Ignoble Reactions

Envy is an ordinary human emotion familiar to us all. But, since we were children, we have been taught to overcome this feeling, or at least avoid showing it. But if your colleague, someone who is doing basically the same thing you do, suddenly attains international renown and a prestigious award, how hard it apparently is to restrain yourself and avoid making a disgraceful scene!

The amount of filth that has been hurled at Svetlana Alexievich by her fellow writers – Russian and Belarusian alike – is truly amazing. Of course, the main accusation being leveled against the 2015 Nobel laureate for literature is that her documentary novels “aren’t really literature.” One gets the impression that her critics are completely out of touch with how contemporary literature has been developing, with the new genres that have emerged.

It is true that 90 percent of Alexievich’s books consist of stories related to her by a host of people, but to call them a “collection of interviews” totally misses the point. They are masterfully composed documentary collages through which Alexievich’s authorial perspective clearly shines, and in which quantity (the wealth of materials collected) is magically transformed into quality – a great work of literature.

The other complaint is that Alexievich’s prize was politically motivated. Because she doesn’t like Putin, because she doesn’t like Lukashenko, because she wrote a book about the terrible trauma of the Afghan War and the aftermath of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, about what it is like, post-perestroika, to look back on past lives of which not a trace is left.

The Nobel Committee’s decision is being labeled an attempt to humiliate Russia (while at the same time her critics like to emphasize that she is not a Russian writer, even though she writes in Russian, since she lives in Belarus), or to humiliate Belarus (while in Belarus they claim she’s not really a Belarusian writer). One also hears the somewhat surprising idea that the award reflects the West’s fear of Russia and a desire to get back at it for creating the Donetsk Republic and interfering in the affairs of Ukraine. (Please don’t ask me to explain the logic here.)

Some purport to know that the Nobel Committee felt incredibly upset after the Sochi Olympics and the annexation of Crimea (what on earth does the Nobel Committee have to do with these events?) and acted on an impulse to lash out (at whom?). But in the end it is, we read, the Nobel Committee that has been tremendously debased.

I do not want to name the people who have made these assertions. Some of them are famous and even popular writers; some have only a narrow following. What they seem to have in common is an unabashed and vicious envy. They talk about Russian pride and the Nobel Committee’s political ambitions, but there are dollar signs in their eyes. They are wondering how much money Alexievich will get, how many more books she will sell. And they want to know why it wasn’t them.

I am pleased to report that sales of Alexievich’s books have indeed increased, and I hope this is true not only in Russia, but throughout the world. These books are imbued with a spirit of humanism and an insightful compassion toward people, in keeping with Russian literature’s greatest traditions, within which, once upon a time, envy was considered a shameful emotion.