TRANSLATOR: You know, if we talk about, for example, ants and how they continue to pull, you know, little pieces of wood or grass and something might happen in human life, but they continue to do their daily tasks.

TRANSLATOR: And I don’t think that there are a lot of options in this dilemma. You have to continue to do, live your everyday life, do your everyday business, but be on the side of good in small and big one.

TRANSLATOR: And all those ideas and attempts to right the people and to change them, they end up in big blood and I think people can only try to change themselves and create this space, this circle of clean water, around them.

46 TRANSLATOR: When now I hear those conversations about Great Russia, about great tasks, I really have nothing but fear.

TRANSLATOR: What we have enough strength for is to tackle our own soul.

Q: (in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: Svetlana, I just finished reading Secondhand Time and it’s an incredible book.

Q: (in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: They have a simple question: why in Russian you used a word like

“secondhand” in the Russian title of your book?

TRANSLATOR: Because, you know, in Russian we don’t have such an all-encompassing word for old things. That’s a very good word.

Q: Svetlana, thank you very much for this interview. You spoke about those people who got out of this camp and were not ready for this freedom. But what about the generation who were born

47 in 1990s? We never saw the USSR times, and we were born in a country which was already free.

How would you describe this generation and is there any hope that we can change Russia and the whole situation?

TRANSLATOR: You know, the civility that I see in maybe your generation, maybe other generation of young people, because we thought there would appear a generation that was not beaten, that was not imprisoned, a generation that would be free. And you know I don’t really see free people in your generation.

TRANSLATOR: You know, and I like the new generations, because those are the people who travel, they speak foreign languages, they saw the world, they mastered their computers, but when I talk to them, very often, they kind of live within themselves, and they say, “I don’t go to elections, you know, I’m not interested in Putin.” Well, you know, if you’re not interested in

Putin, Putin might very well be very interested in you very soon.

TRANSLATOR: And so this political infantilism, is not something, childishness, is not something that I understand.

TRANSLATOR: I asked one young man, “Oh, have you read Solzhenitsyn?” And he said, “Oh, this is old stuff. Nobody is interested in that anymore.”

TRANSLATOR: And that’s again this kind of biological superiority.

TRANSLATOR: And then it happened that young people in Belarus, they did come out, out to the street, they were on the square, and about seven hundred people were arrested.

TRANSLATOR: And one young woman told me that up until she found herself in jail she felt that Gulag Archipelago is a boring big volume.

49 TRANSLATOR: And then she, you know, saw her investigator and she realized that the bits and pieces of Gulag Archipelago that she did read were very much part of life because the investigator told her that they would put somebody in her jail who would rape her, they would put a plastic bag over her head, and she realized but this is very much not a book but a life.

TRANSLATOR: Because the good things are not passed on, but the plastic bag over head, that does get passed on.

TRANSLATOR: I would say hurry up and take power in your hands.

Q: Thank you very much, I wanted to ask you a question that’s essentially integrated about different parts of your book on Chernobyl. It made me think of going to a concert and you are applauding the orchestra but really the composer as well. So your book I was thinking about how magnificently descriptive and eloquent so many of your interviewees are, so I have two questions about this, one is and also how frequently people expressed concern when they realized they were being looked at and reported on and didn’t seem entirely happy as the woman you described earlier about being exposed.

50 So my question is in terms of editing. You know, your—you put the book together, but really what you did was introduce us to other people who are so capable and willing and wanting to express themselves. So I wanted to know how much editing you did, if any, and how many people did you find would not allow themselves to be in your book?

TRANSLATOR: There were cases where people refused interviews.

TRANSLATOR: And about the war I cited that example, this one woman said, “I don’t want to go back into that hell.”

TRANSLATOR: And with Chernobyl there were cases when people said, “Well, you wouldn’t understand, anyway, it would take the next generation to understand it, so there is no point talking about this.”

51 TRANSLATOR: But when I published a few bits for instance in magazines, people called me and they actually said, “You know, we do want to talk, because we thought that it would be a very journalistic book, it would be a very anti-Russian, anti–nuclear power book, but no, we see that it’s deeper and we want to talk.” So actually I would say that very few people refused to talk.

TRANSLATOR: And I think it happens because I’m interested in love and in death and I think those are two things that everything revolves around and that all of us want to understand something about.

Q: And the editing, did you find yourself editing at all?

TRANSLATOR: You know, when I realize that this is going to be a large story, maybe four or five pages of a book, I meet with this person quite a few times, because out of a hundred pages, you have some material, I would end up with four and five, and they need to be materialized, if you will, they need to grow on details, so I would have to meet with them again and again.

52 TRANSLATOR: So I would select the most powerful parts of the story and I would kind of concentrate them, but I would never fake or substitute any feeling or anything important.

TRANSLATOR: And my only limit and my only censor is really myself, is what I couldn’t understand, what I didn’t understand, and that is where the limit is.

TRANSLATOR: Well, and you know, one needs not only to develop a kind of a listening apparatus but if you will a kind of method apparatus for understanding and it comes from thinking about life, from constantly watching other things and I don’t mean that I take from other things, but I do watch things in art and literature and philosophy and natural sciences in general directions where things are going.

TRANSLATOR: And I don’t want to stumble upon myself, you know, the point of art is not to repeat yourself, is to try to get something new, something interesting.

53 TRANSLATOR: And it could be hanging in the air but it hasn’t been formed, it hasn’t been expressed.

Q: Thank you.

Q: I was wondering what you thought about the idea that has sometimes come up that language can’t really capture, when language fails to capture suffering and pain, and I ask this because often when my grandmother tells me her stories of when she was in concentration camps in the

Holocaust, she herself can’t even articulate herself, so I was wondering how you cope with this idea within your work, and how you face this barrier when sometimes people can’t even articulate their own suffering.

TRANSLATOR: Thank you for your question and it’s the most difficult thing.

TRANSLATOR: On the one hand you want to talk about catastrophe, on the other hand you feel the catastrophe of the story.

54 TRANSLATOR: Now I do not know whether you feel it here, but in our culture, we feel that words have lost a certain electricity.

TRANSLATOR: And our defeat when we couldn’t keep what we had won in the 1990s, it paralyzed all of us.

TRANSLATOR: And one has to think about it, but there are no miracle solutions, you just have to constantly search.

Q: You said earlier you were calling on young people in Russia to take power into their own hands, and living in this country it sometimes feels to me as if people take all the power into their hands that they can. A shooting happens in Orlando, people take to the streets, they post on

Facebook, somebody like Trump rises, people scream about his racism, his bigotry. People take all of the power that they have because they have the freedom here and yet it sometimes feels as if nothing happens. And I wanted to know how a country like this looks to you from where you are, what that freedom means, if anything, to you?

55 TRANSLATOR: Well, let’s start with the fact that I do not know the language, and without the language, it’s very difficult to listen, to hear.

TRANSLATOR: But I notice that the country is very confident, that people speak very loudly, and that there is assertion in speech.

TRANSLATOR: But, you know, when I first got out of the plane, the first thing that I saw was a huge screen, TV screen, and Trump was speaking on that screen.

TRANSLATOR: And then Hillary came up and what I thought about and what I realized that all throughout our lives we fight for certain ideals and they get diluted, and we need to fight for them again, and it’s very difficult, but we need to do it.

56 TRANSLATOR: And I perhaps understand your country more after September 11, because it was such a huge event but also something that is very typical as an event for our culture and it was discussed very much in Russia.

TRANSLATOR: What is curious is I mentioned this effigy-burning in Vladivostok, and a journalist interviewing those young people burning in effigy found out that they all wanted to come live in America.

TRANSLATOR: And that this is what happens and I can kind of talk about this as someone who looks into this mind of the masses, but as far as America goes, it’s always interesting for me.

TRANSLATOR: And the philosophy that looks into the future, that thinks about the future, I’m very interested in American authors and what they say.

57 TRANSLATOR: But I feel very sad that I’m not able to talk to my character, to a small person, to an everyday person.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: Before I thank you each, Svetlana Alexievich, do you maybe have a question for Masha Gessen?

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH: (speaks in Russian)

TRANSLATOR: Masha, when I read you, and, you know, when I’m writing, I have a feeling of not perhaps being so sure where do you get your assuredness?

MASHA GESSEN: Before you started asking a question, I thought that being asked a question by Svetlana Alexievich is sort of the definition of eliciting the imposter syndrome, but being asked that question by Svetlana Alexievich is mockery. I don’t know where you get that idea. I don’t feel confident at all.

TRANSLATOR: At least outside, you would think that, yes, from the outside.

TRANSLATOR: I wanted to ask the Perelman, is that an imaginary, fantastic, imagined person?

58 MASHA GESSEN: So I read a book about Grigori Perelman who is the mathematician who proved the Poincare Conjecture and disappeared. I didn’t find him, I mean, he’s phenomenal, he solved the most difficult question of the century, possibly the most difficult mathematical problem ever. I didn’t find him to be an inscrutable person. I actually thought that he made a lot of sense and his behavior was fairly consistent, and he actually gave enough explanations of his behavior. I like writing about people who are inaccessible, because I actually think that they— and this is something that makes Perelman similar to Putin, they give ample explanation of their actions. If we only listen, people will tell us who they are.

TRANSLATOR: Well, if we only knew what’s in their heads.

PAUL HOLDENGRÄBER: And on that note, on that note, I would like to first thank our extraordinary translator, if you could translate that, please.

(applause)

So Anatoli, thank you very much, Masha Gessen, thank you so much, and Svetlana Alexievich, thank you very much.