Nobel Prize in Literature, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexeevich delivered a lecture in Moscow devoted to the problems of war and peace.

The writer, who calls herself "the absolute pacifist," stated that the Russians "were again people of war" and "abandoned almost in the Middle Ages". The Nobel laureate touched upon the Second World War, Afghanistan, Chernobyl and many others.

The Russian edition of Novaya Gazeta published excerpts from the lecture of Alexeyevich.

Victory, which is difficult to distinguish from defeat I think, I can not call a lecture what I want to say today: the lecture requires detachment. In the topic "I do not want to write about the war," it is not - this is what excites me most, all 40 years of my activity.

When I was in Afghanistan, I saw our soldier - he just checked our documents, and when we left the General Staff, he was already lying dead. Not an element, but another person. I am an absolute pacifist. No one will convince me that human life is something equal - it is a divine gift, and it is not given to die somewhere in the Donbass or in Syria. The question of the rejection of war, each person must decide for himself, get out of this system, do not participate in it. I think in the eyes of our descendants we will look like barbarians, because we are so humanistic.

Women cooks who participated in World War II, said that they had huge boilers. They cooked them porridge and soup for 400-500 people, and from the battle came back ten. People came completely different, did not understand who they were, could not look others in the eye. The line between animal and human was practically erased. I think that somehow escaped us in the apotheosis of victory. This is a victory that is difficult to distinguish from defeat.

We are military people We can say that we are military people, and any failure brings us back. Now we are cast aside almost in the Middle Ages. When I was driving around Moscow, I saw a huge number of people who are standing to see some kind of religious rite. This is a form of escape from what is happening now.

At some point we disappeared from the normal path, which, it would seem, became - and, in general, did not step into the 21st century. I remember how in 2000 I went to Europe, how we were happy, as they said, "Finally you are with us". Because the world was paralyzed by the fear of an atomic confrontation. We must understand how people became war people again, why they forgot what fathers told us.

For the book "The war does not have a woman's face," a woman told me a story: when they announced the end of the war, they and their colleagues shot down the entire combat set of weapons-shells, cartridges, all to one. The next day a commission came to this part, tried to accuse someone of something, everyone was genuinely puzzled, but why all this? It seemed to people that after such tears, after such suffering, war can never happen again. But on Russian television, threats are sounding again - someone there "into radioactive ash".

Medal for what is being jailed I think that women and children have some kind of knowledge about human insanity that is not known how to take root in our nature. One of my heroines said: "I will tell you about such a war, from which the general will vomit" - and this is one of the best stories in the book "The war does not have a woman's face". She says: when hand-to-hand fighting begins, and people converge with each other closely, the person disappears, and instead of him remains a certain species. When they are stabbed in the eyes and in the stomach, when they do not cry, but mumble, when only one instinct works, it turns out that in fact we are only slightly proroporosheny culture.

Many women who went through the war said that victory is not something to talk about and remember. To talk and remember is about experience, how to be a man, how not to kill. I recently saw on TV how soldiers are sent to the Donbass for a brass band, but I think that today the hero is someone who does not shoot.

So Dostoevsky wrote in his diaries - how many people are there in a person? Not so many people think about this and are personally responsible for what is happening in the world. Even today's religiosity did not bring this, it grouped everyone into a kind of people's body, which, as is known, feels, but does not think.

In my books I try to present the versions of people who look at events from different sides. One pilot saw a pilot, another - this woman who was in melee, the third - for example, the machine-gunner. But they all said later: the main thing is not to meet the eyes of the one you shoot at. Because war requires thoughtlessness, only so you can kill. Strelkov said that in the Donbas during the first week it was most difficult to get people to shoot at each other. Because for this it is necessary, from peacetime, to step somewhere to where they give medals for what they usually put in jail. And at first people did it unwillingly, under compulsion.

Evil is more trained than good When I was at war, I realized that the person who took the rifle in their hands becomes different, not the one whom my mother, for example, drove to a choreographic school. As if the demon, nurtured by the military culture, penetrates our society and unreservedly rules in it. Evil is more trained than good. Art, by the way, has a dark side, inspired by evil. In the war I saw how much beauty there is there, that death and beauty are always there - like shells fly in the night sky, as the guys sing in the evening, everyone in their own language. Near death people discover in themselves what is hidden in them very deeply. In the first weeks of my stay in Afghanistan, I came to the exhibition of modern weapons. A man spent a lot of time making evil beautiful.

We are completely unprepared for the future. More terrible wars await us, no longer a man with a man, but people with nature. She will test us like Fukushima. A strong typhoon is able to turn civilization into a pile of garbage.

I was in Chernobyl when people were taken out from there. The soldier said that one woman can not be pulled out of the house by force. When I got there, she saw me, one among the men, and said: "My dear child, is this a war? Look, the birds are flying, I even saw my mouse in the morning, my soldiers - and I must leave this land?" And around that The world - the sky, flowers, the earth, it would seem, we are familiar with. But you can not sit down on the ground, you can not tear flowers, fruits - you can not eat. The new evil has no smell. You do not hear it and do not feel it, it's unclear who to shoot at? Chernobyl moved people from one reality to another. When I traveled around this zone, I felt neither Russian, nor Belarusian, nor French, but I felt myself a representative of a bio-species that could be destroyed. We looked very far, but we pretend that nothing happened.

Chernobyl changed everything. What is "far-close", if on the fourth day radioactive clouds were over Africa? What is "our-strangers":

we, the Belarusians, do not have their own nuclear power plant, but for several days the wind blew from Ukraine to the north, and Chernobyl has become our problem too. What we call war today - looks no longer the same as before, the evil has many new faces that we can not always distinguish from each other. We are completely unprepared for the future.

As reported by the "Observer", previously Nobel laureate Svetlana Aleksievich left the Russian PEN Center "not to lick the boots of power":.

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