This article is published in issue 9 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 1, 2022
When you are left speechless you go to look for those of others, at least that’s what I do. In these absurd days the first words I looked for were those of Svetlana Aleksievič, the writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. Aleksievič was born in Ukraine in 1948, to a Ukrainian mother and a Belarusian father who were teachers in rural schools, and she recounted the most tragic events involving the Soviet Union: the wars, the dictatorship, Chernobyl, Chechnya. . Aleksievič’s way of telling is unique because she always starts from the words of the common people protagonists of those events: women, boys, soldiers.
Svetlana Aleksievič, 73, a Belarusian journalist and writer born in Ukraine. In 2015 she received
the Nobel Prize for Literature.
«What interests me», he writes, «is not only the reality that surrounds us, but that which is within us. Not the event itself, but what it induces in feelings. We can also say: the soul of events. For me, feelings are also realities ». For many years I have kept this sentence as the cover of my Facebook profile, because I fully recognize myself in it, as in the sentence «I have been a bookish person for a long time, detached from reality, even if it often attracted and frightened me. But ultimately the ignorance of real life made the subsequent recklessness possible ».
The morning I woke up and like everyone else I was petrified by the Russian aggression of Ukraine I took from the bedside table, where I have kept it since I first read it, the book by Aleksievič entitled War does not have a woman’s facewhere he tells the story of the Second World War from the point of view of the girls – then very young – who fought it: even more charged with suffering than we can imagine.
I posted the cover photograph of the book, because that’s a title that speaks for itself. After a few hours I found a comment from the journalist Francesca Mannocchi, the best of all a
recounting the conflicts and migrations, from Ukraine: «I have it here with me».
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Source: Vanity Fair
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