Ricard San Vicente: “The Soviet man has not disappeared yet”

What are the main features of Svetlana Alexievichʼs narrative?

In Russia and, in fact, in the Soviet Union, it is widely common to create what some people called documentary literature. It is a literature based on reality, a narrative that departs from a historical event —for example the Second World War—, or a personal experience —the death of your mother or father leads you to a reflection that moves between confession, journalism and literature— or, in short, any painful event able to produce any kind of reaction. Alexievich collects experiences of very different people in terms of age, job and relationship with conflicts and tragedies. She realizes that women are not so much present in literature about war and conflict, so she writes Warʼs Unwomanly Face.

Have you translated it into Spanish?

No, I have only translated into Spanish her first work Voices From Chernobyl. After that, I began some adventures related to documentary literature. Polish named it literature of events and editors non-fiction.

Letʼs go back to Alexievich...

She suffered the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The conflict led her to collect testimonies from relatives of fallen soldiers. In the 1990s, during the process of dissolution of the Soviet Union when the number of suicides increased notably, Svetlana Alexievich conducted a kind of survey of the problem through the experiences lived by families, survivors, doctors, etc. Every topic she analysed revolves about what she calls the ʻSoviet experimentʼ. The introduction of the book Second-Hand Time speaks about her interests in the Homo sovieticus, particularly in those generations who have played a completely different role: main figures, victims and testimonies of such a huge sociological experiment as the Soviet Union.

She also uses the literature of events in Voices From Chernobyl. Once again, she analyses a worldwide popular catastrophe through testimonies provided by firemen, firemenʼs wives, survivors, politicians, soldiers, those sent in to clean up the mess and monitor the damage, etc.

In short, Svetlana Alexievich analyses contemporary matters on the phenomenon of the Soviet Union. Her main aims are to create a huge mosaic that enables her to understand and make people understand that the “Soviet civilization” —the name used by the Russian writer Andrei Sinyavsky— has been an absolutely distinguishing event in the history of humanity. 

What does the award mean for the author, her country and Russian speaking countries in general?

For the moment, she has been congratulated by the Russian Minister of Culture and the president of Belarus, who has expressed his will of including Svetlana Alexievichʼs works in school curriculum. He has needed some time to react; maybe elections have influenced him...

Has the President expressed his desire to promote the works of an author who is critical of his government?

Very critical! In fact, Alexievich defends that Soviet culture has not disappeared from todayʼs political practice, not only in Russia and Belarus, but also in every territory of the former URSS. And, obviously, her work is very critical with all that, extremely critical. She says: “I am patriotic but not of the Russia of Putin, Shoygu (Russiaʼs defence minister), Lukashenko (the president of Belarus) and other politicians”. In fact, the case of Spain is quite similar: you can love Spain, but not the Spain that the former President Aznar represents.

It seems that there are not clear limits among former Soviet countries...

She thinks that the similarities shared by men who have lived the Soviet experience, even if they are from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan or Belarus, are larger than the differences that separate because they belong to different republics. The Soviet experience left a deep mark that has kept them linked. New generations may be different, but present generations have inherited this culture... Alexievichʼs work says: I am a Soviet women and I am interested in getting to the core, the spirit, the soul of the Soviet man who has not disappeared yet.

When people speak about Russian literature, most of them refer to great 19th century works. Soviet literature is poorly known, and Post-Soviet literature created in the countries that composed the former Soviet Union is even more unknown.

In fact, writers do not make this difference either. Neither Fazil Iskander —Abkhaz writer and Nobel Prize nominee during the Soviet Age— nor Chinghiz Aitmatov, born in Kyrgyzstan, establish this difference. It has to do with the Soviet experiment; at the beginning, the URSS brought writing to many people with Muslim cultural origins so they express themselves in Arab. The literature of Caucasian populations is written in their own languages because the Soviet Union gave them a script. However, many writers have realized that Russian language will open them to other countries as Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Uzbek or Tajik languages wonʼt lead them to English, Spanish, German, Italian and French cultures.

And further than language...    

There is a culture, there is a project —described by Svetlana Alexievich in Second-Hand Time— that aims at achieving a future of freedom, justice and wealth. In fact, communism is based on the idea that a social cataclysm is needed to eliminate private property and social institutions inherited from the previous regime of human exploitation, to free men from chains and to build communism, a society in which we will be really free and exploitation will cease. This idea remains true in Soviet men and it is present in one part of the population. With the dissolution of a project which was developed with so much effort, suffering and pain and left so many victims, they lost sight of their aims and they sank into mediocrity. Suddenly, they lack a main, epic and heroic objective, like the one pursued by his parents who struggled during the war and built the cities, the preys, the channels of a new country, the USSR, which does not longer exists.

Alexievichʼs work has contributed to two phenomena: the deterioration of the value of the official word and a return to the practice of giving a name to everything, which starts by reconsidering your own world and reconstructing reality. A boom in travel literature takes place; it is a literature devoid of the ideology that the power infused into Soviet literature, the so-called ʻsocialist realismʼ. And the desire to reconstruct the world and provide it with voice leads to memories, autobiographies, chronicles. Some writers are born from the experience of the Chechen War, like it happened with the Second World War, but in this case they deal with it from an objective perspective, they try to understand why, suddenly, people kill each other to defend a series of ideas instead of reaching an agreement through dialogue and negotiation.

So, realism is still alive in Russian literature.

Yes, absolutely, even in works by Vladimir Sorokin, a popular writer who uses science fiction to extrapolate Putinʼs regime and establishes a bridge between the future and the age of Ivan the Terrible, through a new language full of Chinese elements, as he considers that China is the country that will finally rule the world. It is a kind of uchronia to speak about Putin regimeʼs drift towards injustice, authoritarianism, centralism. Throughout the Soviet age, what is Grossman but a writer who tries to assimilate the Second World War in Life and Fate? And, in poetry, what is Akhmatovaʼs Requiem but a reflection on the fate that suffered those who died? And, what does Fazil Iskander analyses on Sandro of Chegem but the problems that worry every human being and go further than the small world that surrounds the Republic of Abkhazia?

We can name other works and writers, for example Aitmatovʼs The First Teacher, the story of a Soviet man who travels to Kyrgyzstan, an Asian country lost in the most remote past, or Bulgakovʼs The Master and Margarita, a phantasmagorical fiction related to Soviet reality in the 1920s and 1930s.

Do you think that the Nobel Prize will mean a recovery of Svetlana Alexievichʼs work in Western countries that will maybe involve the recovery of other Russian writers?

Keys to success are unknown. If publishers and authors will know them we will not be in this situation. There are periods of enthusiasm, like the Perestroika when people read a lot to increase their knowledge, so many works were published. But then, the Chechen War broke out and it brought the cruelest side of war, so interest in culture decreased. I am working on the translation of Shalamovʼs work and the publisher is happy because of the impact that such a hard work on Soviet work camps may have. On the contrary, in the 1980s, the publishing house Plaza y Janés only published the first volume of Solzhenitsynʼs The Gulag Archipelago. I hope that Alexievichʼs Nobel Prize increases not only publishersʼ interest, but also readersʼ.

Letʼs talk about the role of translators. Is their work recognised enough?

When Alexievich was given the Nobel Prize, the digital edition of the newspaper El País published an extract of Voices From Chernobyl, but they forgot to mention the name of the person who translated the work into Spanish... Readers also forget about translators. This leads us to an aspect that has to do with the University: the specialty in Slavic Languages has disappeared. Current translators of Russian and Polish literature are the result of a twenty-year work performed by people who studied at the University, who were granted scholarships, who have lived in these foreign countries in order to be able to transfer Russian and Polish culture into Spanish and Catalan languages. In twenty years, there will be not native translators, they will be Russian, Chinese or Korean linguists who have learnt Russian and Catalan, so they will translate from Russian to Catalan and vice versa. But we will not translate Russian works anymore because we have stopped training new experts on Slavic languages.

The role of translators goes further than translating words...

A translator has to bring cultures closer. My students must know at least what a samovar is; when I say the word izba, they have to visualize a wood-made house with a thatched roof owned by a miserable Russian farmer. They must be able to imagine the reality described by Tolstoy, Chekhow, Dostoyevsky, and if we speak about the Soviet civilisation, like Sinyavsky said, they must be able to understand concepts that are absolutely unknown in our culture. The translator is the only person able to transfer these concepts, he/she turns them into understandable by means of notes or glossaries; the translator is the only person that tries to understand the text and turns it comprehensible to the reader.

It is important to bear in mind that Russian and Soviet people, like many other isolated populations, think that everyone knows their reality. They believe that everyone knows about their own weather conditions, political questions or understand prison slang. The translator works together with the author or experts on Russian literature in order to do a job which is based on a four-five year degree which has disappeared at our Faculty and at nearly every Spanish Faculty of Philology.

We work for something else than having a burger with fries on the table. We need to face a situation of considerable uncertainty... Thatʼs when we realize that probably we should have improved our studies of history, philosophy, philology, etc. thirty years ago...