Anna Starobinets: “Evil is a relative concept”

Psychologies: In one short story, you raise ethical, legal and psychological “adult” questions: revenge, decency, betrayal, professional engagement, the presumption of innocence, the ethics of investigation and inquiry, the justice of punishment. What age do you think children will understand and be interested in these topics? Do they require adult comments?

Anna Starobinets: It seems to me that “The Brutal Detective” is a reading for children from the age of seven (and further, at least until old age). It is from this age that such topics – decency, ethics, betrayal, justice, and so on – are already interesting for children: I judge by my daughter and her peers. I do not like to divide topics, genres and plots into adult and non-adult ones. I believe that a child is able to understand any universal, not narrowly professional topic – you just need to give yourself the trouble to find the right words and intonation. Sometimes they understand more than we would like. And certainly more than they, in our opinion, “should”. Of course, there are some taboo things that children need to be protected from – scenes of violence, pornography, etc. But I don’t see the point in sorting everything else into adult and childish.

Read more:

• An evil word hurts more than it looks

And what about the terms used like “psychological trauma”, “feeling of insecurity”, “expectation of aggression from the outside”, “nervous amnesia”?

A.S.: The terms in my book are usually explained – either through the direct speech of the characters, or through the context – but if the child has questions, an adult, of course, can always comment further.

One of your heroes is a Cat who stubbornly draws stripes on his muzzle and identifies himself as a badger only out of love for the old Badger who raised him. Another hero is a little bird, who lives in a hare family in a cage and under a black rag. Is the relationship of someone else’s child with a new family somehow particularly important to you?

A.S.: As far as Barsukot is concerned, I am more interested in the topic of the influence of the social environment vs. genetic predisposition. Here is a cat in front of us, for which the Badger was an example to follow from infancy. What takes over in it? His feline instincts, habits, the feline structure of his body – or his habit, purely social, to be a badger and be proud of it? Every time the hereditary and the social clash in Barsukot, an internal conflict occurs, an internal drama is played out. For me, as an author, such a character – with a breakdown, with a conflict, living out of harmony with himself – is purely egoistically beneficial. It turns out to be more multifaceted, more interesting, brighter, more unpredictable than just a cat.

Well, a starling in a cage under a rag is a completely different story. Here I just wanted to show that the Hares, habitually positioning themselves as victims, also have their own victim in their house. That is, their victimization, vulnerability is very ambiguous. For Little Bird they are aggressors. At the same time, they hysterically impose on others the image of hares as sufferers and martyrs. And the little bird endures in silence. Sometimes the real victim is not heard at all.

Read more:

• “We do not want equality, but justice”

The rest of the characters, too, as they say, with a difficult fate and personal drama. The hare family has no place to live, the hare decides on a double crime with the best of intentions, the badger grows old and fears losing his professional skills, the vegetarian laws of the forest protect animals from predators, but no one seems to notice the genocide of insects, and so on and so forth. Is it a conscious move to show children that there is no smooth fate and that each of us has personal pain behind it? Or did you pursue some other goal?

A.S.: My animals are anthropomorphic, the forest society is conceived as a cross section of the human, and in the human world there are no unambiguous characters, destinies and situations. Everything is relative, everyone has their cockroaches, their injuries and their “skeletons in the closet”. I don’t want to show my kids anything. It’s just so, these are the laws not only of literature, but also of life, and I follow them when I come up with characters and collisions.

Read more:

• “Evil can only be fought by being unsusceptible to evil”

Detective as a genre from the very beginning involves the task of “finding the culprit.” Do you think this task of finding the culprit and pronouncing a sentence is appropriate for a child?

A.S.: Why not? The genre really involves the presence and search for the guilty, it’s exciting, it develops logic, and I see no reason to deprive children of this genre. On the contrary, I came up with the Brutal Detective series at the request of my daughter – she really wanted to read thrillers and detective stories, and not much has been written for children in this genre. Well, as for the topic of guilt. The position of an intellectual seems to require teaching the child that both sides are to blame in any conflict. This approach is correct in many cases, but it should not become formal and the only possible one: children feel injustice very keenly. It happens that someone really is to blame, someone specific. Yes, his bad deed, his bad behavior may have a reason, yes, sometimes the guilty one can be pitied – but he is still guilty, and it is very unfair not to admit it, and most importantly, not to give yourself the trouble to figure out what happened. Unfortunately, adults – teachers, parents – often do not want to understand. Well, roughly speaking, two boys had a fight, which means that both are to blame and both should be punished. But it is quite possible that one of them is the aggressor. We, if there was a collision of two cars on the road, do not expect the traffic cop to say: “Both are to blame.” We are waiting for him to figure out who violated the rules of the road and became the culprit of the accident. And for some reason we deny the children the right to find the culprit. But it also happens that a child who has screwed up several times at school begins to be indiscriminately accused of any hooliganism. In this sense, the detective is more of a psychotherapy for a child than a guide to “finding the guilty”. Because a normal investigation does not involve the search for “extreme”, but the search for truth and the restoration of justice. That is why Badger Senior, the head of the Deep Forest Police, is so insistent on using the right words – for example, he demands that the Wolf be called a “suspect” and not a criminal, until the investigation is over and evidence of his guilt is provided. Everyone – both animals and readers-children – proceed from the fact that it was the Wolf who ate the Hare, and the Senior Badger is just a bore. And then it turns out that there are actually several options, and not only the Wolf had a motive. And to blame the Wolf indiscriminately is unfair.

Read more:

• Peace&Love: the principle of non-violence in action

The plot of your detective story frustrates the reader to a certain extent: there is no one guilty, the victim himself is guilty, deliberately taking the positions of the victim and profiting from them. Does this coincide with your ethical position of the absence of evil as such?

A.S.: No, I believe that evil, of course, exists. Simply evil, firstly, is a relative concept: sometimes it suddenly serves the good, or helps to better see the good, or, even being evil, manages to evoke sympathy from the good. But, of course, Bulgakov wrote about this much better in The Master and Margarita than I did in The Beast Detective. Well, and secondly, evil is such a thing that, if you are dealing with it, requires the participation of not only the heart, but also the intellect. To understand where is evil, what is evil and who is evil, you need to be able to analyze, to understand that sometimes evil is very good at pretending, hiding, mimicking good or just normal. It is easy to confuse good and evil, victim and persecutor. So my ethical position in this case is simple: if you want to be on the side of good, analyze, sort it out, do not make hasty conclusions.

Do you believe in the healing functions of punishment? That fear of punishment prevents crime?

A.S.: I don’t really believe in the healing functions of punishment. All this “stay in the corner / sit on the bunk and think about your behavior” is just a figure of speech, corners and bunk do not work as a breeding ground for the development of reflection or conscience. But I believe that punishment forms in the head of the offender (and his entourage) a causal relationship between the action and the consequence: “If I do this, then this will fly to me. Do I need it?” I believe that the fear of punishment often outweighs the desire to commit a crime. The relative order in the world rests precisely on this fear, and not at all on Christian and cultural traditions and values.

Read more:

• The Milgram Experiment: We Need Rebels

And if we are talking about children, is it possible to punish your child “well”? What punishments are acceptable to you? Useful?

A.S.: As far as children are concerned, non-violent (I never hit children, spank, shake, etc.) and non-humiliating, logical punishment-consequences are acceptable to me. If my 11-year-old daughter Sasha didn’t do her homework and got a D, I won’t take her to her birthday, I won’t let her watch a movie or somehow have fun until everything is done and until another, prettier grade appears. The punishment is logical: time that could have been spent on pleasure will now have to be spent on work not done. Not because it’s a deuce, but because it’s irresponsible. For a deuce, received due to mistakes made during the control, I will not punish at all. A person may not understand something, this is not a crime. Or another example. If Sasha, instead of sleeping at night, secretly chats with friends on social networks, I take her mobile from her for a while and definitely ask her to give it to us for the night. Because cheating is a crime. I stop trusting – I increase parental control. Cause is a consequence. Usually Sasha does not object to my measures of punishment and is not offended – I think because they really seem logical to her. In general, we usually get by with little bloodshed. My punishments are quite mild, but Sasha’s “crimes” are also vegetarian. I was lucky, she has a very meek and cheerful disposition.