Russia – in the meat grinder of history

“Now all maps of the world are outline cards on which we enter the arrows of new suffering every morning,” writes the Russian writer Alexander Ilitschewski over the period after February 24, 2022. When the Russian invasion of Ukraine began, shock and languagelessness prevailed among the opposition Russian writers. Ilitschewski also describes that, this search for words, for a language that would be appropriate to the events. It was time for the war to arrive in literature.

But there are now a variety of literary disputes with the new reality. In the anthology »No! – Voices from Russia against the war «Author Sergei Lebedew has put together a selection: short stories, poems, scenic, reports by authors who live in exile or are still in Russia and have contributed their texts under pseudonym. There is even a fairy tale in the Baba Jaga, the witch of Slavic mythology, is arrested for the spread of fake news across the Russian army.

The war is always present in these stories, but it usually remains in the background, it is primarily about life in exile and current conditions in Russia, it is about propaganda and repression, about dealing with relatives who believe the propaganda or even voluntarily report for the “special surgery”. Small acts of solidarity are also described, such as placing flowers on graves with Ukrainian names in Russian cemeteries.

Few words find for the war itself, but for what he does with Russian society. The story “The Festival in the Village” by Alissa Ganijewa is particularly remembered. Based on a village in Dagestan, she shows a state in which only the truth of the government propaganda applies. The children at school are instigated that they are “warriors of a huge country who is fighting fascism alone today”.

When a child does not want to participate if the “special surgery” is marched at the village festival, the teacher, the FSB, the Russian domestic secret service, threatens to call. After all, the children are ready in army uniform and equipped with flags to cheer the veteran. A patriotic speech follows the next and the museum director Achmedow should speak to celebrate the day, but while he is waiting for his appearance, he always feels banging. He knows which phrases and slogans are expected from him. But they don’t want to come over his lips, he doesn’t want to be part of the big lying concert. Does he have a choice?

What happens if you do not participate, the narrative “The Darkest Night” is about the Russian-Aserbaijanic author Jegana Jegana JegaBarowa. She tells how unreal it feels to realize that someone has denounced you. “Denounced” was not a word for the young woman, which belonged to her life, but in history books: “I seemed to have literally got into the meat grinder of the story.” It follows what many government opponents can tell stories: fear, escape, escape with visas, “ticket prices and other normalities of homelessness”.

The tape “#lostlingual” of the Tatar author Dinara Rasuleva is concluded with the end of the volume. It adds an important decolonial perspective to the collection. Rasuleva tells of the loss and finding of her mother tongue, the Tatar. Until she was six years old, she spoke fluently Tatar, but as soon as she went to school, she let the language “like slippers back in front of the door”. Only Russian was spoken in class, and a Tatar accent was considered a landing.

Rasuleva later became aware that “I was ashamed of my own culture and was proud of my assimilation to a stranger”. The suppression of indigenous languages in Russia has a long tradition and continues. Rasuleva does not want to be satisfied with it. In 2022 she begins to acquire her mother tongue again and writes poems in Tatar, as she remembers this language of her childhood, with all mistakes and gaps in the vocabulary. She wants to make a small contribution to preserving and reviving her culture, and concludes her considerations with the hope that if many acquire their mother tongue again, one day “the cultures and languages of the oppressed indigenous peoples achieve the level of cultures and languages of colonizers”.

The anthology gathers less the big names, i.e. already very well -known authors in Germany, but many very different voices and perspectives, often by authors who are made accessible for a German -language audience for the first time.

So there is a lot of new things to discover in this book, which is also an attempt to oppose the propaganda and violence of the Russian state with the written word. “The word does not heal wounds, does not let the murdered up, do not punish the criminals,” Lebedew writes in the foreword. But the word is still important, because “it is no coincidence that the state power in Russia is so fiercely pursued all those who dare to say the truth that dare contradict.”

“No! – Voices from Russia against the war, «ed. v. Sergej Lebedew. Rowohlt Verlag, 384 pages, born, 28 €.