This one would not typically be referred to as ‘a short story’ – though it is a story, an incredible one at that, and it is short, at least in this telling.
Attributing it simply to Alexievich is also questionable. The most important co-authors are Irina Vasilyeva, Yelena Razduyeva, and two men identified simply as Yuri and Volodya/Vladimir. These people are also the story’s main characters.
It’s a story that appears, self-contained, towards the end of one of the most extraordinary books I’ve ever read, Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Alexievich, for those who don’t know, is an oral historian or literary documentarian, who, in each of her books, collects and curates a large number of testimonies from diverse people involved in a particular historical episode or phenomenon, enabling her to represent it with unusual depth, nuance and humanity. In this book, her theme is nothing less than the disintegration of Soviet civilisation and the emergence of its replacement, whatever that is.
The particular story I’m highlighting is about a woman, Lena, who leaves her beloved husband and three children to dedicate herself to a convicted murderer, serving a life sentence in a remote prison, who she, on the basis of only a photograph and the handwriting of a short, fairly nondescript letter, believes featured in a dream she had many, many years ago, telling her she would be his bride before God. We get Lena’s perspective, her abandoned husband’s perspective, the perspective of the convicted murderer, the perspective of a woman who previously made a documentary about these people and their situation and somehow cannot let them go now, and the perspectives of many fellow villagers and prison inmates who’ve known the main characters for years. It’s incredible! And of course made more so by the parallel – or even the deep connection – between Lena’s commitment to her vision, and that which the Soviet people, or many of them at least, had to theirs.
It’s hard to imagine a short story, in the usual sense of that term, achieving anything close to what this one does. I need to soon try and discover other great literary documentarians, other approaches to and innovations in that form.
I have myself heard spontaneously told, never-written-down stories that, to my mind, stand with the best literary ones I’ve encountered. I would think and hope we all have, even if we don’t normally think like that. I know I don’t. We’re perhaps a little too in awe of the institutional frame. I’m a huge fan of Living Libraries / Human Libraries, and of, you know, getting to know people.
First published in Russian as part of the book Время секонд хэнд in 2013. Bela Shayecivh’s English translation of that book, with the title Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets, then appeared in 2016
A Personal Anthology 