新书速递|《经济学人》：历史是一个姑娘，每人都能是化妆师

原创 2017-07-30 从余启 我与我们的世界我与我们的世界

欢迎打开“我与我们的世界”，从此，让我们一起“纵览世界之风云变幻、洞察社会之脉搏律动、感受个体之生活命运、挖掘自然之点滴奥妙”。

我与我们的世界，既是一个“奋斗”的世界，也是一个“思考”的世界。奋而不思则罔，思而不奋则殆。这个世界，你大，它就大；你小，它就小。

欢迎通过上方公众号名称打开公众号“查看历史信息”来挖掘往期文章，因为，每期都能让你“走近”不一样的世界、带给你不一样的精彩。

本期导读：有人说，历史是一个任人打扮的姑娘。不过，这句话只说了硬币的一面，即打扮倒是可由“化妆师们”任意打扮，但打扮的后果，即硬币的另一面，却不是由他们完全做得了主的，而且，如果打扮过头儿的话，就会令人吐血，比如，“抗日神剧”。更有甚者，有很多“姑娘”，“化妆师们”是碰都不敢碰的，更别说打扮的事儿了，比如，一九八九年春末夏初北京发生的那个故事。

历史这位姑娘，化妆师们把她打扮成什么样子，展现在我们面前的历史就会是个什么样子。不过，不管有多少个版本，历史的“真相”却仅有一个。但问题在于，“真相”可以还原么？很多人的回答可能是肯定的，甚至有人会反驳：君不见，小到街坊邻里讨论的家长里短，中到记者媒体跟踪的社会热点，大到学者大咖编纂的历史事件，难道不都是被还原的一个个真相么？！

可惜的是，人们通过九牛二虎之力还原出来的所有那些东西，最多只能算是“真相”的一部分或者说“部分的”真相，而它们距离真正的“真相”或者说“完整的”真相还差十万八千里，而且，绝大多数情况下，真实的距离或许还远不止十万八千里。人们所看到、所听到的所有所谓的“真相”，不过是还原这些“真相”的人在其能力范围内所想要还原的“整个真相”的一部分而已。因此，日常生活中，我们所了解到的真相，都只是真相的某些部分。

很多情况下，有些人还可能会往所谓的“真相”里添油加醋，混淆视听，蒙蔽众人耳目。因此，真相的追寻，路漫长，且艰辛。凡是真相，都是关于“过去的事”的。既然真相是“过去的事”，那人们就无法对其完全复原，因为，时间一直在变，空间永远在换，在人们与“真相”之间，既横亘着一道无法逾越的“时间”界限，也横亘着一道无法跨越的“空间”鸿沟。

人们能力所及，仅限于“搜集”组成“真相”的一个个碎片。但不管人们能搜集到多少碎片，都不足以拼接出完整的“真相”，人们只能努力不断接近“真相”，但永远无法掌握绝对完整的“真相”。同时，人们追寻“真相”的努力，对于“真相”本身已不会产生什么意义，因为“真相”已经过去，已被死死地定格在了历史的时空之中。人们追寻“真相”的努力，其实，都是为了现在，抑或是将来。

Soviet history

苏联史

The war for memory

为历史记忆而战

After the Great Patriotic War came the struggle to reckon with-and manipulate-the stories. Svetlana Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War” was part of a peculiarly Soviet debate about the past.

苏联时期，卫国战争结束后，针对如何解读战争以及如何叙述战争的斗争就马上开始了。斯维拉娜·亚历塞维奇所著的《战争中的女性面孔》，就是苏联时期针对如何进行历史叙述所做的斗争中的一个篇章。

The Unwomanly Face of War

By Svetlana Alexievich

维拉娜·亚历塞维奇：《战争中的女性面孔》

Random House; 384 pages; $30

Penguin Modern Classics; 331 pages; £12.99

“I AM writing a book about war,” Svetlana Alexievich noted in her diary in 1978. Russian does not have definite and indefinite articles, but Ms Alexievich, at the time a 30-year-old Soviet author, born to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, did not need one. There was only one war, defining the country at the cost of 20m lives: the Great Patriotic War of 1941-45.

1978年，维拉娜在日记中写道：“我要写一部关于战争的书。”当时，关于那场战争的俄语史料既没成型，也不充裕，不过，所有这些，对于父亲是白俄罗斯人、母亲是乌克兰人、当时30岁的苏联作家维拉娜来说，都无所谓。她要写的战争只有一个，那就是1941-1945年间葬送了2000万条生命的卫国战争。

There had been many accounts, but Ms Alexievich’s “The Unwomanly Face of War”, published in 1985 and released this week in its first post-Soviet English edition, was unusual: an oral history told by women who enlisted in the army straight after school, learning to kill and die before they learned to live or give life. Some tales were blood-curdling—like that of a 16-year-old nurse who bit off the smashed arm of a wounded soldier to save his life, and days later volunteered to execute those who had fled the field. Other stories were heartbreaking, like that of a girl who first kissed her beloved man only when he was about to be buried.

关于卫国战争的叙事，已有很多。但维拉娜所著的《战争中的女性面孔》（该书1985年出版，苏联解体后英文版本周首次发行），却非同寻常，因为，它是一部由从学校直接走入军营、在学会如何生活、如何哺育生命之前就学会了如何杀戮并面临死亡的女性口述而成的史书。有些故事，令人毛骨悚然，有个16岁战地护士，用自己的牙齿把受伤士兵已经粉碎的手臂咬掉，以挽救他的生命，而几天后却又自告奋勇，对战场逃兵执行死刑。有些故事，令人神伤心碎，有个女孩，首次亲吻她所爱的那个男人，却是在那个男人下葬之时。

The book was followed by other oral histories of people caught in calamities: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the Soviet empire. In 2015 she won the Nobel prize in literature “for her polyphonic writings”. For her, the nightmares of the 20th century made fiction impossible. “Nothing may be invented...The witnesses must speak,” she said in her acceptance speech. Her work has been called journalism or history, but it defies easy classification.

《战争中的女性面孔》出版后，一时引领了口述历史的潮流，通过灾难幸存者们的口述，部分还原了一场场历史事件，包括苏联入侵阿富汗、切尔诺贝利核事故，以及苏联帝国的解体。2015年，维拉娜因其“多元声音的叙事写法”获得了诺贝尔文学奖。而对维拉娜来说，20世纪发生的那些噩梦般的人间灾难，完全不是编造出来的小说，而是实实在在发生过的。维拉娜在领奖时说道：“事实就是事实。。。当事人应有话语权。”维拉娜的书可归为新闻类或历史类，但该书却又不能这样简单归类。

Ms Alexievich’s greatest talent may be not writing, but listening and getting witnesses to talk. The book is filled with more than 200 voices. Yet, filtered by “the human ear”, as she calls herself, they vary little in tone or rhetoric. Her book reflects an uneasy relationship between memory, which often involves mythologising, and history as a multitude of dimensions. A memoir is not a reconstruction of the past, but a record of the time when the memoir is produced and of the mental state of the person remembering. As such, Ms Alexievich’s book is a testimony to the late 1970s and early 1980s and the war for memory which she took part in.

维拉娜最大的优势，或许并不在于她的写作能力，而在于她的倾听能力，以及她能让当事人开口讲述的能力。该书中的采访对象，有200多位，不过，经由维拉娜她这个“人间耳目”（维拉娜这样自我称呼）过滤后，语调或措辞方面就没什么大的区别了。维拉娜的这本书，反映了通常被神话化的历史记忆与多维的历史事实之间的张力。一部回忆录，并不是对过往的重构，但是，却是对回忆录产生时那个时代的记录，也是对当事人讲述时的心理状态的记录。由此看来，维拉娜的这本书，便是对1970年代晚期与1980年代早期的一个见证，也是维拉娜本人为拯救历史记忆所进行的斗争的见证。

The fight for memory began as soon as the war stopped. Stalin feared the feelings the war awoke in his people. (“The only time we were free was during the war. At the front,” Ms Alexievich was told.) Reminders of suffering were cleared off the streets. Crippled veterans who pushed themselves on self-made wheeled platforms with hands—if they had any—were rounded up and sent to a camp on the island of Valaam. Russian prisoners-of-war were sent to the gulag as potential traitors. “Liberation” brought not freedom, but a new wave of repression and anti-Semitic campaigns. “After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war,” one man told Ms Alexievich.

卫国战争结束伊始，围绕卫国战争的历史记忆的斗争就开始了。斯大林担心卫国战争会在国民心中激荡。（一位口述者曾向维拉娜说：“我们能享受自由的唯一时期，就是在卫国战争时期。”）在大街等公共场合禁止提起战争中的苦痛，失去腿脚的老兵自力更生用双手（如果他们有双手的话）自造带有轮子的平板小车想上街溜达也被禁止，并被围捕起来然后遣送到苏联北部的维拉姆岛上的集中营，俄罗斯的战俘作为叛国者被送往苏联劳改营。“解放”带来的不是自由，而是新一轮的镇压，以及一场又一场的反犹运动。一位男性口述者曾向维拉娜说：“卫国战争胜利后，每个人都沉默了，而且，沉默和恐惧的程度，不亚于战争之前。”

Victory day—the only unifying and truly national Soviet holiday—became part of the official calendar and mass culture only in 1965. Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982, saw the war as the main source of legitimacy for a stagnating system, and covered himself in military medals: Hero of the Soviet Union, Order of Victory. Liberals and the Soviet apparatchiks fought over its memory, and Ms Alexievich was on the front lines. The bleeding memories of her witnesses clashed with the gloss and bombast of the official rhetoric. Her book was published when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, hoping to put a human face on socialism.

卫国战争胜利日，这个唯一一个真正属于苏联并象征着团结的国家级节日，只有到1965年才被官方认可并成为大众文化的一部分。1964-1982年间的苏联领导人勃列日涅夫，就把卫国战争视为苏联那停滞不前的政治体系的合法性的主要来源，并把各种军功奖章加于自身，包括苏联英雄勋章以及胜利日勋章。自由派人士与苏联体系的盲从官僚们之间，围绕卫国战争的历史记忆进行着激烈斗争，而维拉娜，便身处那场斗争的前线。维拉娜所采访的当事人的血淋淋的记忆，与官方那光鲜亮丽、宏伟壮阔的说辞，形成了强烈对比。维拉娜的书出版之时，正是戈尔巴乔夫上台之际，该书能得以出版，或许是寄望此书能给苏联社会主义添上些许人性的暖色。

Even so, the censor demanded cuts, such as the story of a young partisan woman who drowned her crying baby to avoid alerting German soldiers. Those cuts are restored in the new edition—as are her conversations with the censor, who was particularly scandalised by the description of menstruation on the battle front. “Who will go to fight after such books?” the censor demanded “You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism...You make them into ordinary women, females.”

即使这样，监管当局也要求进行删减，其中就有这样一个故事，一位对国家无限忠诚的年轻妈妈，亲手把自己啼哭的婴儿按入水中活活淹死，只是为了担心招来德军士兵。被删减的部分，在此次新版本中都得到了还原，其中也有维拉娜与监管当局的对话，特别是书中对战争前线女兵例假的描述，惹恼了审查人员，维拉娜被训斥道：“这样的书出版后，有谁还愿意再为国家奔赴战场？你这是在用动物所具有的本性来侮辱女性。。。你把女兵等同为了普通的妇女，日常的女性。”

More important, the battle for memory unfolded in the minds of storytellers themselves. A woman who joined a tank brigade at 16 tells Ms Alexievich “how it was”, only to follow her story a few weeks later with a letter that included an edit of the transcript of their interview—with every human detail crossed out. The suppression of the human and the humane in people was crucial to surviving Soviet life.

更重要的是，对历史记忆的斗争，也在口述者们自己的心中生根发芽。一位在16岁就加入坦克部队的退伍女兵接受访问后再次见到维拉娜时问道：“结果怎么样？”，几周过后却发现她们两人的谈话文稿已被编辑修订，每一处充满人性的细节全被删掉了。对人性和人道的压制，在苏维埃延续其生命中起着关键作用。

Having defeated fascism in Germany, the Soviet Union imported some of its ideas and practices, which bore fruits decades later. Waving the banners of the second world war and holding the photographs of those who perished in it defeating fascism, today’s Kremlin has restored Soviet symbols, declared the supremacy of the state over the individual and annexed Crimea. Unleashing a war against Ukraine, Kremlin propaganda described Ukrainians who demanded dignity as “fascists” and Russian soldiers as “anti-fascist liberators”. The exploitation of the memory of the war has been the central element of modern Russian ideology. It is what makes Ms Alexievich’s work so relevant today.

苏联在打败法西斯德国后，也从德国借鉴引进了不少法西斯观念和经验，而且，这些观念和经验几十年后在苏联开了花、结了果。今天的克里姆林宫，通过挥舞二战胜利的旗帜、宣传以战胜法西斯为荣的老兵，又重新穿上了苏联那套老旧的衣裳，宣扬国家利益高于个人权益，对外展示肌肉并窃取了克里米亚。在于乌克兰的搏击过程中，克里姆林宫宣传机构把要求保持尊严的乌克兰人描述为“法西斯分子”，并把俄罗斯士兵描绘成“反法西斯的解放英雄”。对卫国战争历史记忆的利用，已成为当前俄罗斯意识形态的核心元素。这也是维拉娜这本书在当今依然有重大意义之所在。