Love has been my only fault

The choice of the writer Małgorzata Nocuń by the Polish Institute of Culture to inaugurate the 1st Edition of the Hispano-Polish Literary Spring at the Spanish National Library (BNE) can be described as particularly apt. As is the decision of the editor Raúl Enrique Asencio to make this carefully edited book available to Spanish-speaking readers. 

A compilation of stories based on ten years of travelling through the immense post-Soviet territory, and of listening to hundreds of women with life experiences that are difficult to match, Małgorzata Nocuń came to Spain to present her latest work: Love Has Been My Only Fault. On the Women of the Former Soviet Union (Ed. La Caja Books, 237 pp). The excellent translation by Agata Orzeszek and Ernesto Rubio maintains the formidable narrative pulse of a simply extraordinary writer. 

Her meticulous fieldwork, travelling to the most remote cities and villages of that immense federation that brought together fifteen countries under the Russian empire, is crowned by her interviews with hundreds of women, from whom, with great skill, she extracts the confessions they had always had to hide throughout their lives. 

She brings to light that there is another ghost, one that haunts the memories of those who lived in the Soviet Union: the silence of the women who suffered under the patriarchal control of the state, religion and tradition. Their trauma is passed down from one generation to the next until one day someone remembers, speaks out and gives a name to that which had been silenced.

Małgorzata Nocuń has turned listening into literature, splendid literature. She has travelled through the intimate territory in which daughters inherit from their mothers the memory of hunger, misery and death, and has become an attentive witness to a constellation of conversations and testimonies that illuminate a side of the 20th century that remained in darkness. Her descriptions of hunger, misery and death are unsurpassed, and the phrases form the backbone of the stories, not to twist the reader's guts but, which is much more difficult, to make him a participant in the stories of so many Soviet citizens, and for him to draw his own conclusions. 

Nocuń, who has composed a book of high literature, exhibits a precise and incisive style, heir to masters of non-fiction writing such as Svetlana Alexievich or Hanna Krall. In Love is My Only Fault, she creates a refuge in which the story of the nearly one million female partisans, drivers and snipers who fought in the Red Army, or the female soldiers who today make up almost a third of the Ukrainian militia, resonates. Of those trapped in the siege of Leningrad (now St Petersburg again), who recited Anna Akhmatova's verses from memory to stave off hunger. Of those who waved the red flag, seduced by the utopia of the soviets, and of the dissidents who ended up in the basements of the Lubyanka, the putrid heart of the KGB. Of all the ‘enemies of the people’ who lost their names in the gulag or who spent their youth in the pits of Soviet psychiatry. Here are the voices of a crumbling empire which, after its collapse, has exposed its structure of violence. 

The author is not content to simply question those who, in one way or another, became disillusioned upon realising the schizophrenia between the sinister reality they were living and the propaganda they were often forced to parrot. And she finds answers that are often as surprising as they are logical: ‘I cannot admit,’ says a former heroine of the USSR, ‘that I always lived a lie and that, now close to my death, I have to throw it all away.’ 

Dramatic, often tragic stories, but in which those women managed to overcome, where the scarcity of men caused by the massive carnage of war led them to share them, even to obtain the longed-for offspring, accentuating in passing the ancestral superiority in Russia of men over women, always obligatorily submissive and obedient, disproving in passing that fallacious propaganda of equality of the sexes, reflected in unisex uniforms. In her talk at the National Library of Spain, Małgorzata Nocuń summarises it as ‘that great scientist who, after an exhausting day of work in the laboratory, helping her children with their homework, preparing dinner, washing the dishes and cleaning the house, apologises to her husband for not having been able to clean his shoes...’ 

And, of course, the Polish author also captures the enormous disappointment of Ukrainian women, who fought side by side with the Russians in the Great Patriotic War (the name given to World War II in the USSR), and have now been ‘invaded and devastated by that son of a bitch Putin’. 

This is a dense book, one of those that leave their mark, but not without the large doses of hope instilled by these women who managed to overcome the most overwhelming adversities. To this end, let us consider this quote from one of them: ‘…Before the war, I was about to become a woman. I thought I would have breasts as big as my mother's. But my breasts shrank as if they had dried up. In their place was withered skin topped by nipples. My stomach was concave and my ribs stuck out at the sides. I hadn't had my period for seven months. I was no longer a woman. After the war I fell in love, but I could never stop thinking about the siege [of Leningrad]. I kept remembering the frozen corpses in the streets, people crawling because hunger had taken away their ability to walk... Today they call it depression’.