MEMORY-ESSAY #1
This ESSAY has FIVE parts. Click here for the FIRST part, “CROCODILE PHILOSOPHY”. CLICK HERE FOR THE SECOND PART, “THEN AND NOW”. CLICK HERE FOR THE THIRD PART, “SILENCED”. CLICK HERE FOR THE FOURTH PART, “WHO KNOWS WHERE THE TIME GOES”.
18. Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, Out of the Fire, trans. Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya (1977; Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980), p. 6.
19. Ibid., p. 402.
20. In Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023), Jade McGlynn refers negatively to “the way in which Russia has progressed along a path that passes through cultural obsession and arrives at the total securitization of the memory of 1939/41 to 1945 and other historical interpretations” (p. 17).
21. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Michael R. Katz (1880; New York: Liveright, 2024), pp. 290, 291. Italics in original.
22. Maxim Gorky, “Soviet Literature”, in Gorky, Karl Radek, Nikolai Bukharin, Andrey Zhadanov and others, Soviet Writers’ Congress 1934: The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism in the Soviet Union (1935; London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), p. 46. No translator is named.
23. Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1985; London: Penguin, 2019): “Dostoevsky once posed a question: can we justify our world, our happiness, and even eternal harmony, if in its name, to strengthen its foundation, at least one little tear of an innocent child will be spilled? And he himself answered: this tear will not justify any progress, any revolution. Any war. It will always outweigh them” (p. xi).
24. Camus, The Rebel, p. 56.
25. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, p. 291.
26. Adamovich and others, Out of the Fire, p. 330 (ellipses in the original).
V
ETHOPOEIA
ETHOPOEIA
The fear some felt in the Soviet Union after 1945 was that Nazism could revive like a savage vampire rather than some maudlin and theatrical spectre. The anxiety was expressed near the end of an interestingly wry documentary made by Mikhail Romm, Triumph over Violence (1965), for example. It began to be conceivable that the European memory of Nazi atrocities could fade, despite or perhaps because of the sheer scale of them, and that dormant hatreds could in responsible memory’s absence come back to life. Attempting to prevent such a forgetting, some Soviet artists worked to preserve first-hand accounts of what had happened in the territories which formed the post-war Eastern Bloc. One of these artists was Ales Adamovich, who travelled extensively in his native Belarus collecting testimonies from survivors of Nazi wartime massacres. (Adamovich’s writing later formed the basis of the harrowing 1985 fiction film Come and See, directed by Romm’s student Elem Klimov.) The interviews with survivors gathered in a book such as Out of the Fire needed to be published, Adamovich and his co-authors said, because “some people keep trying again and again to white wash this plague of the 20th century in the eyes of new generations, who themselves did not experience the horrors of the Second World War”.18
I won’t discuss the testimonies in Out of the Fire directly here. They are very sad and disturbing to read, and it isn’t possible to do them justice in this short essay. I will however quote one comment made by the authors, and italicised by them for emphasis, in order to acknowledge what is at stake in the record of the mass murder in Belarus and beyond: “No matter what we have heard and read about nazism, these people have seen it at a far closer range than we, have seen right at their side the bared teeth of the ‘superbeast’ at a moment when there was no longer anything to separate the nazi and his victim and the nazi’s whole nature, everything there was in him, was laid before his victim’s eyes.”19 In putting down this brief marker, I think it worth adding that academic work is now being produced in Britain which openly characterises the commitment in Russia to maintain this history as state propaganda. Probably Specters of Marx and The End of History among numerous other works contributed to the intellectual culture in which such an argument can seriously be made.20
A prosperous, technocratic, peaceful idyll was Fukuyama’s victorious—or burnt-out—daydream of life in the universal liberal society created by the end of history. But there was always another way to think about culmination, about ultimate things, in the nuclear epoch after 1945. People took stock of the industrialised slaughter of the concentration camps together with the immeasurable open-air massacres, and many of them concluded that something had changed forever in the world. Inevitably the problem of theodicy—of how evil can exist if there really is a God—became relevant to these reflections, and writers like Camus in The Rebel went back to Dostoevsky’s monumental presentation of the problem in The Brothers Karamazov.
To summarise briefly: Ivan Karamazov rejects God (though not His existence) during a conversation with his devout younger sibling Alyosha, who is an attendant of Father Zosima, an elder of the local monastery. Ivan’s humanitarian argument stems from what he calls the “unredeemed tears” of tortured and murdered children: “Is there a creature in the whole world who’s able, who has the right to forgive? I don’t want any such harmony; out of love for mankind, I don’t want it. I prefer to remain with sufferings unexpressed. It’s better if I remain with my unavenged suffering and my unappeasable indignation, even if I’m wrong.”21 This impassioned and often-quoted speech doesn’t stand on its own in the novel. A number of other statements and episodes make up a chorus of rumination, but what Ivan says is usually contrasted most of all with Father Zosima’s doctrine of all-encompassing Christian love which is described in the novel shortly after Ivan’s declaration to his brother.
Ever since The Brothers Karamazov’s publication, readers and critics have wrestled with this virtual dialogue between Ivan and Father Zosima, and in the Soviet Union it was naturally no scandal to side with Ivan, especially given that the Nazis had in living memory perpetrated acts which even the fictional Ivan, who admits he keeps a scrapbook of atrocity reports, might be said to have never imagined. Yet it is also noteworthy that Dostoevsky’s treatment of theodicy should have remained a reference point for at least some Soviet readers, given that this conservative and religious novelist, who had bitterly satirised the revolutionary movement of his time, was out of kilter with state ideology. Gorky, in his role as a leader of Soviet writers, in a 1934 address called Dostoevsky a genius but expressed revulsion at the content of his novels: “Dostoevsky has been called a seeker after truth. If he did seek, he found it in the brute and animal instincts of man, and he found it not to repudiate but to justify.”22
So perhaps it followed logically that Soviet readers should have felt free to pick and choose what they took from Dostoevsky, whose work anyway is profoundly ambiguous—and specifically to favour Ivan’s stubborn humanitarianism over Father Zosima’s doctrine of forgiveness, and to do so on the basis that the world war had once and for all demonstrated the extent of the human capacity for evil, the further proof being that people could soon afterwards begin to ignore or downplay the truth of that demonstration. Thus another Soviet chronicler, working with a method similar to Adamovich, Svetlana Alexievich, paraphrased Ivan’s words and attributed the sentiments to Dostoevsky himself.23 The trouble is—if the novelist’s work of fiction is taken seriously as fiction—that the words are, all the same, still the character Ivan’s words and in The Brothers Karamazov, as Camus pointed out, Ivan is going mad.24
Listening to his brother, sweet Alyosha is bewildered and then horrified. His reaction to Ivan’s diatribe is theological and emotional not philosophical or humanitarian—“That’s rebellion”,25 he says as a rebuke—and Dostoevsky underlined the young Christian’s words by calling the whole chapter “Rebellion”. Perhaps it is the case that, after the killing fields behind the eastern front, and after the death camps, Alyosha’s objection simply can’t any longer hold up against Ivan’s obdurate denial—perhaps the twentieth century created a whole Ivan Karamazov World. I am, however, not sure about that, and so I will have to return to the question in my own way another time. For now, I will end by quoting Out of the Fire again, at length.
Adamovich and his collaborators also took Ivan’s side, but instead of paraphrasing Dostoevsky and leaving it at that, they kept the issue open by preserving some words of Father Zosima intact, albeit under protest. They then added their own reworking of the elder’s doctrine, using the figure of speech which rhetoricians call Ethopoeia—that is, speaking on behalf of another, or in this case on behalf of all the survivors of the massacres who felt that there could be no end to their sorrow. And by doing both these things in tandem, the writers made their Ivan Karamazov point while leaving in view the other side of the argument, meaning that the very form of the supplemented citation allowed for the possibility that in addition to all the horror and the grief, in addition to the proud and dignified labour of commemoration, there might still be new beginnings of a kind the writers themselves couldn’t for the time being imagine, and not only the forever sadness:
“…God raises Job up again and restores his wealth; many years pass by, and he has other children and loves them all. Good Lord, ‘How could he love those new children when the other ones were no more, when he had lost them? Remembering them, could he really be fully happy, as in the past, with the new children, no matter how dear the new ones were to him?’”
The nineteenth century was far from untroubled. But in this century the experience Dostoyevsky describes was the fate of millions of mothers and fathers. All this can be read in the eyes and faces, discerned in the voices of so many villagers.
The authors continued:
Yes, a people’s capacity to survive, its natural strength is most important. The people who are quoted in this book are not merely “bringing back” their own children. They are bringing life itself back to life.
Yes, these people have not lost their memories of the past. We sense this in their eyes and voices as they tell us about their present life and their “new” children.
Perhaps starets Zosima is right in a way when he expresses Dostoyevsky’s hope (and also doubt):
Recalling those dead and gone can one really be completely happy? “But one can, one can! Through the great mystery of human life, the old sorrow gradually turns into quiet, tender joy,”
This is a truth of life.
You read it in people’s eyes, in their faces. But you also read something else, something hidden deep within. Something expressed, even cried out as if in unbearable pain, by the Byelorussian novelist Kuzma Chorny, the bard of the village folk. He did not express it in the quiet voice of Zosima but in the outcry of Ivan Karamazov. This is quite natural in our 20th century with its scales… The fate of an entire people was involved. And the very real pain and suffering of people so alive in the memory, so dear to the heart…
“A priest was telling the congregation about how God tested Job’s faith. He sent all kinds of misfortunes on him… He knew it was God’s punishment but he didn’t stop praying to God and praising him, he didn’t cherish a grievance against God. God gratified him for this by returning everything he had… more children were born to him, just as many as had died before… For thousands of years people have been told this story and can it be that nobody ever realized that you can’t say such a thing to people because it is a grave lie… If I started another family and if I once more returned to life—had a new house, had my own bread to eat and again had a little son running out to greet me, I could get used to living in another house or riding another horse… But my dead child—it lived, it saw the world, it knew I was its father! There might be another child but it would not be the one who experienced the suffering and that suffering will remain forever because it was real and nobody can ever make it unreal.”
This we could sense in the most quiet voices, as if addressed to the whole world!…26
ABOVE: pages from Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik, Out of the Fire, trans. Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya