Svetlana Alexievich Quotes

These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future. Svetlana

often thought that the simple fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings.

I'm not afraid of God. I'm afraid of man.

I know full well what it means to dream. My whole childhood, I begged for a bicycle, and I never did get one.

Why didn't we put Stalin on trial? I'll tell you why...In order to condemn Stalin, you'd have to condemn your friends and relatives along with him. The people closest to you...our neighbor Yuri turned out to have been the one who informed on my father. For nothing, as my mother would say...When Yeltsin came to power, I got a copy of his file, which included several informants' reports. It turned out that one of them had been written by Aunt Olga...his niece...a beautiful woman, full of joy...It's not just Stalin and Beria, it's also our neighbor Yuri and beautiful Aunt Olga...

To take just two examples: in the hope of obscuring the true impact of the war, some local authorities refused to allow special areas in cemeteries to be set apart for the graves of soldiers killed in Afghanistan; while others forbade the cause and place of death to be stated on gravestones or memorial shields.

You're young. Why are you doing this? That's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor. You'll just burn together." I was like a dog, running after them. I'd stand for hours at their doors, begging and pleading. And then they'd say: "All right! The hell with you! You're not normal!

We were expecting our first child. My husband wanted a boy and I wanted a girl. The doctors tried to convince me: "You need to get an abortion. Your husband was at Chernobyl." He was a truck driver; they called him in during the first days. He drove sand. But I didn't believe anyone. The baby was born dead. She was missing two fingers. A girl. I cried. "She should at least have fingers," I thought. "She's a girl.

There's something immoral, voyeuristic, about peering too closely at a person's courage in the face of danger.

At first, the question was, Who's to blame? But then, when we learned more, we started thinking, What should we do?

Yur Karyakin once wrote: 'We should not judge a man's life by his perception of himself. Such a perception may be tragically inadequate.' And I read something in Kafka to the effect that man was irretrievably lost within himself.

It turned out the officer was escorting the soldier home. He'd gone mad: 'He's been digging ever since we left Kabul.

There are many of us here. A whole street. That's what it's called--Chernobylskaya. These people worked at the station their whole lives. A lot of them still go there to work on a provisional basis, that's how they work there now, no one lives there anymore. They have bad diseases, they're invalids, but they don't leave their jobs, they're scared to even think of the reactor closing down. Who needs them now anywhere else? Often they die. In an instant. They just drop--someone will be walking, he falls down, goes to sleep, never wakes up. He was carrying flowers for his nurse and his heart stopped. They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them.

But I was telling you about love. About my love...

-- Lyudmila, Ignatenko,
wife of deceased fireman, Vasily Ignatenko

Back then everyone was saying: "We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left.

Don't call these the "wonders of Soviet heroism" when you write about it. Those wonders really did exist. But first there had to be incompetence, negligence, and only after those did you get wonders: covering the embrasure, throwing yourself in front of a machine gun. But that those orders should never have been given, that there shouldn't have been any need, no one writes about that. They flung us there, like sand onto the reactor. Every day they'd put out a new "Action Update": "men are working courageously and selflessly," "we will survive and triumph.

We've worshipped many gods. Some have been consigned to the scrapheap, others to museums. Let us make Truth into a god! A god before whom each of us shall answer according to his own conscience, and not as a class, or a university year, or a collective, or a people... Let us be charitable to those who have paid a greater price for insight than we ourselves. Remember: 'I brought my friend, and my own truth, back with me from a raid.. Head, arms and legs, all severed, and his skin flayed...

There can't be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.

My prayer is simple. I say it silently. 'Lord, i cry unto me! Give ear!' Man is crafty only in evil, but he's so simple and open in his plain words of love. Even for philosophers, the word is only an approximation of the thought they have experienced. The word genuinely attunes to what's in our soul only in prayer, and in prayerful thoughts. I can feel it physically. 'Lord, I cry unto me! Give ear!' And man too. Man frightens me, but I always like meeting one. A good man. That's it.

I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget about it. Nikolai Fomich Kalugin, father

repentance, the response would be, "What do I have to repent for?" Everyone thought of

My life has always been like a change jar. It's full, then it's empty, then it's full again, then it's empty again.

For a child, the loss of a parent is the loss of memory itself.

We were told that we had to win. Against whom? The atom? Physics? The universe? Victory is not an event for us, but a process.

Everyone thought of themselves as a victim, never a willing accomplice. One

We share a communist collective memory. We're neighbors in memory.

I'm searching for a language. People speak many different languages: There's the one they use with children, another one for love. There's the language we use to talk to ourselves, for our internal monologues. On the street, at work, while traveling--everywhere you go, you'll hear something different, and it's not just the words, there's something else, too. There's even a difference between the way people speak in the morning and how they speak at night...

The most important thing is spiritual labor...Books...You can wear the same suit for twenty years, two coats are enough for a lifetime, but you can't live without Pushkin or the complete works of Gorky.

Today, people just want to live their lives, they don't need some great Idea. This is entirely new for Russia; it's unprecedented in Russian literature. At heart, we're built for war. We were always either fighting or preparing to fight. We've never known anything else - hence our wartime psychology. Even in civilian life, everything was always militarized. The drums were beating, the banners flying, our hearts leaping out of our chests. People didn't recognize their own slavery - they even liked being slaves. I

And yet we went on being surprised that they didn't love us. They'd come to our hospitals. We'd give a woman some medicine but she wouldn't look at us, and certainly never give us a smile.

still remember the way a twenty-year-old shouted, 'I don't want to hear about any political mistakes! I just don't want to! Give me my two legs back if it was all a mistake.

I'll explain it to you: it's terrible to remember, but it's far more terrible not to remember.

Any little knot, that was already a wound on him. I clipped my nails down till they bled so I wouldn't accidentally cut him. None of the nurses could approach him; if they needed anything they'd call me. And

Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat...You look and you know: this may be your last. The earth is so beautiful...And the air...And the dear sun...

According to Darwin's theory, it's not the strongest who survive, but those who are the best adapted to their environment. Average people are the ones who survive and carry on the human race.

I remembered some lines from the papers: our nuclear stations are absolutely safe, we could build one on Red Square, they're safer than samovars. They're like stars and we'll "light" the whole earth with them.

Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally.

No one knows what's in the other world. It's better here. More familiar.

Is there anything more frightening than people?

Even if it's poisoned with radiation, it's still my home. There's no place else they need us. Even a bird loves its nest.

No one had taught us what freedom means. We'd only ever learned how to die for freedom.

Our people need freedom like a monkey needs glasses. No one would know what to do with it.

Truth is communal.

We discussed how our lives were only beginning. There was joy and fear. Before we had been afraid of death, and now--of life...It was equally frightening.

I don't like the word "hero." There are no heroes in war. As soon as someone picks up a weapon, they can no longer be good. They won't be able to.

When you're part of a mob, the mob is a monster. A person in a mob is nothing like the person you sit and chat with in the kitchen. Drinking

When I see a garden in flower, then I believe in God for a second. But not the rest of the time

Everything we know of horror and dread is connected primarily with war. Stalin's Gulags and Auschwitz were recent gains for evil. History has always been the story of wars and military commanders, and war was, we could say, the yardstick of horror. This is why people muddle the concepts of war and disaster. In Chernobyl, we see all the hallmarks of war: hordes of soldiers, evacuation, abandoned houses. The course of life disrupted. Reports on Chernobyl in the newspapers are thick with the language of war: 'nuclear', 'explosion', 'heroes'. And this makes it harder to appreciate that we now find ourselves on a new page of history. The history of disasters has begun. But people do not want to reflect on that, because they have never thought about it before, preferring to take refuge in the familiar. And in the past. Even the monuments to the Chernobyl heroes look like war memorials.

We're afraid of everything. We're afraid for our children, and for our grandchildren, who don't exist yet. They don't exist, and we're already afraid. People smile less, they sing less at holidays. The landscape changes, because instead of fields the forest rises up again, but the national character changes too. Everyone's depressed. It's a feeling of doom. Chernobyl is a metaphor, a symbol. And it's changed our everyday life, and our thinking.

At that time my notions of nuclear power were utterly idyllic. At school and at the university we'd been taught that this was a magical factory that made "energy out of nothing," where people in white robes sat and pushed buttons. Chernobyl blew up when we weren't prepared.

We still have our television and our books, our imagination. Children grow up in their houses, without the forest and the river. They can only look at them. These are completely different children. And I go to them and recite Pushkin, who I thought was eternal. And then I have this terrible thought: what if our entire culture is just an old trunk with a bunch of stale manuscripts? Everything I love . . . He:

Humanities" started sounding like a disease

How were you taken prisoner?' The interrogator asked my father. 'The Finns pulled me out of a lake.' 'You traitor! You were saving your own skin instead of the Motherland.' My father also considered himself guilty. That's how they'd been trained.

Astonishment: these women's military professions - medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper - and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles - here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history "humanizes" itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I've happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from the ground. Before her is the whole path - up and down - from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they "write" their life. Sometimes they also "write up" or "rewrite." Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people - nurses, cooks, laundresses - behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read - not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be,

They, our parents, lived through a great catastrophe, and we needed to live through it, too. Otherwise we'd never become real people. That's how we're made. If we just work each day and eat well - that would be strange and intolerable! We

Russian novels don't teach you how to become successful.

People who've come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity - we have our own lexicon, our own conceptions of good and evil, our heroes, our martyrs. We have a special relationship with death. The stories people tell me are full of jarring terms: "shoot," "execute," "liquidate," "eliminate," or typically Soviet varieties of disappearance such as "arrest," "ten years without the right of correspondence,"*2 and "emigration." How

I often thought that the simples fact, the mechanical fact, is no closer to the truth than a vague feeling, rumor, vision. Why repeat the facts - they cover up our feelings. The development of these feelings, the spilling of these feelings past the facts, is what fascinantes me. I try to find them, collect them, protect them.

Life was full of adventure: I learnt the smell of danger - I've got a sixth sense for it now. We're homesick for it, some of us; it's called the 'Afghan syndrome'.

The doctors said that I got sick because my father worked at Chernobyl. And after that I was born. I love my father.

I want to make a film, to see everything through the eyes of an animal. "What are you shooting?" people say to me. "Look around you. There's a war on in Chechnya." But Saint Francis preached to the birds. He spoke to them as equals. What if these birds spoke to him in their bird language, and it wasn't he who condescended to them?

They die, but no one's really asked us. No one's asked what we've been through. What we saw. No one wants to hear about death. About what scares them. But I was telling you about love. About my love . . . Lyudmilla

The only righteous thing on the face of the earth is death. No one has ever bribed their way out of that. The earth takes us all: the good, the evil and the sinners. And that's all the justice you'll find in this world.

At first we were all turned into animals. The very word "Chernobyl" is like a signal. Everyone turns their head to look at you. He's from there! That

Do you know that it can be a sin to give birth? I'd never heard those words before. Katya

Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do.

So...Well...Life went by...The only thing money can't buy is time. Weep before God or not, you can't buy it. That's just the way it is.

Show me a fantasy novel about Chernobyl--there isn't one! Because reality is more fantastic.

That's how it was in the beginning. We didn't just lose a town, we lost our whole lives.

Man lives with death, but he doesn't understand what it is.

The commentator says: The West is trying to spread panic, telling lies about the accident. And then they show the dosimeter again, measuring some fish on a plate, or a chocolate bar, or some pancakes at an open pancake stand. It was all a lie. The military dosimeters then in use by our armed forces were designed to measure the radioactive background, not individual products. This level of lying, this incredible level, with which Chernobyl is connected in our minds, was comparable only to the level of lies during the big war.

My father only saw six months of combat before being taken prisoner. How did they capture him? They were advancing over a frozen lake while the enemy's artillery shot at the ice. Few made it across, and those who did had just spent their last strength swimming through freezing water; all of them lost their weapons along the way. They came to the shore half-naked. The Finns would stretch out their arms to rescue them and some people would take their hands, while others…many of them wouldn't accept any help from the enemy. That was how they had been trained. My father grabbed one of their hands, and he was dragged out of the water. I remember his amazement: "They gave me schnapps to warm me up. Put me in dry clothes. They laughed and clapped me on the shoulder, 'You made it, Ivan!' " My father had never been face to face with the enemy before. He didn't understand why they were so cheerful… The Finnish campaign ended in 1940…Soviet war prisoners were exchanged for Finns. They were marched toward each other in columns. On their side, the Finns were greeted with hugs and handshakes…Our men, on the other hand, were immediately treated like enemies. "Brothers! Friends!" they threw themselves on their comrades. "Halt! Another step and we'll shoot!" The column was surrounded by soldiers with German Shepherds. They were led to specially prepared barracks surrounded by barbed wire. The interrogations began…"How were you taken prisoner?" the interrogator asked my father. "The Finns pull

For our entire history, we'd been surviving instead of living. Today,

A soldier must be like a bullet, constantly ready to be fired.' I learnt that by heart. You go to war in order to kill. Killing is my profession - that's what I was trained to do.

Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us - thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other

We're going to die, we're going to die. By the year 2000, there won't be any Belarussians left." My daughter was six years old. I'm putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear: "Daddy, I want to live, I'm still little." And I had thought she didn't understand anything. Can

I asked everyone I met what 'freedom' meant. Fathers and children had very different answers. Those who were born in the USSR and those born after its collapse do not share a common experience - it's like they're from different planets. For the fathers, freedom is the absence of fear;[...] For the children: freedom is love; inner freedom is an absolute value. Freedom is when you're not afraid of your own desires;

I told you. There's nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer's pen. I had thoughts like, It's not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn't see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn't care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn't necessary. I also have medals and awards - but that's because I wasn't afraid of dying. I didn't care! It was even something of an out. They'd have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it.

My past no longer protects me. There aren't any answers there. They were there before, but now they're not. The future is destroying me, not the past.

When I was a kid, the neighbor woman, she'd been a partisan during the war, she told me a story about how their unit was surrounded but they escaped. She had her little baby with her, he was one month old, they were moving along a swamp, and there were Germans everywhere. The baby was crying. He might have given them away, they would have been discovered, the entire unit. And she suffocated him. She talked about this distantly, as if it hadn't been her, and the child wasn't hers. I can't remember now why she told me this. What I remember very clearly is my horror. What had she done? How could she? I thought the whole unit was getting out from the encirclement for that little baby, to save him. Whereas here, in order to save the life of strong healthy men, they choked this child. Then what's the point of life? I didn't want to live after that.

Where are we going to get tens of thousands of dollars if my husband makes 120 dollars a month? One professor told us quietly: "With her pathologies, your child is of great interest to science. You should write to hospitals in other countries. They should be interested.

According to Abkhazian custom, the time you spend with guests around the table doesn't count toward your lifespan because you're drinking wine and enjoying yourself.

Victory is not an event for us, but a process. Life is a struggle. An overcoming. That's why we have this love of floods and fires and other catastrophes. We need an opportunity to demonstrate our "courage and heroism.

My daughter married a Italian. His name is Sergio. When they come stay with me, he and I have our kitchen dialogues... in Russian...We'll talk until morning. Sergio thinks that Russians love to suffer, that that's the trick of the Russian soul. For us, suffering is ' a personal struggle,' ' the path for salvation'. Italians aren't like that, they don't want to suffer. They love life, they believe is given to them to enjoy. Like...my daughter and Sergio will come home from the supermarket, and he'll be carrying the grocery bags. In the evening, she can play piano while he makes dinner. For me it was nothing like that: he'd try to take the bags from me, and I'd grab them away 'I'll do it. You shouldn't'. He'd come into the kitchen and I'd tell him, ' this isn't your place'.

We'll die, and then we'll become science,

Happiness is beyond the mountains, but grief is just over the shoulder

isn't a hair, you can't just pull it out. And no ritual can make it stick. Why cry over it? Who

records the lives of ideas. People don't write it, time does. Human truth is just a nail that everybody hangs their hats on.

He's going to die." I understood later on that you can't think that way. I cried in the bathroom. None of the mothers cry in the hospital rooms. They cry in the toilets, the baths. I come back cheerful: "Your cheeks are red. You're getting better." "Mom, take me out of the hospital. I'm going to die here. Everyone here dies." Now where am I going to cry? In the bathroom? There's a line for the bathroom - everyone like me is in that line.

There's a fragment of some conversation, I'm remembering it. Someone is saying: "You have to understand: this is not your husband anymore, not a beloved person, but a radioactive object with a strong density of poisoning. You're not suicidal. Get ahold of yourself." And I'm like someone who's lost her mind: "But I love him! I love him!" He's sleeping, and I'm whispering: "I love you!" Walking in the hospital courtyard, "I love you." Carrying his sanitary tray, "I love you.

Seventy-plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new man: Homo sovieticus. Some see

There you are: a normal person. A little person. You're just like everyone else - you go to work, you return from work. You get an average salary. Once a year you go on vacation. You're a normal person! And then one day you're suddenly turned into a Chernobyl person. Into an animal, something that everyone's interested in, and that no one knows anything about.

You can talk to the dead just like you can talk to the living. Makes no difference to me. I can hear the one and the other. When you're alone ... And when you're sad. When you're very sad.

We're often silent. We don't yell and we don't complain. We're patient, as always. Because we don't have the words yet. We're afraid to talk about it. We don't know how. It's not an ordinary experience, and the questions it raises are not ordinary. The world has been split in two: there's us, the Chernobylites, and then there's you, the others. Have you noticed? No one here points out that they're Russian or Belarussian or Ukrainian. We all call ourselves Chernobylites. "We're from Chernobyl." "I'm a Chernobylite." As if this is a separate people. A new nation.

One of the poets says somewhere that animals are a different people. I killed them by the ten, by the hundred, thousand, not even knowing what they were called. I destroyed their houses, their secrets. And buried them. Buried them. Leonid

You're all like black boxes here," he said. He meant the black boxes that record information on airplanes. We think that we're living, talking, walking, eating. Loving one another. But we're just recording information!

My husband, a man with a university degree, an engineer, seriously tried to convince me that it was an act of terrorism. An enemy diversion. A lot of people at the time thought that. But I remembered how I'd once been on a train with a man who worked in construction who told me about the building of the Smolensk nuclear plant: how much cement, boards, nails, and sand was stolen from the construction site and sold to neighboring villages. In exchange for money, for a bottle of vodka. People

We all live through it by ourselves, we don't know what else to do. I can't understand it with my mind. My mother especially has felt confused. She teaches Russian literature, and she always taught me to live with books. But there are no books about this. She became confused. She doesn't know how to do without books. Without Chekhov and Tolstoy.

They were told they were on a holy mission and that their country would remember them. Now people turn away and try to forget the war, especially those who sent us there in the first place.

The mysterious Russian soul... Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: what's behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there's just more soul.

At the Minsk tractor factory I was looking for a woman who had served in the army as a sniper. She had been a famous sniper. The newspapers from the front had written about her more than once. Her Moscow girlfriends gave me her home phone number, but it was old. And the last name I had noted down was her maiden name. I went to the factory where I knew she worked in the personnel department, and I heard from the men (the director of the factory and the head of the personnel department): "Aren't there enough men? What do you need these women's stories for? Women's fantasies…" The men were afraid that women would tell about some wrong sort of war. I visited a family…Both husband and wife had fought. They met at the front and got married there: "We celebrated our wedding in the trench. Before the battle. I made a white dress for myself out of a German parachute." He had been a machine gunner, she a radio operator. The man immediately sent his wife to the kitchen: "Prepare something for us." The kettle was already boiling, and the sandwiches were served, she sat down with us, but the husband immediately got her to her feet again: "Where are the strawberries? Where are our treats from the country?" After my repeated requests, he reluctantly relinquished his place, saying: "Tell it the way I taught you. Without tears and women's trifles: how you wanted to be beautiful, how you wept when they cut off your braid." Later she whispered to me: "He studied The History of the Great Patriot