site.btaAlexievich: "Words fail us to describe what's going on in our world today"

"Words fail us to describe what's going on in our world today," Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian Svetlana Alexievich said at a news conference here on Sunday.

The 2015 Nobel Prize winner is a special guest at the 39th Apollonia Festival of Arts here. On Saturday evening she attended a conversation with readers titled "Story of Catastrophe and Catastrophe of the Story".

Asked by BTA how the invisible wounds to the soul that the war inflicts on humankind are healed and can they be healed at all, Alexievich replied that "there is no cure for the wounds of war. But special attention should now be paid to the people who come back from the war, so as to heal the wounds in their souls. It is very important at this point how we will tell what is happening to Ukrainians and to Belarusians under the circumstances. What matters is what you will write," she said, addressing the journalists.

"We must retreat from the war as far as possible because it is traumatizing in any case, no matter whether we sit comfortably at home, watching TV, or we learn the news about the war online," the writer believes. "You will agree that the world of each one of us has been disrupted since that war between Russia and Ukraine began," she added.

"Words fail us to describe what's going on in our world today. It seems that the present addressee today is the culture of war. An awful lot has been said and written about the war. But now we must rethink it all and take a new look at this war, find new words about it," Alexievich said, replying to a question from former BTA director general Panayot Denev.

"Putin upturned the thinking of war. Europe never thought that a new war was possible at that point," the author said. She is now writing about what happened in her native Belarus in 2020, including the war in Ukraine.

She noted that quite a few people in Ukraine, driven by the despair they experience, are now saying that they will not listen to Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich or will not read Dostoevsky because they are Russians. "I see this as a cry of their souls," the writer said.

"The catastrophes that we have witnessed and nearly experienced over the last ten years have affected us all. We must find new words and new meanings to narrate all this," Alexievich argued. People who handle words should not despair. "We must simply handle these new words," she reasoned.

Assoc. Prof. Georgi Lozanov, who heads the BTA Culture, Science and Education Directorate, asked the Nobel Prize winner what he described as one of the most painful macro-historical questions: "why, contrary to what was hoped, Russia failed to integrate into the outside world after the USSR fell apart".

Alexievich recalled that during business trips to the outlying parts of Russia in the 1990s she talked to local people who told her that they dreaded what lay ahead. "Ordinary people there felt robbed of what had happened, after the collapse of the state. This is precisely Putin's point of departure today," she added. 

Asked why she turned to writing documentary prose, the writer said that "at present everybody is a politician, whether they like it or not. The bad thing is that time flies so fast. We cannot afford to narrate events that happened 50 years ago. You see what has been going on over the last 20 or 30 years, the breathtaking speed at which everything has been changing. This is a new world, with new temptations placed by evil in our way. It is hard to imagine how anybody, like a recluse monk, can spare years of life in order to write something. That is why I opted for this genre. The protagonist should be the eyewitness, the person involved in the particular event," Alexievich emphasized. 

Before taking up writing, she worked as a journalist for seven years. "I decided that sticking to the classical form of the novel was not mandatory. I decided that I wanted to write novels of voices - the voices I interviewed and heard, and that the plot should be the narrative of those who witnessed what happened. When they narrate it, they are very focused and accurate. It's about witnessing the war," the author explained.

She dismissed criticism that this cannot be literature proper. "You see how all art forms have been changing in recent years. We can't say that all other art forms can change while writing should stick to the canon," the Belarusian writer argued. "Let me reassert that a person must do what they believe that are bound to do," she added.