“I perceive the world through the medium of human voices. They never cease to hypnotize, deafen and bewitch me at one and the These words are from the postscript of Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, the third book of Belarussian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich. They attest to her faith in the human voice, and the power of this fragile medium to convey human truth. Her sensitivity leads her to take on subjects of widespread suffering: the Soviet-Afghan War, World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, Suicide in Russia, and the collapse of Russian Socialism. In her books, she recounts dozens of stories told by dozens of individuals, composing something that, in the culmination of its discrete, emotional strains, approaches the vast dimensions and social complexity of the event itself. For her writings, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015.
The postscript of Zinky Boys follows nearly two-hundred pages of stories, from which the voice of the writer herself is nearly absent. It is clear that each story is one half of a conversation (the speakers sometimes address Alexievich directly: “What’s the point of this book of yours?” “Stop me. I could go on talking for ever”), though she elects against the journalistic Q&A format in favor of the unbroken anecdote. The effect is to lend greater immediacy and rawness to the story being told. Alexievich provides no commentary, and often the only evidence of her pen is in the laconic title at the head of each story describing the person (i.e. “Private,” “A Soldier,” “Civilian Employee”—again and again “A Mother”). The tug of pity, the despair of loss, the banality of violence, the flash of heroism, the absurdity of power: these are the contrapuntal emotions that Alexievich organizes into a sort of disparate chorus.
The title Zinky Boys evokes the zinc coffins in which Soviet soldiers, most of whom were between the ages of 18 and 21, were buried. These coffins serve as the most important of the book’s few motifs. Though the frequency with which Alexievich’s speakers return to this image is natural, unplanned, it feels like a literary device. The coffin represents the common, the dominating anxiety of both soldiers and families: the former fear to be sent home in a zinc coffin; the latter fear to receive one.
For many of the mothers and widows, the pain is compounded by the inability to see their loved one: you can’t open the coffin. Several doubt that the silver box really contains their boy. One mother still waits for her Sasha—“I never saw him dead so I’m waiting…” Others regret, touchingly, the lack of a “little window” for the face. A widow recounts the unnerving moment, shortly after her husband is deployed to Afghanistan, when “a madwoman, a kind of witch,” stops her in the street and informs her, “they’ll send your husband home in a zinky.” The widow tells Alexievich: “After that, I knew something would happen.” This encounter shows not the plausibility of this particular widow, but rather just how deeply the image of the zinc coffin had sunk into the common consciousness. Beneath the level of suspicion, of rationality.
Because of the book’s method, making counterpoint from a collection of disparate stories, the reader is confronted with such questions as whether there is anything resembling a hero, a plot, a message, a dominant emotion or a unifying ethos discernable in the book’s mob of voices. The given answer is pain—pain as it exists in connection with a certain event called the Afghanistan War.
At the beginning of each of the book’s three sections of stories, Alexievich allots a modest amount of space to personal anecdote three phone calls from a veteran (an Afganets) who has the ostensible purpose of sneering at Alexievich’s writing. Though his posture of righteous indignation, he can’t seem to suppress the need to talk, to tell his story. On the first call, he conveys his frenetic truth and then slams down the phone. Alexievich, hardly shaken, remarks, with both irony and sympathy, “all the same, I’m sorry we didn’t talk. He might have become the main character of this book, a man wounded to his very heart.” For the next phone call (and a third, increasingly placid, anger modulating into suffering), the man indeed becomes Alexievich’s “Leading Character.” With his memories, his pain, and his confusion he does embody characteristics typical of the author’s interlocutors, any of which we may identify as wounded to the very heart. But there runs though these stories a tenacious strain of vital humanity that one associates with this need to talk, to shape one’s experience through the medium of the voice.
Perhaps the most heartrending moments of Alexievich’s book are when a speaker addresses not Alexievich or a dimly imagined audience, but her lost. The voice, in these moments, seems to echo within the space between lost love and its object. One mother (the last before the postscript) spends hours every day at the grave of her son. She concludes her story: “Send me the worst imaginable pain and torture, only let my prayers reach my dearest love. I greet every little flower, every tiny stem growing from his grave: ‘Are you from there? Are you from him? Are you from my son?’”
The Slavic Studies department will be hosting a series of reading groups and a panel discussion on Alexievich’s works. The reading groups, led by the present writer and Aneeka Kalia `16, will discuss Alexievich’s two works available in English: Zinky Boys and Voices from Chernobyl, copies of which are available at the Language and Culture Center on the first floor of Blaustein. All are welcome. The meetings will take place on four consecutive Mondays (beginning 2/8) 4:15-5:45 at The Walk in Coffee Closet, with drinks and snacks courtesy of the Slavic department. The panel discussion will take place Tuesday, March 29 4:15-5:15 in Ernst common room. Faculty will be presenting on Alexievich’s books available only in Russian. •
