Lyudmila Petranovskaya: “We are not special, we just got more”

Pass the tests

• Do you know guilt?
• Can you turn the page and start a new life?
• Are you an anxious person?

Transfer of traumatic experience

At one time, I was greatly impressed by the books “War has no woman’s face” and “Last Witnesses”. The topic of war as trauma has been of interest to me for a long time, and there was little such direct access to people’s experience. It is clear that veterans did not tell schoolchildren about this, they did not show it on TV and did not write in the “correct” literature – there are more and more about feelings, about love for the Motherland and duty, but about how girls at the front managed with menstruation – no . Although, to be honest, a person, a woman, is much more influenced not by love for the Motherland, but by this experience, when she walks in the heat kilometer after kilometer, and flows down her legs, and everything hurts, and men avert their eyes. With this experience, with this trace in her soul, she then lives life, gives birth and raises daughters and sons, and this experience is reflected in how she raises them. And how do they raise theirs? This experience is then melted down into a variety of things, and without knowing about it, it is impossible to understand a lot in today’s Russian families and in relations between people, and this is already directly related to my profession.

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• “In the lyrics, mental trauma easily goes into action”

The transgenerational transmission of traumatic experience and its consequences within families is a very important topic for me, so many times, starting to unravel the tangle from something seemingly completely distant, I came across exactly this.

We start a conversation with a young foster mother, who complains of an incomprehensible dislike for the long-awaited baby, so kind of glorious, in need of her love. She does everything for him, but she herself feels nothing but longing, duty, hopelessness and fear of condemnation. And so, not always, but quite often, having sorted out everything that lies closer to the surface: insufficient preparation for receiving a child, difficulties in relations with her husband, accumulated fatigue, childhood resentment, and finding out that all this may be, but “not then”, does not evoke recognition and emotional response, we are stuck in a pop-up “suddenly” memory of a family story once heard in childhood. About the grandmother of this mother today, the youngest of several children, left without a mother shortly after birth. The father married almost immediately a young girl, so that there would be someone to look after the children. And then the famine began. Great hunger. The father died, some of the children too, some of the older ones were forced to study at the FZU, and the younger stepmother was somehow taken to the city and left there at the station – at the age of three. Then an orphanage, where one of the surviving elders found her ten years later. The story in the family was told with condemnation – “I would not leave my own.” And when we remember this story now and think about what it was like for this very stepmother, today’s prosperous young woman has tears in a stream – and she recognizes all her feelings: longing, doom, the duty to save someone else’s child, and no love and joy of motherhood, and after – only condemnation. Unconscious, unaccepted, buried in family memory for many years, the experience emerges in response to a certain similarity of the situation – a foster baby in her arms – and subjugates today’s feelings. Without knowing this historical context, without understanding what entire generations had to go through, it is impossible to work with Russian families, this is my deep professional conviction.

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• “I was in Auschwitz”

It is very few who can

The second reason is also related to the profession, I can well imagine what it is like to pass through such material. Listen, accept, endure when you don’t know what is harder to hear – convulsive sobs or a calm, detached voice. I know very well what it’s worth, because sometimes you have to listen to the stories of former orphans or their foster parents – there is the same degree of infernality as in stories about the war, the same total insecurity of a little man in a millstone. No money, no fame, no prizes and grants – nothing is worth it, once having been in this hell, to go down there again and again voluntarily, despite the fact that you personally do not need it and nothing threatens you from it. But someone has to.

A person with a sufficient supply of inner well-being is more likely to go down there and back out. I had to read reproaches that Aleksievich did not comprehend his own experience, but used the experience of other people. To be honest, it is very few people who can comprehend and describe such an experience. Units. And usually these are very outstanding people: Frank, Shalamov. How to hear the voices of others? The ones who would never write a book? Who will ask them, who will write them down? Aleksievich managed to do it, and this is very valuable.

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• “A society that ignores the violence of the past commits new violence”

We cannot change history and save these people from their traumatic past (well, a psychologist here can do a little more than a writer, and still not that much). But they have the right to be at least heard. At least to keep their voices, not to sink into oblivion as the silent consumables of history.

At the same time, I am not close to everything that Aleksievich says in an interview, I am unpleasant with constant repetitions about the fact that “no one is left”, “there are no free persons” and so on. I don’t know, maybe it’s the usual immigrant, when there is some need to explain the departure to oneself. Or work with trauma nevertheless formed a “tunnel vision”, I know this effect well when you look around and see completely unfortunate orphans. This does not mean that “no one is left”, it means that it’s time for me personally to go on vacation. Probably, the work of a journalist or a writer with such material also requires support in the form of supervision, as well as the work of a psychologist in order to deal with the emotions and fantasies induced by the “field”. But in any case, this work causes me great respect and sympathy. I feel like guild solidarity, although this is a different profession.

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• PTSD – what is it?

dissociative cleavage

Our history is very, very traumatic, especially the history of the past century. I think we’re all dealing with PTSD on a national scale. One of its components is dissociative splitting. This is such a psychological defense, chosen by the psyche in unbearable circumstances – to split off suffering, encapsulate it so as not to feel mental pain, remain functional and survive due to this. I already once wrote about how noticeable dissociative splitting is in books written right at the time of events – such as Wanda Wasilewska’s Rainbow, where monstrous events are spoken of so unemotionally, in a restrained descriptive manner: here is the corpse of the son lies, frozen in a snowdrift, the mother goes to visit, here the woman in labor is beaten with boots, and the newborn is lowered into the hole in front of her eyes, here the boy is shot, his mother buries him right in the hallway. The same frightening evenness can be heard in many of Aleksievich’s notes: the enumeration of actions, events, everyday details – as if through glass, as if it were not with me.

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Dissociation in itself is not bad – it is a way to survive, not to go crazy, a completely functional mechanism, provided that it only works for a while. When you need to get together, survive, save yourself, “reach your own.” And there already to give vent to tears, anger, fear – everything that was “frostbitten”, stuffed into a capsule. But here’s the problem with living through trauma in our history. There were no “own” people. Not on the other side of the front, not on this one, and nowhere at all. All these heroines of Vasilevskaya, after the return of the Soviet army, could now go to Soviet concentration camps. In the eyes of the Motherland, they were criminals, not victims, since they did not die in battle with the enemy, since they dared to survive in the occupied territories. And if they started talking and remembering… No understanding, no sympathy, no consolation, no help and protection. Don’t you dare speak and remember, shut up and forget.

Thus, dissociation from a temporary protective measure becomes part of the cultural norm, part of the national character. This is a huge and very painful topic that deserves a separate discussion. It still hurts, it still affects, and not only because of that war, there was a lot of everything before and after. There are such volumes of traumatic experience that you look in and you can’t see the bottom. But you have to at least try. Long-standing dissociation, even on the scale of the psyche of one person, can have rather bad consequences, to say nothing if it becomes part of the collective unconscious.

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• How do the (great)grandchildren of the executioners live?

We weren’t the only ones going through this. Testimonies of the victims of the Holocaust began to be collected only in the 70s, before that they were also ordered to remain silent. Not under fear of prison, of course, just hung in the air. But they realized it, wrote it down, collected it, and still caught it alive. The Canadian “Duplessis orphans” also got the opportunity to speak only decades later. And how many tragedies have remained only meager lines of chronicles, because no one recorded the voices of the victims and witnesses.

Many peoples have a fairy tale story – about a perfect murder, about how the victim was buried, they lied to everyone, but then a reed grew on the mound, a shepherd cut a pipe from the reed, and this pipe told the whole world what really happened. It seems to me that this is the most accurate metaphor for this kind of literature, like a “novel of voices.” Despite the fact that they try with all their might to bury the experience of suffering, they continue to demand to shut up and forget, “not to discredit the bright image”, not to “distort the picture”, people decide – and speak. And everyone who decides to speak carries a message to others: “Do not be silent! This is your life, your experience, your truth, no one dares to bury it and bury it in secret.

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• Love… survived violence

Bead game

Finally, another reason why I would like to welcome the decision of the Nobel Committee is literary. To be honest, the “no one read” remarks about the books of the Nobel laureate sound funny. You might think that someone read books that were awarded last year, the year before last, and so on. Certainly not the inhabitants of Runet, except for rare exceptions.

I myself have stopped reading modern “serious” literature in recent years. Only non-fiction and teenage. Life, feelings, sincerity are still preserved there. And all this endless postmodernist glass beading, which these days usually collects awards and critical acclaim, has long caused nothing but irritation. Maybe, of course, I missed something, or maybe it’s all about my lack of spirituality and bad taste, but it seems that my friend feed is more interesting and contains more lively feelings and new thoughts than a typical “premium” novel with internal monologues, streams of consciousness and calculated by inserted erotic scenes and socially significant plots.

Therefore, I have not followed the decisions of the Nobel Committee for a long time – but what difference does it make what high-browed politically correct boredom they will once again call the best in the world “according to the Hamburg score”, forgetting the testament of the venerable dynamite. Because the dynamite, by the way, asked not for the game of glass beads to reward, but for the impact on culture and the world as a whole. So until they decide to give the Nobel Prize to Rowling, there’s nothing to talk about, I thought for a long time.

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And here is the prize for Aleksievich, the author of the genre of “novel of voices”. In my opinion, this is correct and fair, it is, as it were, an invitation to new genres in literature with legal rights. It seems to me that literature that is quite classical in genre will benefit from neighborhood and rivalry with the living voices of people.

As for the impact on the world as a whole, I hope that, once in the spotlight, Aleksievich’s books will give the world a chance to better understand Russia and its history (shared for a long time with its immediate neighbors). Perhaps it will finally be an understanding that is different from several labels that have stuck in the teeth and are equally far from the truth: about “special spirituality”, about “a miserable nation, a nation of slaves”, about an “aggressive Russian crazy bear”, about a “mysterious Russian soul” and the like. We are not actually pathetic, not especially spiritual, not crazy, and not even very mysterious. We just got really into it. More than you can bear without changing.

For more details, see L. Petranovskaya “Don’t be silent. PTSD on a national scale Online publications “Spectrum”.