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After a few days in Andalusia, invited by the Cosmopoetic Festival of Córdoba, Svetlana Alexiévich (Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, 1948) shows a southern enthusiasm. The Nobel Prize for Literature he received in 2015 discovered to many the work of this writer and journalist capable of throwing words further than life in a handful of books where there is only room for reality, for the voices of the invisible, of the humiliated, of the defeated. And that they are the sample of the best combination between journalism and literature .

With a slight smile and tense gaze and at times fallen, he displays a deck of interests and concerns that make his voice a necessary music that does not hide the eternal open wound of asking things.

What happens after finishing a book that has taken 10 years of work? It is different every time. When I published The Zinc Boys I was so shocked by the testimonies that I couldn't even see a crushed worm. Then, with The Boys of War I suffered a strong disenchantment. How those children / angels could suffer so much! When I close a story I have to distance myself from everything to regain strength. I finish exhausted, empty. How much do you owe your writing about the real to fiction? When writing, nothing. As the sculptor Auguste Rodin said, I try to separate the superfluous from the essential. And in my work the essential thing is reality. That's why people surprise me. When you talk to someone who has lived through the horrors of war in all its rawness there are surreal moments. Some victims have told me how beautiful war can be, how beautiful it is to see the light of explosive rockets at night. Or how beautiful a burning village can be ... The paradox of the presence of beauty in the center of evil is something that impacts. The strongest, in that sense, I lived in the war in Afghanistan, in the late 70s. Seeing the relief of Russian soldiers, boys so young, handsome, with their impeccable uniforms, causes some confusion. I, who am absolutely pacifist, find there a desolate beauty. When you live something like that, fiction is not necessary, that is, the possibility of inventing is nullified before the real and its rawness ... Yes. The complex thing in these situations is that someone wants to count without censorship. Let it open. I try to strip the person of all his luggage to take me to the bottom of his emotions. Tólstoi said that one day the writers will be ashamed to invent life. I agree. He said it after writing Ana Karenina and Guerra y paz , two monumental fictions. For something it will be. The voices that he gathers in his books do not have the ingredients of the hero, but of the witness. Is the witness more implacable in telling his story? The witnesses have reflected in the soul the event of their lives that I seek. What is a hero? A model invented by others or by me. That is why I am more interested in the witness. It is a scam that brings bad news of reality, of another reality. I am interested in those who agree to tell their experience and not what they have read in the newspapers or seen on television. The most interesting stories come from the simplest people, because they have no masks, they are not hostage to what they have been told. They have seen it. They are the most open-eyed to observe reality. How do you get these witnesses not to speak only as victims? For example, a devastated mother or a young soldier full of terror. People like that tend to cling to life in a desperate way. They want to get out of the abyss in which they are or to which they were pushed. When I talk to them, I try not to return them to that abyss, but to help them climb to the surface. Although sometimes I feel like an executioner if I cause that person to dive again in their dark areas. When I wrote my first book, War has no woman's face , some of those who told me their stories suffered even damage. But his testimony was necessary. Only they could warn us of so much disaster that we still did not know about World War II. You don't find that strength in Dostoevsky's novels. Now he works on two books at once. One about love and one about death. What generates greater uncertainty? Old age. Science has given us more time. Our biological project is over but we are still alive. Before you educated your children, you pushed them to life and you had fulfilled. Now after that you have a long way to go. And at that time, many people wonder what to do with that time, why stay alive, how to live ... These people are very, very interesting. It's that living biologically doesn't always mean living humanly. That's why they prepare a world for us. of cyborgs without time problems. It is a good reason to stop and think. How much does your own experience weigh when writing about love? In my life I have had several important love stories. If I had not experienced these situations, I could not ask the questions I ask to the people who participate in this work. Do you remember when you had a clear awareness of death? Probably in Afghanistan ... Death is a mystery. I have read a lot about her. The Book of the Dead of ancient Egypt, philosophical and scientific essays ... There is more reason about death in ancient books than in current literature. I believe that love and death are the two main issues in life, but death is more enigmatic. We are interested in what will happen next, if there is a further ... The questions generated by death are deeper. Also, notice, most of the dead look surprised. Like saying, "What am I doing here?" Do you think that after death there is something left? I don't want to agree that death is the end. Those 21 grams that say you lose when you die and call soul, what they mean. The answers of science are not enough. You have to see what those 21 grams house. What do you fear? At heights. Only vertigo? Well, something else. I would not like to know what my instincts are in extreme situations. I have spoken with women and men who lived in the Battle of Stalingrad and El Cerco in the city. Good people who at a time like that made barbarities. An experience I would not like to have it. Perhaps that is why my books are not a compilation of testimonies of the terror of others, but the maximum interest I have in writing is to show how human warmth can be maintained even in infamous situations. Is it possible to distinguish between fantasy and truth in testimonials you collect? Yes, by intuition. My stories are never unidirectional. I try to write from many different perspectives, as many as there are voices in my work. That ends up shaping, more than a reality, a truth. For example, how not to believe a nurse who tells you that she leaves the operating room hugging the amputated leg of a young soldier as if she were a baby. Is it necessary to invent something like that? Or that moment when a strong woman who lived in World War II clarifies that in the war, dying is not the worst, that her horror in those years was not to die but to wear long men's underpants that reached her ankles. Something like that is not invented. How was your childhood? I grew up in a village where there were almost no men, they were always outside. My childhood was among women. I listened to their stories of suffering and those voices were forever fixed in my memory. They never shouted their misfortunes, as in the movies, but whispered their pain. Just as men counted their defeats with a note of irony. Was the Nobel Prize a bulletproof vest against you that Russian and Belarusian governments commit with journalists and disaffected? I live in an authoritarian system, with sparsely educated beings occupying The positions of power. Neither Vladimir Putin nor Aleksandr Lukashenko [President of Belarus] have culture, so a Nobel Prize cannot protect you from such people. He grew up and was educated in Russian culture and for more than 40 years he has written about the history of Soviet utopia. Was the USSR the story of a scam? In Bolshevik Russia it all started with the promise of reaching paradise on earth. I read many newspapers and letters from the revolutionaries during the process of preparing The End of Homo Sovieticus . Simple people thought that with communism they would have the possibility of improving their lives, that they could eat and buy better shoes, that they would not be humiliated again ... But then what Gueorgui Pléjanov warned happened: Russia is a feudal state and not We can live the leap from a feudal state to socialism from one day to another. I have lived emigration in Sweden and I can say that in Sweden there is socialism. And nothing resembles what the Soviet Union promulgated. The Swede was a result of development and we washed our faces with blood. Do you feel part of a defeated generation? Polish writer and Nobel laureate Ceszaw Milosz said that fascism is a tremendous thing, but it has some temporary operetta in very bad taste. However, communism seems solemn and will return on numerous occasions to rise. In the 90s, some of us had the feeling that something could change and that the wisdom had triumphed. We could not foresee that we were going to take so many steps back. Then we understood that someone who leaves a concentration camp never feels free as soon as they leave. Freedom is a slow and long road. How do you explain the rebirth of the extreme right in the West? I think it is a result of the fears and traumas of the middle classes that generate these monsters. He has also lived through the excesses of nationalism, the eagerness of raising moral and physical walls ... Democracy is receding dangerously. We urgently need renewed ideas and wake up. Democracy is invincible, but you have to be prepared to fight for it. What interests you and what worries you about today's journalism? I'm worried about banality. And that many journalists are collaborating to expand that banality. Many times you write or speak without thinking. Many have stopped training their brain and their intelligence. Losing critical judgment and accepting banalities as if they were ideas is a catastrophe. I worked seven years in a newspaper and it was a very interesting experience. They asked me to write silly things and what interested me was not among the interests of the newspaper, so I left it when I was in a great professional moment. In such a fanatical present of images and screens, what weight do words have? It seems that little. It is as if they had lost electricity, magnetism. Life accumulates too much garbage in this regard. Everyone writes, takes pictures and gives their opinions about everything. That makes the demand go down too much. Is feminism the last revolution of the twentieth century that the XXI needs? Of course. What feminism is doing is very necessary. Feminist thinking is flexible and is fully linked to the present and our surroundings. In our new reality, which must be increasingly sustainable and respectful of living beings, the feminist look will be extremely interesting. Fascism, populism and others will dissipate in favor of better emergencies. Contemporary man is screwed.

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