Jestem Czeczenem

by German Sadułajew, Katarzyna Rawska-Górecka (Translator), Wojciech Górecki (Translator)

Jestem Czeczenem to opowieść o miłości do ojczyzny, przejawiającej się w niezwykłym i niemal zapomnianym w XXI wieku przywiązaniu do ziemi i krajobrazu. To także studium poczucia pięknie pojmowanej narodowej dumy płynącej z tradycji przeciwstawionej medialnemu obrazowi czeczeńskiego uchodźcy. Bohaterom opowiadań Sadułajewa nieuchronnie towarzyszy cień wojny, który niemal przekornie ożywia idylliczne obrazki z dzieciństwa i barwne wspomnienia spokojnych czasów. Jednak każdy wątek pamięci powraca do punktu wyjścia - nieszczęścia konfliktu zbrojnego, którego ofiarami, ale i sprawcami są nierzadko najbliżsi...

Genres: Russia, Fiction

178 pages, Paperback

First published November 4, 2010

Reviews

[Mark Staniforth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unforgettable - brutal war and beautiful peace swirled up in a jumble of fragments which almost border on the hallucinatory: part memoir, part folk tale, part dream. It adds up, somehow, to one of the most vivid testimonies to the futility of war I've read in a long time.

[Jangul · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know if I can recommend this book to general readers. I am conflicted. Sadulaev is not immune to the xenophobia, antisemitism, and misogyny underlying the typical post-soviet Russian context -- though in including these elements, he remains true to the pervading bleakness and cynicism of a 'collapsing' Russia. (If you like the Russian movie Brother then you will enjoy this book.) However Sadulaev's prose (when not over wrought or problematic) is so raw and telling of the pain and longing of a man torn from his land and his land (physically/spiritually) being torn apart. Read at your own risk.

[Marcin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Akcja niektórych z najlepszych powieści w języku rosyjskim rozgrywa się w górach Kaukazu. Michaił Lermontow, Lew Tołstoj i Aleksander Puszkin to tylko niektórzy z pisarzy, którzy niemal „wymyślili” literaturę rosyjską na tle burzliwego południa. Literatura o Czeczenii rutynowo żywi się Hadżi Muratem Tołstoja czy Więźniem Kaukazu Puszkina, gdzie przywołuje się szlachetnego górala jako godnego przeciwnika. Dzieje się tak dlatego, że rosyjski punkt widzenia jest jedynym, jaki mamy. Opinia przeciętnego Czeczena na temat podboju jego ojczyzny najpierw przez wojska carskiej Rosji, później zaś przez postradzieckie dywizje nie jest znana poza wyobraźnią wielkich pisarzy rosyjskich.

Masowa umiejętność czytania i pisania pojawiła się na Kaukazie dopiero wraz z komunizmem, a to przyniosło formy literackie, które nie przetrwały próby czasu, jak ody do Stalina, czy pieśni o produktywności pracy. Wśród pisarzy-dysydentów, których książki samizdatu były w tajemnicy przekazywane z rąk do rąk, nie było Czeczenów. Świat długo czekał na kogoś na tyle wielkiego, by udźwignął ciężar cierpień swego narodu.

Z nadzieją sięgałem po ten tytuł i nie przeżyłem rozczarowania. Wydawnictwo zaproponowało polskiemu czytelnikowi wybór trzech opowiadań Sadułajewa, z których pierwsze i trzecie chwyta mocno za grdykę i nie chce puścić. Mitologizacja rzeczywistości, umiejętność operowania metaforą i celną puentą są mocnymi atutami tego pisarstwa. Sadułajew nie rozpieszcza swoich czytelników, prowadząc go przez labirynt bitew, waśni i okrucieństw: od ujarzmienia Kaukazu przez carat, przez stalinowskie przesiedlenia z okresu II wojny światowej i czasu bezpośrednio po niej po dwie wojny czeczeńskie. Owszem, czytelnik odgadnie zakończenie tych opowiadań jeszcze przed ich rozpoczęciem, ale jeśli to miałby być zarzut pod adresem tego typu literatury, jak czyni się to w anglojęzycznych notach recenzenckich dostępnych tutaj, to w obliczu takich uwag zarówno ja, jak i reszta świata jesteśmy bezradni. Nie wiem, czy to efekt kontekstu kulturowego czy doświadczeń historycznych, jakie powodowało i nadal powoduje bezpośrednie sąsiedztwo Rosji, że taka literatura dobrze rezonuje w tym zakątku Europy. Bo o tym, że istnieje iunctim między wydarzeniami z Czeczenii a tym, co dzieje się za naszą wschodnią granicą nikomu nie trzeba udowadniać. Czy Czeczenia w osobie Germana Sadułajewa doczekała się wielkiego pisarza, potrafiącego opowiadać jej historię na własnych zasadach? Tego nie wiem. Wiem jednak, że smutne jest, iż odbywa się – i odbywać musi – w języku najeźdźcy i kolonizatora, bowiem nie istnieje literacki język czeczeński. Z ciekawości zajrzałem do czeczeńskojęzycznej Wikipedii i wynik tych poszukiwań optymizmem nie nastroił.

Tytuł ten można połknąć w jeden dzień, lecz ostrzegam, że jego przetrawienie zajmie trochę czasu. I jego termin przydatności do spożycia nie minął - Ukraińcy wiedzą o tym najlepiej. Autor napisał, że trudno być Czeczenem. Sami przekonajcie się, jak bardzo.

[Laura Malkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s hard really to review a short story collection (if indeed this can be called a collection of fiction, as some of it seems to be autobiographical).

German Sadulaev was born in Chechnya a remote federal subject of the Russian Federation. Remote enough for the Caspian Sea and Georgia to be its neighbours.

There was so much to enjoy in this book, the relationships between friends when finding their feet as young adults, relationships between parents, siblings and neighbours. Even the adoration of animals (the swallows and their continual migration, cats and their resilience and cows and their steadfastness and reliability).

But it seemed to fall short somewhat with its misogyny and instances of anti-Semitism. Therefore the last story in the collection seems to be at odds with the rest of the collection as the author suggests we have to conquer evil, in order to get better and to be able to move on with this world.

I don’t doubt this was well written, but the first 150+ pages were much better than the last 100. It’s as if this was a collection of writings found and bound, unrelatedly churned out – rather than the cream that rose to the top.

I would attempt a Sadulaev again – but I might wait a while.

[Goran · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is well writen and interesting.
But it misses something.
IDK, it is about First Chechen War, and parts about the war are mostly in "Russians are killing civilians" style.

Does not seem like complete truth to me, and I do not like stories that are saying just part of the truth.
Therefore, 3 instead 4 or 5.

[E.P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "I am a Chechen!" German Sadulaev pulls together a set of stories, based heavily on his own biographical experiences, about the Chechen conflicts. Fragmentary, lyrical, in turns desperate and magical, and often non-linear, this collection follows in the tradition of Russian writers such as Lermontov and Babel, taking bare biography and mixing it with fiction, folk tales, and poetry in order to create, not a historical account of the wars that have torn Chechnya apart, but an impression of what it is like to live through such conflicts.

Born in the Chechen village of Shali to a Russian mother and Chechen father, Sadulaev subsequently moved to St. Petersburg and has become one of the more prominent--and controversial--voices in contemporary Russian fiction, as well as representing the Communist Party in elections. This complexity of biography is reflected in Sadulaev's complexity of composition: along with the fragmentary nature of the book's structure, made up as it is of multiple short stories and vignettes with multiple narrators, reminiscent of Lermontov's "A Hero of Our Time," the overarching theme of the book seems to be the fragmented and contradictory contemporary Chechen self. Just as Babel's narrators in "Red Cavalry Tales" and "Odessa Tales" are torn between their Jewish and their Russian identities, so are Sadulaev's narrators torn between their Chechen and Russian selves, something illustrated most graphically in in the section entitled "When the Tanks Awoke," about two friends, each half-Russian, half-Chechen, who end up on opposite sides of the conflict. Only one survives the confrontation, but nonetheless "even now there are two of us, my friend and I. My brother and I." The two halves of the book's super-narrator seem equally caught up in an eternal conflict, unable to split off the Chechen from the Russian parts, but just as unable to reconcile these opposing forces.

This internal ethnic conflict appears not only in the stories' narrators' explicit struggle to accept the fact that they are both Chechen and Russian, but in the concern about ethnicity and appearance that appears over and over again. Chechens, Sadulaev tells us, are largely "person of non-Caucasian ethnic origins," meaning that they are not necessarily the swarthy "chernozhopiye" ("black-asses") the police in Moscow and St. Petersburg are on the lookout for, but fair-skinned and -haired Aryans. "If you want to arrest a Chechen," Sadulaev informs us in "One Swallow Doesn't Make a Summer," the first, most biographical section, "don't look for someone swarthy." Instead, look at behavior, since "a Chechen always holds himself as though today the whole world belongs to him, and tomorrow he'll be killed regardless."

Even so, Sadulaev's narrators are obsessed with the "wheaten-haired girls" of Russia proper, who are so alluring and promiscuous, but whose enticing appearance and seductive behavior contains a trap: "There is no happiness," the narrator of "One Swallow" concludes, "the fair-haired Russian women brought us none. We ourselves have become women like them." Again, like Babel's Jewish narrators, but vastly more so, Sadulaev's Chechen men are deeply concerned with their manhood, which they want to prove by sexual domination of Russian women--but instead they find themselves feminized by the contact, and worse yet, carrying in their veins the blood of the Russian women who took Chechen men as husbands and lovers. It is the Chechen women (and, we know, not just the women) who are the victims of the Russian army's planned and unplanned use of rape as a weapon in their war against the Chechen populace.

"I Am a Chechen!" is not, as can be predicted by the subject matter, a lighthearted read. Nothing about Chechnya can be. Sadulaev himself compares his stories to snuff films, and accuses the reader of reading them for the same reason. But this collection of stories, for all the brutality of its subject matter, is ultimately neither titillating nor, surprisingly, even depressing. While I still consider Arkady Babchenko's "One Soldier's War" the definitive and essential work on the experience of the Chechen conflicts, Babchenko's book is inherently Russo-centric. Sadulaev's work is a necessary corrective to that Russo-centric view, and beyond that, it is full of a literary power and lyrical beauty that deserves to be read in its own right. And unlike Babchenko's pessimistic conclusion to his work, which focuses on the scars of PTSD carried by the Russian soldiers after the war has technically ended, Sadulaev ends on a call to positive action: "Each of us, individually and collectively, persons and nations, we have to walk this path," he tells us. "We have to conquer evil, to rise above hatred...And then the doors will open. The doors of heaven."

[Spikeybär · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written and cleverly constructed work that employs everything from embedding mythology to breaking the fourth wall, interweaving life stories and a broader cosmos.
However, this poetic novel is somewhat tainted by thinly veiled anti-Semitic, sexist, and racist passages. The hyper-masculine bravado at times swerves into the realm of subconscious homoeroticism. Surprisingly sexuality and even homosexuality (if only female) explicitly manifest thoughout the novel openly, even if limited and relativized. Yet, as some of the more controversial passages are written not as charchater narration (although, at least in one respect the Chechen and Russian characters seem united: their basic distrust or even hatred against Jews) but from an omniscient perspective, they seem to reflect views that the novel actually wants to convey...

[Jarotvor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadulaev appeals to what makes us human—to tendencies that transcend Chechen culture—seeking outrage, empathy, or understanding. His writing is confessional. Through prose, the author professes regrets (e.g., about being absent [One Swallow…,” pg. 8]) and mourns the past of individuals and nations alike, telling tales of home, and the devastating (im)possibility of return (pg. 12).

Swallows, in particular, carry the theme of returning to familiar places. They evoke the rhythm of seasons in which all things come and go, and later highlight the terror of losing these natural or cultural patterns to war. As proverbial symbols recognized across nations, the traveling songbirds adopt many additional meanings. Swallows are the messengers of change: they signal better times ahead, potential liberation (pg. 12), or the lingering presence of ancestral memory (pg. 15 and 27). But just as a “language does not make a nation” (pg. 32), one swallow does not a summer make (pg. 90)—in other words, one should not become hopeful too soon, especially with the Russian winter still looming on the horizon.

Proverbial wisdom serves the narrative at large: Sadulaev shocks the readers’ conscience by detailing the extermination of Chechen culture. He outlines traditions (e.g., the rituals connected to lilac flowers and the arrival of the swallows, pg. 11), or the aforementioned proverbs (also mentioned on pg. 29, 31, or 53), only to immediately contrast them with raw destruction, when well-intentioned Chechen customs are brutalized along with their communities (“The scarves fell to the much, under the wheels and the heavy tracks … [h]ouse after house was reduced to rubble, interring people beneath,” pg. 18). The unexpected jumps between lighthearted and heart-wrenching moments illustrates Chechen reality, where mundanity and existential fear live side by side.

As if transcribing oral histories, Sadulaev blends myth, reality, and legend to catalog the memory of a distressed nation (pg. 53 and 57). The narrator treasures vernacular naivete, embraces love despite his traumas*,* and honors the innocence of children (who “need no purification … [and] become angels immediately,” pg. 16) and madmen, described as “holy fool[s]” (pg. 42). The narrator groups himself with the mad. He primarily blames developmental complications––however, the madness rather originates in unbearable psychological states, including his debilitating guilt for acting “cowardly,” or even the loving empathy that prevents him from turning a blind eye.

What is objective and what is fictional? The line between Author and Narrator is blurred from the very first fragment, a near stream of consciousness where the metaphor of motherhood sways between the land and the human mother. The reader never knows what to expect; Sadulaev freely melds poetic and mythical passages with sudden tidbits of reality (pg. 41), often pivoting mid-sentence to subvert conventional expectation ( “…I saw your eyes, there was none in them. They were blind,” pg. 8). The accounts are never strictly factual––closer to fairy tales than textbooks––yet just as true, honest, and autobiographical.

The time of “One Swallow…” is similarly non-linear, completely defined by the narrator’s memory. The author blends form and substance. He talks about memory in the same way humans recall the past (i.e. chaotically and imperfectly), loses himself in thought, and illustrates how madness becomes inevitable in wake of brutal loss––when one is “unable to live with what [he] knows [and] remembers” (pg. 85). At times, the fragments seem intentionally disjointed and disorganized, a formerly whole story, now in pieces, each of which employs different narrative techniques aimed at different target audiences. As if the author himself exploded from within (pg. 76) into fifty-eight shards of memory to ask his reader: “Did something hit your heart?” (pg. 73).

[Leona Winterlee · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I Am a Chechen!" explores how total war can turn brother against brother, and turn the landscape of home inside out. While it may not be everyone's cup of tea, for me it was a really rewarding read.

The use of symbolism and stylistics really gives you a lot to slow down and reread in order to unpack the layers of meaning, and piece all the fragments together into a greater whole. The level of intention in the writing really left an impression on me. It's not a difficult read, but there's more to it than meets the eye.

There was one part that I didn't understand the purpose of, and that's the anger towards the mother in the middle or later half of the book. If anyone understands the greater significance of that passage, please share.

Overall, I really enjoyed the examination of the meaning of brotherhood and family. Unfortunately, some readers have erroneously interpreted these themes as homoerotic, which overlooks the nuanced cultural significance of male bonds. (He was trying to convey how much his quality time with his father meant to him--get your mind out of the gutter guys.)

That being said, the latter half of the book felt like a departure from the first. I didn't enjoy it quite as much. Perhaps due to clumsy translation, or perhaps to intentionally create a feeling of deflation and, "Where do I go from here?"

[Eleni Mastronardi · Rating 4 out of 5]

At once both poetry and prose. Remarkable commentary on the truth of the Russian-Chechen conflict.

[Evan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting perspective on Chechen culture and the war in Chechnya, but hard to follow and often is disjointed.

[Josh Maher]

Insightful read from Chechnya full of imagery and analogies that provide a deeper glimpse into the author’s world.

[Salomé McSmith · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is full of lyrical passages and allusions, it also touches the nonsense of the war which makes disappear whole nations, cities, villages. Blind bullets kill the innocent, and as we learn great people, such as mad village teacher who gave birth to a stillborn child, or Ibrashek, the village fool. I think the author could develop totally independent short stories on these protagonists. "Jestem Czeczenem" also gives an insight about Chechen people, the theories of origin of this ethnic group. What's more, the story breaks the stereotype of an image of Chechens. Most people imagine them dark haired, bearded with sullen complexion and always dressed in sportswear. Which is not always true. I was teaching a group of refugee students from Chechenia who were blond, blue-eyed without any specific preference to tracksuits.
It is not an easy read, but it definitely is a must read for people interested in learning something about this (now) tiny nation and people who don't want to indoctrinate themselves with mass information littering the internet/TV space or take the current president of this country, as the author puts it, as their image.

[Sukumar Honkote · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the foremost things that a reader should expect from this book is the interesting writing style. The style adopted by the writer has never been tried on social/political book and hence, a sufficient incentive for serious readers to buy it. The book appears to be like a sequence of thoughts and not as sequence of events. While all the writing is in similar style, the incidents and thoughts are not all that of the author. The book keeps hopping between incidents of various Chechens trying to show how the life there has changed due to the war and authors personal thoughts. There are no statistics, no laundry list of destruction, no stories of bravado of the natives. I do not believe I have done justice to the book in this review. But I can promise that every reader will take back something special on reading this book.

[Paulo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outstanding book! I thought that I had read enough about Checnhya but just after the Sadulaev´s book I could really understand what means to be a chechen. The account can be divided in 3 parts: At the first one , he presents the culture and miths of that nation in a romantic way: swallows , towers , blue and black mountains.... Secondly , it becomes more harsch , remembering his friends and relatives left by the wars. The latter part contains deep reflections in few chapters...that one in which he explains the history of Soviet Union to his daughter is very emotional. Indeed , this is a very captivating book.

[Bjørn André Haugland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book, with a completely unexpected structure and form considering its subject-matter. It's very lyrical, filled with dream-like short stories, repeating many of the same stories in variations over and over again. This is not, however, in any way repetitive. Sadulaev uses his own recollections and those of his kinsmen to craft widely different narratives, all illuminating different sides to the horror and madness that was the two Chechen wars and their aftermath. Don't go into this expecting adrenalin-filled war-reporting, but beautiful and haunting tales of loss.

[Igo Lubczański · Rating 5 out of 5]

Przejmująca oraz porywająca historia o tragedii narodu w obliczu wojny. Zwięzły, obrazowy język pozwala na poczucie natężenie, z jakim wojnę przeżyli osoby pochodzenia czeczeńskiego. Doskonale zarysowuje dysonans pomiędzy ZSRR oraz obecną Rosją. Lektura obowiązkowa, aby zrozumieć charakter działań wojskowych na terenie Czeczenii pod koniecz XX wieku.

[Polevka · Rating 5 out of 5]

a MUST read for those who are into the topic. insightful, clever, ironic, lyrical. not often does one have an occasion to read such a moving book describing authors own experiences, written with an apparent distance

[Ćaki Lisičić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Izvanredna u cijelini.

[Fugado De La Casita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Marvellous piece of literature. Interesting perspective on the Chechen war and what it is for the author to be a Chechen. Very poetic.

[Jade Twiby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very raw and insightful, but too fragmented at times.
7/10

[E A M Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent though harrowing in places.