Abstract
Amongst the most treated questions in Western research on the works of Svetlana Aleksievich is the question of the genre of Aleksievich’s prose works, followed closely by the question of the historical authenticity of her method of collecting oral information about the Soviet period of history from witnesses of that history. The questions treated, such as the problem of genre, aesthetic authenticity and the relationship of history and fiction, can be distilled into the question of the authority of the literary text. If the Nobel Prize for literature is awarded on the assumption that Aleksievich’s work is literature—and no one, including the author, has questioned that assumption—then it is justifiable to pose the question of the authority of the literary text as an aesthetic message—as literary truth—using the tools of literary analysis, not of historiography or sociology. In this essay, the claim that Secondhand Time [Vremia second hend] is a novel will be examined in the context of the narratological model of the literary text of Russian Formalism and Prague Structuralism and by applying the test of “artistic quality” (khudozhestvennost’), which validates the aesthetic value of texts of the literary canon. This examination will allow us to answer the question about what kind of text has been created using oral testimonies as material for a work of fiction.
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Notes
"The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015." Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014, Web, 11 August 2018. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/. She was awarded the Prize for the cycle of works on “Soviet man,” not specifically for a single work.
“Soviet man” is the major protagonist of all of Aleksievich’s literary works. The subtitle of Secondhand Time indicates that this is a historical type who is leaving the historical stage. Compare: Svetlana Aleksievich, Second Hand Time: The Last of the Soviets. An Oral History, trans. Bela Shayevich (Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company, 2016).
Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018) and Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 59, nos. 3–4 (2017) are two publications in which Aleksievich’s prose is examined in the context of history, culture and literature.
Heather Coleman points out that there is the problem in Aleksievich’s writing of “distinguishing the lines of history and fiction.” H. J. Coleman, ‘Svetlana Aleksievich: the writer and her times,’ Canadian Slavonic Papers, vol. 59, nos. 3–4 (2017), p. 193.
“Das Empfinden der Autorin, ihre Emotionen, fliessen in das Dokument ein und ergänzen es. Das blosse Dokument ist defizitar, zum geschichtlichen Zeugnis wird es erst durch die Autorin” (Clemens 2018, p. 84).
V.V.Vinogradov was the first critic of the Russian Formalist School who raised the category of “obraz avtora”: “Voobsche, voprosy o rechevoĭ strukture ‘obraza avtora’, ‘rasskazchika’, liricheskogo geroia v stiche, personazheĭ v drame, a takzhe v romane, novelle i povesti zanimaiut ochen' vazhnoe mesto v nauke o iazyke khudozhestvennoĭ literatury. Inogda imenno v etom krugu stilisticheskikh iavleniĭ otyskivaetsia razgadka kompozitsionnoĭ struktury khudozhestvennogo prozvedenia, ego vnutrennego stilisticheskogo edinstva.” V. V. Vinogradov, “Nauka o iazyke khudozhestvennoĭ literatury i ee zadachi: na materiale russkoĭ literatury,” in Issledovania po slavjanskomu literaturovedeniu i stilistike: Doklady sovetskikh uchёnykh na IV Mezhdunarodnom s"ezde slavistov, ed. F. F. Kuz’min and A. N. Robinson (M.: AN SSSR, Sovetskij Komitet Slavistov, 1960, p. 25).
“Dokumentalnia proza vtorichna po otnosheniyu k 'khudozhestvennoĭ', predpologaia (otnositel’nuiu) konstiturovannost’ posledneĭ. Avtor dokumental’noĭ prozy soznatel’no sozdaёt tekst, pretenduiushchiĭ na nekhudozhestvennost’ – i nakhoditsa po otnosheniu k khudozhestvennoĭ v polozhenii odovremennogo ottalkivania i sblizhenia. Sobstvenno, ustanovka na dokumen’talnost’ – iznachal’nyĭ zhest razryva, tekst utverzhdaet, chto on ne literatura,—v smysle vymysla (lzhi)—i tem samym vneshe paradoksal’nym obrazom otkazyvaetsa ot pravdopodobia – on dolzhen byt’ pravid, a ne pravdopodoben, dazhe esli pravda neveroiatna” (Teslia 2012, p. 8).
“Die Chronik gilt gemeinhin als ich-narrative Form der Geschichtsdarstellung, die vom Ideal eines blossen Aufschreibens und Datierens geleitet ist, in dem die Person des Verfassers nicht bemerkbar ist. Dies ist angesichts der Selbstcharakterisierung Aleksievičs als “Historikerin des Spurlosen” problematisch. Können über historische Zeiten, aus denen keine Spuren überliefert sind, in der Geschichtswissenschaft gerade keine Aussagen getroffen wereden, konzentriert sich Aleksievič auf dies angeblich spurlosen Momente. Im Kern ihrer Ästhetik liegt somit ein Anspruch, der dem berichtenden Charakter der Chronik entgegenläuft.” Clemens Gunther, ‘Mehr als Geschichte: Svetlana Aleksievičes dokumentarische Prosa,’ Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018, p. 84).
“…tsement, kotoryĭ svyazyvaet khudozhestvennoe proizvedenie v odno tseloe i ottogo proizvodit illiuziiu otrazhenia zhizni, est ne edinstvo lits, i polozheniĭ, a edinstvo samobytnogo nravstvennogo otnoshenie avtora k predmetu” (Tolstoy 1958, p. 232).
“Ia ne pishu sukhuiu, goluiu istoriiu fakta, sobytiia, ia pishu istoriiu chuvstv” V poiskakh vechnogo cheloveka http://alexievich.info/. Compare also https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2015/prize-announcement/
In the West, Russian Formalism left a lasting imprint on New Criticism and F. R. Leavis’ critical methodology, relying on the “close reading of texts,” which fed into the interdisciplinary field of comparative literature. This methodology modulated into a new phase with post-Structuralism, in which the Structuralist methodology of analysing the semiotics of meaning became the method of reading texts through other texts (called ‘deconstruction’). In Russia after the 1920s, all literary trends which did not conform to the “artistic method” of Socialist Realism went underground, until they resurfaced in the Soviet Structuralism of the Tartu School. The rehabilitation of Russian Formalism was also evident in the relaxation of censorship on Mikhail Bakhtin’s old and new writings in the 1960s, which while not directly associated with the Formalist Group, shared the phenomenological ground of the Group’s approach to literature and discourse.
Compare Bakhtin’s 1934–1935 essay “Discourse in the Novel,” which invokes “heteroglossia,” defined as an “understanding of the dialogue of languages as it exists in a given era,” grounded in the profound knowledge of “each language’s socio-ideological meaning and an exact knowledge of the social distribution or ordering of all the other ideological voices of the era.” M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination. Ed. M. Holquist, trans. C. Emerson & M. Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990, p. 417). In other words, what Bakhtin requires of the novel as a testament of its age is to have intertextuality (“many voices” as heteroglossia) as its structural dominant and to be an “archaeology’ (in Foucault’s sense) of its age.
The structural model of the literary text received an extended and explicit exposition in the work of the Hamburg University Slavist, Wolf Schmid, in the first instance in his Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs. Beiheft zu Poetica, ed. Karl Maurer, Heft 10 (München: Fink, 1973). I have translated and adapted Schmid’s model in my monograph, Slobodanka B. Vladiv, Narrative Principles in Dostoevsky’s Besy: A Structural Analysis (Berne: Peter Lang Verlag, 1979). Schmid has updated and anglicised his model in Wolf Schmid, Narratology: An Introduction (De Gruyter, 2010).
The terminology covering these third-level categories of meaning are alternatively “Abstract” or “Implied” Author/Reader. I have chosen to go with the term “Abstract Author.”
The communication model of language received its earliest theoretical exposition in Karl Bühler ‘s theory of the “organon model” of language. See Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie: Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache. Jena, 1934. Compare the version by Slobodanka B. Vladiv, Narrative Principles in Dostoevsvsky’s Besy, p. 175 and Schmid’s modification in Wolf Schmid, Der Textaufbau in den Erzählungen Dostoevskijs, p. 30, n. 1.
“Voobsche, voprosy o rechevoĭ strukture ‘obraza avtora’, ‘rasskazchika’, liricheskogo geroia v stikhe, personazheĭ v drame, a takzhe v romane, novelle i povesti zanimaiut ochen' vazhnoe mesto v nauke o iazyke khudozhestvennoĭ literatury. Inogda imenno v etom krugu stilisticheskikh iavleniĭ otyskivaetsia razgadka kompozitsionnoĭ struktury khudozhestvennogo prozvedeniia, ego vnutrennego stilisticheskogo edinstva.” V. V. Vinogradov, "Nauka o iazyke khudozhestvennoj literatury i ee zadachi: na materiale russkoĭ literatury," in Issledovanija po slavjanskomu literaturovedeniiu i stilistike: Doklady sovetskikh uchёnykh na IV Mezhdunarodnom s"ezde slavistov, ed. F. F. Kuz'min and A. N. Robinson (M.: AN SSSR, Sovetskiĭ Komitet Slavistov, 1960, p. 25).
Schmid, Der Textaufbau…, p. 31. Translated from German by SVG.
Compare L. Frank Weyher, “Re-Reading Sociology via the Emotions: Karl Marx’s Theory of Human Nature and Estrangement,” Sociological Perspectives, Vol. 55, Issue 2, (2012), read on 31/1/2021 https://doi.org/10.1525/sop.2012.55.2.341.
It has been remarked in the critical literature how “unrepresentative” Aleksievich’s Homo sovieticus is and how selective the historical memory of Aleksievich’s interviewees appears to be. Compare Galia Ackerman and Frederick Lemarchand, “Du bon et du mauvais usage du temoignage dans l’œvre de Svetlana Aleksievich,” Tumultes, 1/2009, pp. 29–55, quoted by Tine Roesen, “Zwischen den Stűhlen: Dokument und Fiktion bei Svetalana Aleksievic,” Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018), p. 106, where Roesen reports that the joint authors find that Aleksievich never alludes to oral history projects to which her witnessing prose might be methodologically aligned while at the same time selecting informants who leave out important historical details, such as the murdering of Jews in Belarus during WWII.
See Secondhand Time, in which the section has the telling subtitle: “On the Mercy of Memories and the Lust for Meaning,” pp. 142 ff. One might ask whether historical meaning can be achieved by selective memory.
In an article, published in his own journal Vremia in 1861, Dostoevsky extolled the virtue of great art as more “useful” to humanity than any utilitarian art with a social message. Taking a minor nationalist Ukrainian female writer, whose nom de plume was Marko Vovchok, as an illustration of bad art, Dostoevsky argued that Vovchok’s representation of “Little Russia” (as Ukraine was known in the nineteenth century) lacked the expressive means and “artistry” (“khudozhestvennost”), which might “persuade” a reader of its “truth.” F. M. Dostoevsky, ‘G-n –bov i vorpos ob iskusstve,’ in: F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Tom 18, Stat’i i zametki 1845–1861. (Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1978, pp. 70–103).
Julia Obertreis is categorical in her evaluation of Aleksievich’s novel not being oral history. See Julia Obertreis, “Polyphonie auf den Trümmern des Sozialismus: Svetlana Aleksievič’s Werk aus sicht der Oral History,” Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018, p. 133).
F. M. Dostoevsky, ‘G-n –bov i vopros ob iskusstve,’ in: F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh, Tom 18, Stat’i i zametki 1845–1861. (Leningrad: “Nauka,” 1978, p. 99, translation by Vladiv-Glover).
On Dostoevsky’s view of history, compare Slobodanka Vladiv-Glover, Dostoevsky and the Realists: Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy. (New York: Lan, 2019, p. 47).
It has been noted that Aleksievich concentrates on catastrophes in the “new” post-Soviet Russia, ignoring the positive developments in the lives of people who have managed to transition into successful commercial enterprises and freelance professions. Compare the critique of Aleksievich’s representation of the post-Soviet transition time by the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg historian Julia Obertreis: “Ein annäherend vollständiges Bild der Umbruchzeit entsteht aus ihrer Themenwahl nicht. Da sie sich auf die Geschichte der Katastrophen konzentriert, lässt sie positive Aspeket aus, zum Beispiel erfolgreiche berufliche Umorientierungen hin zu kommerzieller oder freiberuflicher Tätigkeit, neue Freiheiten zur Selbstverwirklichung, lebendige Kontakte ins Ausland, die in der sowjetischen Zeit nicht möglich waren, oder ein erfüllendes religiöses Erleben. Ob sich diese Schwerpunktsetzung in Secondhand-Zeit aus dem Interesse und der Erwartungshaltung des westlichen Publikums speist oder zumindest durch sie verstärkt wird, ist durchaus eine Frage wert. Immerhin findet Svetlana Aleksievič mit ihren Büchern seit den frühen 1990er Jahren im Westen immer mehr, in Russland immer weniger Anklang. “Julia Obertreis, “Polyphonie auf den Trümmern des Sozialismus: Svetlana Aleksievič’s Werk aus sicht der Oral History,” Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018, p. 132).
The reference is to the Pussy Riot performance at the Moscow Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, followed by the arrest and very public trial of two of the three girls, aged between 20 and 30, and their subsequent release in December 2013.
See Second Hand Time, the story of Tanya Kuleshova, 21, p. 454 ff.
This point is also made strongly by Sophie Punkham, by way of a critique of Aleksievich’s use of documentary material, in “Witness Tampering. Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksievich crafts myths, not histories.” New Republic, 29.8.2016. Quoted in: Tine Roesen, “Zwischen den Stühlen: Dokument und Fiktion bei Svetalana Aleksievic,” Osteuropa, 68, Nos. 1–2 (2018, p. 106).
Compare the comment by Julia Obertreis in footnote 25 above.
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Vladiv-Glover, S., Alpay, O. The authority of the text in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Secondhand Time. Stud East Eur Thought 75, 9–32 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09451-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-021-09451-0