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A review by booklane
Red Crosses by Sasha Filipenko
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
4.0
Red Crosses is the fourth novel by well-respected young Bielorussian-born St-Petersburg-based author Sasha Filipenko. It is his first attempt at a historical novel and has been longlisted for the prestigious Yasnaya Polyana Award.
The novel incorporates a series of authentic documents from WW2, mostly correspondence between the Red Cross and Russian institutions showing Russia’s lack of interest in international treaties regarding POW exchanges as set out in the Geneva Conventions and in the destiny of its prisoners, who, as portrayed in the novel, often were considered cowards and collaborators and their spouses accomplices.
The novel starts as a young father who is moving into a Minsk apartment with his baby daughter, meets his 91-year-old neighbour, Tatyana Alekseevna, a woman who draws red crosses on doors in order to find her way because she suffers from Alzheimer, a sort of blessing to forget the tragic events that have marked her life. As she sets out to tell him her life story we learn of her life as a young woman in Western Europe, the return to Russia due to his father’s belief in the Soviet utopia, and her marriage. During WW2 her husband goes to the front and she works in one of the ministries where she has access to the aforementioned correspondence and to the list of missing Russian soldiers. There is a climate of suspicion and fear, the purges continue sweeping the country (at a certain point there are difficulties in finding personnel), anyone could be arrested and end up in a gulag with children sent to an orphanage to forget about them. In this tense and harrowing story that delves into Soviet Russia’s dark past anything can – and will – happen. Under Stalin’s omnipresent father figure, hers will be a harrowing but irony-filled tale of guilt, atonement and ultimately gross self-deception and staunch survival. It is also very interesting to have a woman go through events that are usually presented by male protagonists.
The story is told in a style that is dry and consciously laconic to reflect the dryness of the documents the novel is based on (as per author interview) and bring out the irony and the grotesque nature of the events we witness. Filipenko also makes effective and extensive use of skaz, the spoken language with its immediacy, punchiness and idiosincracies, which cannot always be rendered successfully in translation .
The author shows how the dehumanising, ruthless face of the system worked both at a state and deeply personal level. However, starting out from the past, the novel is ultimately grounded in present concerns and explicitly in the Soviet legacy of post-Soviet countries like Belorussia: amidst a not so uncommon desire to downplay Soviet Russia’s mistakes, a character intent on defending the old values from so-called new democracy-loving parasites will say that slandering accusations about gulags etc have been made up and thrown into the archive to discredit the system. The man faithful to the Soviet past ready to obliterate the mistakes still thrives.
Like many great Russian novelist, Filkipenko dialogizes with tradition (from questions regarding to how much the Russian people can take, to the existence of God, to the horrible apparatchik and the gulag tradition and also incorporating songs and poems) and interrogates present power asking fundamental questions: what present can be built on the legacy of the horror-filled history of the twentieth century? An urgent, thought-provoking novel. I am looking forward for more novels by this author to be translated.
References to the interview in https://www.labirint.ru/now/intervyu-s-filipenko/ (in Russian).
Thank you so much Europa Editions and NetGalley for an ARC of Red Crosses in exchange for an honest review.
The novel incorporates a series of authentic documents from WW2, mostly correspondence between the Red Cross and Russian institutions showing Russia’s lack of interest in international treaties regarding POW exchanges as set out in the Geneva Conventions and in the destiny of its prisoners, who, as portrayed in the novel, often were considered cowards and collaborators and their spouses accomplices.
The novel starts as a young father who is moving into a Minsk apartment with his baby daughter, meets his 91-year-old neighbour, Tatyana Alekseevna, a woman who draws red crosses on doors in order to find her way because she suffers from Alzheimer, a sort of blessing to forget the tragic events that have marked her life. As she sets out to tell him her life story we learn of her life as a young woman in Western Europe, the return to Russia due to his father’s belief in the Soviet utopia, and her marriage. During WW2 her husband goes to the front and she works in one of the ministries where she has access to the aforementioned correspondence and to the list of missing Russian soldiers. There is a climate of suspicion and fear, the purges continue sweeping the country (at a certain point there are difficulties in finding personnel), anyone could be arrested and end up in a gulag with children sent to an orphanage to forget about them. In this tense and harrowing story that delves into Soviet Russia’s dark past anything can – and will – happen. Under Stalin’s omnipresent father figure, hers will be a harrowing but irony-filled tale of guilt, atonement and ultimately gross self-deception and staunch survival. It is also very interesting to have a woman go through events that are usually presented by male protagonists.
The story is told in a style that is dry and consciously laconic to reflect the dryness of the documents the novel is based on (as per author interview) and bring out the irony and the grotesque nature of the events we witness. Filipenko also makes effective and extensive use of skaz, the spoken language with its immediacy, punchiness and idiosincracies, which cannot always be rendered successfully in translation .
The author shows how the dehumanising, ruthless face of the system worked both at a state and deeply personal level. However, starting out from the past, the novel is ultimately grounded in present concerns and explicitly in the Soviet legacy of post-Soviet countries like Belorussia: amidst a not so uncommon desire to downplay Soviet Russia’s mistakes, a character intent on defending the old values from so-called new democracy-loving parasites will say that slandering accusations about gulags etc have been made up and thrown into the archive to discredit the system. The man faithful to the Soviet past ready to obliterate the mistakes still thrives.
Like many great Russian novelist, Filkipenko dialogizes with tradition (from questions regarding to how much the Russian people can take, to the existence of God, to the horrible apparatchik and the gulag tradition and also incorporating songs and poems) and interrogates present power asking fundamental questions: what present can be built on the legacy of the horror-filled history of the twentieth century? An urgent, thought-provoking novel. I am looking forward for more novels by this author to be translated.
References to the interview in https://www.labirint.ru/now/intervyu-s-filipenko/ (in Russian).
Thank you so much Europa Editions and NetGalley for an ARC of Red Crosses in exchange for an honest review.
Content Warnings
cw rape