Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is among the most accessible “classics” of world literature because its tale of murder and its consequences is immediately exciting. All the same, it took me about three attempts before I first finished it. I am now reading it a third time, and each time I feel I understand the book a little better. So far, I have read the first two parts of the book’s six, and I am already overflowing with impressions and observations that I would like to share. The book is so thought-provoking, that simply writing a post at its completion would be to do it an injustice.
World of Decay
I think the thing that has struck me the most this time round is just how grim and depressing the world of Crime and Punishment really is. Within the first two parts we have Marmeladov’s death, an attempted suicide, and plenty of other suggestions of abuse and suffering, not to mention the murder of the pawnbroker which forms the heart of the work.
Colour
Part of this grimness is delivered through Dostoevsky’s use of colour, especially the colour yellow, the traditional colour of sickness and decay. When we find it throughout the entire world of Crime and Punishment’s Saint Petersburg we are left with the feeling that the world itself is falling to pieces. We have Raskolnikov’s wallpaper, the “yellow glass filled with yellow water” that he is given at the police station, the yellow face of the woman who attempts suicide, Sonya’s yellow ticket legalising her work as a prostitute, and most memorably, the “ominous yellowish-black spot” that marks Marmeladov’s fatal wound from the horse’s hoof. There is also the red of blood. When Raskolnikov awakes in the beginning of part II he worries that his clothes are covered in it. Then, when he meets a member of the police later on, he is drenched in it – but in this case it’s Marmeladov’s.
While I would like to say that the Saint Petersburg of today could not play host to a similar tragedy to that of Crime and Punishment, I feel like I’d be lying. Just last year a professor here killed and dismembered his student and tried to throw the pieces of her body and himself into the Neva river. Anyway, this is a view onto the inside of my courtyard. When I first moved in, my girlfriend said it looked like it had come from a Dostoevsky novel. Luckily the inside of my flat is nicer.
Clothes and Money
But colour is not the only thing that gives this world its feeling of decline. Money is constantly in focus in these early chapters, whether it be the landlady’s demands for rent, or else Marmeladov’s suffering family watching him drink his salary away, or else of course the pawnbroker herself with her miserliness. Like the characters themselves, who are always on the brink of destitution, we are unable to avoid reading about money in these chapters. Clothing in Crime and Punishment has a similar role, making us aware of the essential poverty of most of its characters. Razumikhin’s joke when he shows Raskolnikov the new clothes he has bought him, that “we have to make a human being out of you”, nonetheless expresses a fundamental truth about poverty’s ability to dehumanise its sufferers. These people can barely even dress themselves with dignity.
Women
But I think the final sign of decay that I’ve found hardest to avoid is Dostoevsky’s representation of women. In Crime and Punishment the women we come across are exclusively downtrodden and suffering. The differences between them concern simply whether they try to maintain some kind of dignity, like Raskolnikov’s mother and Marmeladov’s wife, or fail to, like the woman on the bridge who attempts suicide. Once, we meet a group of them: “some were over forty, but there were some younger than seventeen; almost every one of them had a black eye”. Dunya, Raskolnikov’s sister, suffers for him in a horrible job in their hometown. Sonya, likewise, suffers for her own family. Only by taking economic responsibility onto themselves to try to save others can the women have a chance of saving themselves. Even Nastasya, Raskolnikov’s comparatively not-falling-apart maid, has a “morbidly nervous laughter”. Everyone’s on edge here.
Crime and Punishment as a Horror Movie
Connected with the feverish yellow world of Crime and Punishment is the feeling I have had with this reading that Dostoevsky’s novel has a particularly intense portrayal of reality and bodies not far from their portrayal in works of horror, especially movies. Of course, there is the dinginess of the world, but there is also the murder itself. When Raskolnikov stands outside the pawnbroker’s door, he feels that “someone was standing silently just at the latch, hiding inside and listening, in the same way as he was outside, and also, it seemed, with an ear to the door…” Perhaps I am not explaining it well, but what I mean is this image of fear and closeness to mortal peril is just the sort of thing that we see in Alien when the xenomorph is right next to Ripley, but not yet aware of her.
A scene in Alien 3 where Ripley has a close encounter with the xenomorph. In Crime and Punishment there are a lot of moments where characters seem to be unnaturally close to each other, both physically and sometimes spiritually, with the same horrific effect.
The incomprehensibility of violence is also an example of this. Raskolnikov’s terrifying dream, when he witnesses the brutal murder of a horse for very little reason, corresponds to that lurking question always present in horror movies with a vaguely humanoid villain – why? Why is this happening, why does this have to happen? When Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister we are faced with another such moment, when the “why” we previously had – to give the crone’s money away to those who need it – is suddenly rendered inadequate, now that it seems to require a wholly innocent victim as well.
Dostoevsky’s language in Crime and Punishment has its own violent intensity too, such as when Raskolnikov feels “as if a nail were being driven into his skull”, or when he looks like he “had just been released from torture”. Our murderer’s mental tension is the same tensed suspense of a good horror movie, where danger is just around the corner.
Ideas and Responsibility
And then there are the ideas. I would not like to go into too much detail before I have finished the book, but I’d at least like to make some observations on the chessboard as it sits before me, as it were.
An illustration to Crime and Punishment by Nikolay Karazin, showing the moment Raskolnikov is forced to kill the pawnbroker’s sister to defend himself from capture.
For in Dostoevsky, there is always a war between ideas. We have by this point been introduced to one of Raskolnikov’s motivations in killing – that he could do some good with it by giving away the old woman’s money. But this theoretical approach has already come up against the unpredictability of the world – firstly in that he didn’t succeed in escaping with the money, secondly in that he was forced to kill the sister. Meanwhile, Razumikhin and Luzhin have already began arguing about the new ideas of progress, economic and otherwise. Extreme and self-centred rationality, we have already heard, will lead people to think it’s okay to put a knife into people. Obedience to much to a system is dangerous, as the wonderful image of Raskolnikov being dragged forwards, “as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine”, illustrates.
Glimpses of Redemption
Even as these two initial parts show some of the depths of the human soul, they also begin laying the foundations for later redemption. Raskolnikov’s isolation at the police station, “a dark sensation of tormenting, infinite solitude and estrangement suddenly rose to consciousness in his soul”, which is “more a sensation than an awareness, an idea”, is important for giving us understanding of the way that life is feeling just as much as it is idea. Marmeladov, in some way a double of Raskolnikov – they both have close encounters with horsemen and their whips – in his dying moments comes to understand the sacrifice that his family have made for him, and in doing so finds an implicit redemption, when he sees Sonya, “humiliated, crushed, bedizened, and ashamed”, for the first time in her prostitute’s garb. It is too late to change for life, but not too late for death.
Raskolnikov, meanwhile, through giving his money to Marmeladov’s family, has also found “a new, boundless sensation of a sudden influx of full and powerful life”. He has not found redemption yet, but he has taken his first step on the path to goodness, a journey that for me at least makes this novel so great.
Conclusion
For all this seriousness, I almost forgot to mention the humour in Crime and Punishment. Because this time round I’ve really started to find the whole thing quite funny. From this lovely exchange between Nastasya and Raskolnikov (one familiar, no doubt, to my fellow students) –
"Why don’t you do anything now?”
“I do something…” Raskolnikov said, reluctantly and sternly.
“What do you do?”
“Work…”
“Which work?”
"I think.”
– to her comments when Raskolnikov awakes “And, what’s more, you were extremely interested in your own sock, extremely!”, with its equal measure for readers of humour and horror, Crime and Punishment is a hilarious book.
But the questions of guilt and redemption that lie at the heart of it are, and have always been, the ones that most appealed to me. I guess it was my Catholic upbringing that made me particularly aware of my own moral failures and need to atone for them, but I’ve always found these topics in literature, and elsewhere, the most compelling. Whether it be the Amnesia video games, to Tarkovsky’s Stalker, I’ve always enjoyed art that has challenged my ideas of personal responsibility, and shown how we can, and sometimes can’t, change. Perhaps it was thanks to Crime and Punishment that the first seeds towards my eventual time spent volunteering in prison were sowed. Who knows?
What do you think of Crime and Punishment and its themes?
I came to the Austrian German poet Trakl depressed and didn’t leave any happier. His short oeuvre, written in the final years before the first world war, is not for the faint of heart. There is very little joy to be found here, and what beauty there is in his poems is tainted by an overwhelming sense of decay. But what Trakl does offer, above and beyond his despair and endless talk of decline, is a unique view of the world, and a unique language of symbols for appreciating it. Each of his poems is a mysterious mood-piece, filled with images whose interpretations are never definite. Rilke’s view, that reading Trakl is like being “an outsider pressed against panes of glass”, looking into a space of experience which “like the space in a mirror, cannot be entered”, hits the mark.
Georg Trakl. Intensely sad, his poems reflect a sensibility that felt deeply the spiritual turbulence of his age. A turbulence that continues into our own and leaves his poetry mysterious and fresh even now.
Trakl is a strange poet, but he is also one whose work is tragically beautiful, and I hope to show that in these few translations below. His concerns seem perfect for our own age. The empty spiritual gulf left by religion’s decline, the feeling of foreboding as the world enters a new era without any ballast or sense that we are prepared for its challenges, and even the loss of a deep understanding of and connection to the natural world – all these are just as relevant now as they were as the First World War erupted. To face Trakl’s dark world is to be given a way of visualising the darkness of our own. So let’s begin.
The Poems
Trakl’s poems are made up of short and simple sentences, that are nonetheless often hard to understand. There’s a lot of ambiguity due to the syntax and punctuation, and whenever I’ve met something unclear, I’ve aimed to convey that same uncertainty in the English. After all, I’m trying to translate a mood and an atmosphere, not a technical document. If I have managed that, then I can be happy with how these have turned out. Following the poems is a bit about Trakl’s life and a conclusion.
Dark breath in green twigs. Blue blossoms float around the face Of the lonely one, his golden step Dying under the olive tree. The night is filled with the fluttering of drunk wings. So quietly bleeds out humility, Dew, which slowly drips from the blossoming thorn. The mercy of shining arms Embraces a breaking heart.
This painting (Starry Night), by Edvard Munch, strikes me as a good representation of my feeling as I read the final two stanzas of “Spiritual Twilight.” Munch was working at about the same time as Trakl and I feel like both of them are often similar in tone and image.
Spiritual Twilight (DE) Silence encounters at the forest’s hem Its dark quarry. On the hill the evening wind ends quietly,
The blackbird’s cries are stilled, And the soft flutes of autumn Go silent in their pipes.
On a black cloud You sail, drunk on the poppy, The ponds of the night,
The stars in the heavens. The sister’s lunar voice is always calling Through the spirit’s night.
The Sun (DE) Daily comes the yellow sun across the hill. The forest, the dark beast, man – hunter or shepherd – All are beautiful.
Reddish rises the fish in the green pond. Under the round heavens The fisherman quietly rows in his blue boat.
Slowly ripens the grape, the grain. When the day silently ends, A good and an evil is prepared.
When the world becomes night, The wanderer quietly lifts his heavy eyes; The sun breaks out of a gloomy chasm.
The Sun, also by Munch. I wonder if, had Trakl lived to grow older, he too would have found way of looking at and representing the world that moved beyond fear and anxiety.
In Spring (DE) Softly sank from dark steps the snow; In the shadow of the tree The lovers raise their rosy lids.
Star and night always follow The dark calls of the mariners; And the oars beat softly in time.
Soon on the ruined wall blooms The violet; The temples of the lonely one silently grow green.
Remembrance, a buried hope, Preserves this brown wood frame, Where dahlias hang above - An ever stiller homecoming; The ruined garden, the dark reflection Of childhood years, So that from blue lids the tears plunge Unstoppably. Now swim the glassy minutes Of gloom Over and into the night.
Who was Trakl? Biography and its Absence
Georg Trakl was born in 1887 and died towards the end of 1914, likely by his own hand. He was born in Salzburg to a family of not great financial means, but all the same this is where he was most happy. His relations with his sister Grete, herself a musical prodigy, may well have been incestuous. In his poems Trakl often writes about the “sister”, but it’s difficult to know what to make of that. What is more clear is that Trakl developed a drug addiction that he supported through becoming a pharmacist. Once war broke out Trakl joined the Austro-Hungarian army as a medical officer on the Eastern Front. By this point his mood was extremely unstable and the experience of the battle of Grodek, though it led to perhaps is most famous poem, also led to Trakl’s final breakdown and probable suicide of a cocaine overdose.
Yet all of this is almost irrelevant in the poems. As is clear above, Trakl hides himself from view. The experience of reading his work is rather like floating through a deep fog. There is nothing so solid as an “I”, even a lyrical “I”, to hold on to. The places of his life certainly make their appearances, including Grodek itself, but always more as symbols and maps of an internal world than as real settings, at least it seems that way to me.
The lovely German edition of Trakl’s work from Reclam which I’ve been reading also includes many of his letters. But these, too, are not of much use for understanding his poems. We can hear Trakl’s own voice, always in pain, and always suffering. It only caused me to feel a terrible and futile desire to help the poor man, but the poems remained – perhaps thankfully – impenetrable. “I was terribly sick for a few days, I think from a mourning that cannot be put into words”. Shortly before he dies he writes “I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond”. What I like about him so much is that his sensibility really does seem to belong to another world, no matter how much suffering seems to be involved.
“I feel like I’ve already almost passed over into the beyond.” The painting is Munch’s Self Portrait in Hell. Trakl’s work, like Munch’s, is filled with religious symbolism. Ultimately, any positive message in Trakl lurks within this Christian impulse.
Conclusion – Religion and the Poppy
Probably my favourite pieces here are the first two. The
image of the blackbird, of the innocent forced to suffer its way through the
world, lies at the heart of Trakl’s whole project, and the bird’s short and
brutal poem strikes me as being particularly beautiful. But it also contains
within it a rare hint at redemption. Trakl’s religious inclinations are, as
with so much else about him, not entirely clear. But for me at least, this poem
has a spiritual angle to it: the suggestion that for all our suffering there
may lurk at the end of the tunnel a kind of salvation. It’s not unlike
Dostoevsky, in its way.
As for “Spiritual Twilight”, I love its tone and sense of
mystery. For me it really conveys that world of abstract rumination we fall
into somewhere in the depths of our despair. It is a weightless poem, just as
we, in our thoughts, are weightless too. But one day we must open our eyes. And
that is where the challenge lies.
The last word on all this should go to Trakl himself. This
is how he describes himself, towards the end of his life: “Too little love, too
little justice and mercy, and always too little love; too much hardness, pride,
and all sorts of transgressions – this is me. I am certain that I only refrain
from evil out of cowardice and weakness and in doing so shame even that part of
me.”
I hope, having read a few of his poems, you have a sense that for all the mercy and love he did not receive himself, he was more than willing to give plenty of it out to those who needed it in his work. The strange thing is, for all his despair, I find myself feeling less alone for reading in his company. And that’s why I think he’s a fantastic poet.
I’ve always found it strange that to think, whether on the metro or while wandering through the streets of my beloved Petersburg, that not thirty years ago this all was a completely different country. By that time, of course, it was clear that the Soviet Union was on its way out. But what would replace it was anybody’s guess. Gorbachev, ever the idealist, hoped to reform the USSR into a new confederation – the Union of Sovereign States – that would alleviate many of that country’s worst failings by decentralizing its power structure. An attempted coup in August of 1991 put this proposal on ice and led to the collapse of the USSR in December of that year. But though the Soviet Union was no more, its people remained. Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich’s Second-hand Time gives these people a voice.
Its pages explore the lives of these people whose homeland evaporated before their eyes. The book is structured as a series of interviews, edited into monologues. “I’m trying to honestly hear out all the participants of the socialist drama”, Alexievich explains. These monologues are presented almost without judgement or comment, and are divided in theme between the end of the Soviet Union and Yeltsin’s years of power, and the time after the dawn of the new millennium when Vladimir Putin became dominant. But in contrast to the historic scope of much writing on this period, these stories are fundamentally human in scale. Love again and again comes up, alongside the pain of women and immigrants in a society that – after the collapse of the Soviet Union – became fundamentally reactionary and nationalist in terms of its culture.
Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel prize in literature in 2015, was born in Ukraine, is Belorussian, but writes in Russian. As you read Second-hand Time it’s worth remembering that Alexievich lost her homeland too. Photo by Elke Wetzig (CC BY-SA 3.0)
A lot of people will tell you it’s a miracle that the Soviet
Union collapsed bloodlessly. Second-hand Time goes against that clinical
view and shows that even the “little” violence that did take place had a real
and terrible human cost. Especially in the West, we also tend to take the rather
parochial view that the USSR was an “Evil Empire”, that its citizens were relentlessly
crushed under the wheels of a terrifying totalitarian regime. But the Soviet
Union outlived Stalin, and things got better than that. Second-hand Time does
not paint the closing days of the Union as filled with joy and plenty, but it
shows through its many and varied speakers how great the loss experienced by
its citizens in many cases was. The creation of the USSR may have been a
tragedy, but its collapse – in light of what’s come after – seems even worse.
Maybe Gorbachev had the right idea after all.
Hopes and Ideals
Anybody who has come into contact with Russia and its culture knows that Russia is special. It likes to tell you as much. “we’re so soulful, we’re so special” one speaker says without irony. It retains a belief in itself as a country of chosen people, with a unique path. A path of suffering, not of joy. The Soviet Union was created because of the great faith – and opportunism – of the communists. Its collapse, likewise, was a moment when Russia seemed to be special once again. Freedom meant everything to everybody, and people were soon disappointed. The nineties were a time of lawlessness and extreme poverty – Yegor Gaidar’s “shock therapy” brought capitalism to the masses, but not the money to take advantage of it. People died in the streets and the sheets, and few could afford the coffin to bury them in, or the ambulance to try to save them.
“Instead of a Motherland, we live in a huge supermarket”.
Salami comes up again and again as this symbol of capitalism’s allure. In the
Soviet Union it wasn’t easy to get access to good meat – and impossible to get
to choose it. But people soon realised that meat isn’t a substitute for
anything good – especially when you don’t have the money to buy it. The first
section of Second-hand Time, The Consolation of Apocalypse, shows people
falling out of love with the changes brought about by the collapse of the USSR.
There is a continual lament for the values they have lost. In the Soviet Union,
people read books, people talked in kitchens – the atmosphere is decidedly
intellectual. The small guy was looked after.
But alongside of shock therapy the Russians were also
introduced to a new set of values, ones that were more suitable to the new
system. Buy buy buy – greed grew dominant. The poor weren’t to be pitied – they
had failed to show the skill and hard work that the rich (apparently) had. Instead
of discussing books, people get excited about new technology, blue jeans. One
speaker, a rich man who made himself in this system, says “money is a test,
like power or love”. It’s hard not to agree. And this early part of Second-hand
Time shows that the Russians weren’t quite ready to pass it. Next to the
chaos of the new free market, socialism is utopian: “Socialism isn’t just
labour camps, informants, and the Iron Curtain, it’s also a bright, just world:
Everything is shared, the weak are pitied, and compassion rules”. One party
official tells Alexievich.
Faulty Memory and Greatness
We remember what we want to remember and, except for those
of us whose depression is particularly great, in the end the good memories rise
above the bad and we come to remember the past as a better place. For the
Russians of today, that innocent trick of the mind is potentially dangerous. It
leads to a longing for the Soviet Union. “You forget about the long lines and
empty stores faster than you do about the red flag flying over the Reichstag.”
Again and again, those interviewed mention the war with Germany as a high point
in their nation’s history. They were great; they saved the day.
The challenge that Russians face now, when the belief in
their country’s unique path is so strong, is to decide between “great history
and banal existence”. It’s not entirely clear which choice is best. One path
seems to hold the salvation of the soul, the other the salvation of the body.
“I can do without a lot of things, the only thing I can’t do without is the
past.” – these are not the words of a salami-lover.
“We all believed that the kingdom of freedom was right around the corner… But life just kept getting worse. Very soon, the only thing you could buy was books. Nothing but books on the store shelves…” Russians turned the wheel of history with the collapse of the USSR, but very soon their naïve hopes turned to bitterness and despair. Socialism was a way of looking at the world, and without it the ground fell out from under people’s feet. And few were ready to fly… There are a great many suicides in Second-hand Time.
“I cannot go on living while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed.”
Grand Kremlin Palace in Moscow. It’s hard not to feel sorry for those who truly believed in the Communist project and had their world fall apart. Ed Yourdon from New York City, USA (CC BY-SA 2.0)
The Butcher Returns
Each one of the stories in Second-hand Time is worth telling. It’s hard to decide what to mention here. Each one hit me in different ways, but some were so powerful – so frightening – that they left me speechless. The final story in the first part of Second-hand Time is such a story. It begins with the experience of a woman who had grown up in one of Stalin’s camps in Kazakhstan as she searched for the truth of her past, but ended even more shockingly with her son’s story of a betrothal gone wrong. He is a lieutenant in the army, about to get married. The girl and her family live well for Soviets. They have crystal chandeliers, porcelain, rugs. The old grandfather, the patriarch, is an honoured veteran. He’d speak at schools, get kids as visitors to hear his stories.
Before the wedding the lieutenant and the veteran go out to the family country house to get drunk. They’re completely alone, and the grandfather begins to talk about his past and his views. He’s an old man, and sounds like one… with a particularly Russian bent. He rails against the liberals, the new generations – they don’t need freedom, they need to work, to suffer. And he reveals he was in the NKVD, how he executed the Soviet people…
“I watch TV, I listen to the radio. It’s the rich and poor all over again. Some people gorge themselves on caviar, buy islands and private jets, while others can’t afford a loaf of white bread. This won’t last long around here! People will once again acknowledge Stalin’s greatness. The axe is right where it always was… the axe will survive the master. Mark my words…”
This idea of the axe, of the power of the state for mass power through fear – this for the grandfather is message of hope. Russia demands a strong leader, it demands control and violence and destruction – not cheese and salami and blue jeans.
It is too much for the lieutenant. He breaks off the
engagement without explanation. A note at the end of the story explains that he
and his family emigrated to Canada before he let Alexievich publish the story. He
adds “I’m glad I left in time. For a while, people liked Russians, now they’re
afraid of us again. Aren’t you?”
Support for Stalin is currently at a record high in Russia. In 2000 Vladimir Putin became president and the dominant political actor in Russia, the latter being a role he has not relinquished since then. The story is the perfect end to the chaos of the 1990s. Russia’s period of anarchy – everybody agreed – had to end some way. But it is only the angry old man, filled with hate, who understood fully what would have to happen – since he believed there had been no change to the Russian people, then just as before they needed to be crushed rather than raised up. Putin is no new Stalin, but the idea that Russia needs a strong leader is dangerously ingrained into the Russian idea of its own path that with hindsight it’s hard to see what else could have happened. The second part of Second-hand Time looks at the consequences.
“The Friendship of the Peoples”
The Friendship of the Peoples was a cultural policy
introduced under Stalin in 1935, designed to reduce the ethnic barriers between
the various peoples of the Soviet Union. Stalin himself was a Georgian;
Brezhnev was Ukrainian; and in the USSR as a whole the Russians only
constituted about half of the overall population. It was a good idea, but it
should be mentioned that Stalin was also responsible for large-scale population
transfers, genocide in Ukraine and Kazakhstan, and generally was not exactly a
paragon of ethnically harmonious leadership. All the same, the policy continued
after his death, and a degree of unity began to form between the peoples of the
Union. A number of monologues in Second-hand Time serve as evidence for
the success of the policy.
For some people, the collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t just mean the loss of their homeland – it also meant the loss of their homes as ethnic tensions tore the new states apart. Here are someAzeri refugees displaced from Ngoro-Karabakh in Azerbaijan – a territory that was predominantly ethnically Armenian, but only after the fall of the Soviet Union became almost homogeneously so – through violence. Oleg Litvin (CC BY-SA 3.0)
And all this success was destroyed by the collapse of the
USSR. In scenes that are reminiscent of the persecution of Jews under the Nazis,
so too we read here of families hidden in attics to avoid being murdered –
whether by Azeris, or Georgians, or Abkhazians, or Tajiks. Moldavia was split
in two, Georgia and Tajikistan underwent civil war, and even in those countries
that did not go to war there were still forcible expulsions.
Today there remain many Russians abroad, particularly in Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, while in other former Soviet Republics there are almost none. Russia itself attracts immigrants from all over the former Soviet lands, but Second-hand Time shows that the dream of ethnic harmony remains as dead now as it was then. A particularly unpleasant interview deals with the lives of the Tajiks in Moscow in our own days and the ways they are treated by the Russians – killed, beaten, left unpaid. It’s something I’ve come to notice a lot recently in my own time in Russia – just how racist the Russian people are towards those who were once their equals. There’s a hierarchy here, one that’s almost invisible unless you look for it. It’s easy to live in Russia without meeting a single non-Russian. But you see them every day, cleaning the metro, manning stalls at the market.
I’ve travelled in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, Armenia, and other former Soviet countries. The people I met there were no better or worse than the Russians are. It’s disappointing that after the collapse of the USSR the peace that very nearly existed was replaced by a revival of ethnic and religious tensions that nobody, really, needs or wants.
The New World and Its Heroes
“What’s the point of changing governments if we don’t change
ourselves?” People changed after the end of the Soviet Union – they had to
change or else die. Their values, as I’ve written above, were overhauled. But
their hearts were harder to change, and many of the characters in Second-hand
Time didn’t succeed in shaking off the Soviet past. But Alisa Z, one
interviewee, did succeed. She’s 35, an advertising manager, and the kind of
shark that found the new world one of endless opportunities. Her monologue is
fascinating… in a way, it’s like a deranged Dostoevsky character going on a
rant to explain their worldview. She took advantage of the “revolution of desires”
to desire everything. Sex, money, power. And she got it.
“Loneliness is freedom… Now, every day, I’m happy I’m free: Will he call or won’t he, will he come over or not? Is he going to dump me? Spare me! Those aren’t problems anymore! So no, I’m not afraid of loneliness… What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of the dentist! People always lie when they talk about love… and money… They’re always lying in so many ways. I don’t want to lie… I just don’t! Excuse me… please forgive me… I haven’t thought about any of this for a long time…”
She’s repulsive; she’s free and completely hedonistic. Her confidence, her directness of experience and existence is mesmerising. She is the kind of person who needed, truly needed, the world of capitalism. She sleeps with oligarchs and eats and drinks and enjoys herself. The world is her oyster. In my own experience of oligarchs (bless the British public school system!) I’ve seen the same brutal hunger. I’m not sure it’s the best way to live, but there’s no denying that this is a type of life… just one that I find terrifying and alluring in equal measure. And when so few of us live, even a repulsive life is more attractive than death-in-life…
Love
History was taking place all the time these people were
speaking, but what almost always stands out is not the history, but the love
that tries to get in the way of it. A good friend of mine in Moscow is dating a
Ukrainian and – would you believe it! – both sets of parents have been trying
to keep them apart from the first day of the relationship. But that’s nothing
compared to the loves that are described here. There’s a woman who falls in
love with a murderer stuck for life in a prison, a woman who is separated from
her husband for seven years because his family refuse to let him be with an
infidel, and many other examples of loves that refuse to let anything stand in
the way.
Russia is a country of romantics, and it seems that love is one of the ways that the Russians – the women especially – were able to survive the horrors that the 1990s brought with them. It’s a way of living and loving that seems strange at best, and silly at worst, to us in the West. But giving oneself up truly to another person, just like giving oneself up completely to an idea like Communism, seems one of the surest ways to salvation of the soul. In any case, the passages of self-sacrifice in the name of love were regularly touching, even if it made me deeply sad to read about all the challenges these people faced, and perhaps ought not have had to.
Protests in Belarus took place in 2010 as Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected to the office of president. The young generation in the former Soviet Union may not be placed well politically to enact changed, but from my experience of them their hearts are almost without exception in the right place. Things in these countries, which have suffered so much, will only get better. Photo by Isabel Sommerfeld (CC BY 2.0)
Conclusion – Future Hopes
The last chapter of Second-hand Time details the experience of a few students in the ill-fated protests in Belarus to Alexander Lukashenko’s re-election in 2010 to the office of president. Many of these people were put in prison and kicked out of university; others were simply beaten by riot police; Lukashenko won, of course. He also won a fourth term in 2015, and is standing for a fifth term in 2020 – although at the time of writing it’s not clear whether Belarus will be absorbed into Russia at some point after that. However much these people faced pain and disappointment, like the protesters in Moscow in 2011, the fact that they tried – Alexievich seems to hint – is already a huge achievement, and a step towards the future.
I’ve lived in Russia for two years now, and I intend to live
here after university. I can’t say I love the Russians, but for me they really
are a special people, just as theirs is a special country. And the times are
changing. The dreams of the 1990s are not yet dead. If there is one thing that
gives me more hope than anything else it is the young generation – here, and across
the world. People may complain about the present situation – regarding Russia, it’s
not my place to – but Russia’s youth will surely, once they come of political
age, change the world for the better. Perhaps the dream of love and brotherhood
that the Soviet Union held so dear may also, one day, prove not simply
idealistic twaddle, but something really worth believing in.
Alexievich’s book is probably the best book I’ve read all year. Both heartwarming and heart-rending, hopeful and hateful, it is a roller-coaster of real emotions. But most importantly, it’s making me go with reopened eyes into the world and realise yet again that every human carries with them their own story, like a cross. And if we do not listen to them, however misguided or deluded they may be, how can we hope to change the world?
