Paradigms of Witnessing and Historical Subjectivity in the Works of Svetlana Alexievich and Elem Klimov

• In Event: Memory and Perestroika: Remembering the Past and Negotiating the Present in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

Abstract

On the 40th anniversary of the Second World War’s end, the Soviet public was met with the release of two cultural texts which posed new questions about bearing witness to history and the psychological impact of the war on children: Svetlana Alexievich’s literary treatment of oral interviews with child survivors Last Witnesses and Elem Klimov’s narrative film Come and See. These texts mobilize complementary arguments about historical memory via an interrogation of multiple forms of seeing: most explicitly in the sense of witnessing violence and upheaval, but also in perceiving one’s own historical subjectivity and being perceived as such by others as well. Each work offers itself as a form of testimony that lays claim to a higher order of emotional truth, yet the specificities and affordances of each work’s given medium—literature and cinema—rely on differing approaches to what can or cannot be spoken, heard, or depicted in order to do so. I argue that Alexievich and Klimov, both keenly aware of their roles as organizers of historical narratives, produce emotionally affective meaning at the limits of what their chosen forms are capable of representing. In so doing, they challenge the interpretive capacities and ethical frameworks of their intended audiences.

Author

• Sydney Stotter, Harvard U