Nobel Lecture On the Battle LostWord下载.docx

1、 No arms . no legs . I think Ive known what love is since childhood .Here are a few sad melodies from the choir that I hear .First voice:Why do you want to know all this? Its so sad. I met my husband during the war. I was in a tank crew that made it all the way to Berlin. I remember, we were standin

2、g near the Reichstag he wasnt my husband yet and he says to me:Lets get married. I love you. I was so upset wed been living in filth, dirt, and blood the whole war, heard nothing but obscenities. I answered:First make a woman of me: give me flowers, whisper sweet nothings. When Im demobilized, Ill m

3、ake myself a dress. I was so upset I wanted to hit him. He felt all of it. One of his cheeks had been badly burned, it was scarred over, and I saw tears running down the scars. Alright, Ill marry you, I said. Just like that . I couldnt believe I said it . All around us there was nothing but ashes an

4、d smashed bricks, in short war.Second voice:We lived near the Chernobyl nuclear plant. I was working at a bakery, making pasties. My husband was a fireman. We had just gotten married, and we held hands even when we went to the store. The day the reactor exploded, my husband was on duty at the fir st

5、ation. They responded to the call in their shirtsleeves, in regular clothes there was an explosion at the nuclear power station, but they werent given any special clothing. Thats just the way we lived . You know . They worked all night putting out the fire, and received doses of radiation incompatib

6、le with life. The next morning they were flown straight to Moscow. Severe radiation sickness . you dont live for more than a few weeks . My husband was strong, an athlete, and he was the last to die. When I got to Moscow, they told me that he was in a special isolation chamber and no one was allowed

7、 in. But I love him, I begged. Soldiers are taking care of them. Where do you think youre going?I love him. They argued with me:This isnt the man you love anymore, hes an object requiring decontamination. You get it? I kept telling myself the same thing over and over: I love, I love . At night, I wo

8、uld climb up the fire escape to see him . Or Id ask the night janitors . I paid them money so theyd let me in . I didnt abandon him, I was with him until the end . A few months after his death, I gave birth to a little girl, but she lived only a few days. She . We were so excited about her, and I ki

9、lled her . She saved me, she absorbed all the radiation herself. She was so little . teeny-tiny . But I loved them both. Can you really kill with love? Why are love and death so close? They always come together. Who can explain it? At the grave I go down on my knees .Third Voice:The first time I kil

10、led a German . I was ten years old, and the partisans were already taking me on missions. This German was lying on the ground, wounded . I was told to take his pistol. I ran over, and he clutched the pistol with two hands and was aiming it at my face. But he didnt manage to fire first, I did .It did

11、nt scare me to kill someone . And I never thought about him during the war. A lot of people were killed, we lived among the dead. I was surprised when I suddenly had a dream about that German many years later. It came out of the blue . I kept dreaming the same thing over and over . I would be flying

12、, and he wouldnt let me go. Lifting off . flying, flying . He catches up, and I fall down with him. I fall into some sort of pit. Or, I want to get up . stand up . But he wont let me . Because of him, I cant fly away .The same dream . It haunted me for decades .I couldnt tell my son about that dream

13、. He was young I couldnt. I read fairy tales to him. My son is grown now but I still cant .Flaubert called himself a human pen; I would say that I am a human ear. When I walk down the street and catch words, phrases, and exclamations, I always think how many novels disappear without a trace! Disappe

14、ar into darkness. We havent been able to capture the conversational side of human life for literature. We dont appreciate it, we arent surprised or delighted by it. But it fascinates me, and has made me its captive. I love how humans talk . I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and pas

15、sion.The road to this podium has been long almost forty years, going from person to person, from voice to voice. I cant say that I have always been up to following this path. Many times I have been shocked and frightened by human beings. I have experienced delight and revulsion. I have sometimes wan

16、ted to forget what I heard, to return to a time when I lived in ignorance. More than once, however, I have seen the sublime in people, and wanted to cry.I lived in a country where dying was taught to us from childhood. We were taught death. We were told that human beings exist in order to give every

17、thing they have, to burn out, to sacrifice themselves. We were taught to love people with weapons. Had I grown up in a different country, I couldnt have traveled this path. Evil is cruel, you have to be inoculated against it. We grew up among executioners and victims. Even if our parents lived in fe

18、ar and didnt tell us everything and more often than not they told us nothing the very air of our life was poisoned. Evil kept a watchful eye on us.I have written five books, but I feel that they are all one book. A book about the history of a utopia .Varlam Shalamov once wrote:I was a participant in

19、 the colossal battle, a battle that was lost, for the genuine renewal of humanity. I reconstruct the history of that battle, its victories and its defeats. The history of how people wanted to build the Heavenly Kingdom on earth. Paradise! The City of the Sun! In the end, all that remained was a sea

20、of blood, millions of ruined human lives. There was a time, however, when no political idea of the 20th century was comparable to communism （or the October Revolution as its symbol）, a time when nothing attracted Western intellectuals and people all around the world more powerfully or emotionally. R

21、aymond Aron called the Russian Revolution the opium of intellectuals. But the idea of communism is at least two thousand years old. We can find it in Platos teachings about an ideal, correct state; in Aristophanes dreams about a time when everything will belong to everyone. . In Thomas More and Tomm

22、aso Campanella . Later in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Robert Owen. There is something in the Russian spirit that compels it to try to turn these dreams into reality.Twenty years ago, we bid farewell to the Red Empire of the Soviets with curses and tears. We can now look at that past more calmly, as an

23、historical experiment. This is important, because arguments about socialism have not died down. A new generation has grown up with a different picture of the world, but many young people are reading Marx and Lenin again. In Russian towns there are new museums dedicated to Stalin, and new monuments h

24、ave been erected to him.The is gone, but the Red Man, homo sovieticus, remains. He endures.My father died recently. He believed in communism to the end. He kept his party membership card. I cant bring myself to use the word sovok, that derogatory epithet for the Soviet mentality, because then I woul

25、d have to apply it my father and others close to me, my friends. They all come from the same place socialism. There are many idealists among them. Romantics. Today they are sometimes called slavery romantics. Slaves of utopia. I believe that all of them could have lived different lives, but they liv

26、ed Soviet lives. Why? I searched for the answer to that question for a long time I traveled all over the vast country once called the USSR, and recorded thousands of tapes. It was socialism, and it was simply our life. I have collected the history of domestic,indoor socialism, bit by bit. The histor

27、y of how it played out in the human soul. I am drawn to that small space called a human being . a single individual. In reality, that is where everything happens.Right after the war, Theodor Adorno wrote, in shock:Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. My teacher, Ales Adamovich, whose name I m

28、ention today with gratitude, felt that writing prose about the nightmares of the 20th century was sacrilege. Nothing may be invented. You must give the truth as it is. A super-literature is required. The witness must speak. Nietzsches words come to mind no artist can live up to reality. He cant lift

29、 it.It always troubled me that the truth doesnt fit into one heart, into one mind, that truth is somehow splintered. Theres a lot of it, it is varied, and it is strewn about the world. Dostoevsky thought that humanity knows much, much more about itself than it has recorded in literature. So what is it that I do? I collect th