In the latest issue of Book Links, we are talking with writer and marketer Linor Goralik about her new novel, Named So-and-So. How did the idea to write a novel about the evacuation of psychiatric patients in 1941 come about? What is known about this real story and why did Goralik need to add fiction to the text? They also discussed how Linor made an exhibition about the clothes of the inhabitants of hell, why she runs the PostPost.Media project about small everyday stories, who wrote a denunciation about her to the FSB, and why the Hare of the HRC was completely cut off.
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Sergey Lebedenko: Today we will talk with the writer Linor Goralik, she published the novel «In the Name of So-and-so» about how, during the war in 1941, patients and doctors of a psychiatric hospital named after So-and-So were waiting for an order to evacuate. My name is Sergey Lebedenko, I am a writer, author of the «Books are Hot» blog.
Vladimir Eremin: My name is Vladimir Eremin, I am a journalist, editor of the Bookmate book service of the Ambivert magazine. Hello everyone.
The main question is how the mentally ill were saved during the war?
Linor Goralik: This is a great topic — in a sense, very scary, but very interesting. Before and during the writing of the novel, I read quite a lot of documentation available to me on this subject, for sure there is much more of it. Differently. Some hospitals tried to evacuate, some hospitals could not evacuate — both the doctors and the local population did everything they could. There were cases when doctors took patients home and passed them off as relatives and family members, in order to … Here, perhaps, it is necessary to preface a little about why this had to be done, why they had to be rescued. Because the Nazis, in accordance with the dominant doctrine, destroyed patients in psychiatric hospitals. This means that [ours] passed them off as their family members, dismantled children from psychiatric wards. In other situations, they tried to hide in the forest, tried to hide in houses. In third situations, they could not save in any way. And when I was writing the novel, I read the testimonies of what the advancing German troops did to the patients of the psychiatric hospitals, and I still haven't told anyone what I actually read, including my therapist, to whom I still cannot retell it. because it seems to me that no one should have it in their heads, it is very scary.
Sergey Lebedenko: But at the end of the book you have a short history of how you took up the novel. In 2005, you read about the history of the evacuation of the Kashchenko hospital, which was evacuated from Moscow on two exchanges. First they landed in Gorky, then, now Nizhny Novgorod, they were not allowed. And then they sailed to Kazan, and then they managed to leave some of the patients there.
Linor Goralik: First Ryazan, then Nizhny Novgorod, then Kazan, yes.
Sergei Lebedenko: And at the same time you said that for some reason no one has dealt with this topic so far. Why do you think it happened? The only thing I can remember is an episode from Olga Lavrentieva's comic «Survilo», where the heroine finds herself in a psychiatric hospital, also evacuated. Why weren't people interested in this?
Linor Goralik: No, the problem here is not in the people, but in the fact that this story was simply not known to anyone, it seems to me. It's completely amazing, but I tried to google her for a year, there is not a word, although there are an infinite number of these small stories of war. I learned about this story when someone asked me about the same at the presentation of the novel. How did I come to this story? I also found it not on the Internet. For about a year, I have been on Granyah.ru, with whom I worked a lot at that time and I am very grateful to them for this, made such a cycle of notes about small museums in Moscow — the Museum of Water, the Museum of Ex-libris, about these crumbs-museums. And I found out that there is a museum at the Alekseev hospital, which is Kashchenko, I had to register there, and I signed up and came. There was a curator of the museum, whose name is written down in my book's afterword. And she told me this story of the evacuation, and this story shocked me, and I started looking for documents, and that's how it all happened. That is, no one knows this story, because no one knows it. She did not interest anyone, because she never existed in public space.
Sergei Lebedenko: When the book was already published, one of the historians or scientists who deal with the topic of war , have already contacted you with a question, is it possible to somehow use the materials?
Linor Goralik: Well, first of all, I think that historians just know this story. But I must say that I was sure when I started writing this novel, that now I will turn to the historians of Russian medicine, they will tell me: «Yes, of course, we know this story.» But I had the exact opposite story. I told them that this story exists. And this is not because they are bad historians, but because such stories are tiny billions, millions. War is a huge space of private little stories. And I had a different story when I spoke with a historian who deals with the archives of our second largest psychiatric hospital. For some reason I want to say that this is Pirogovka, but I could be wrong. I told him: «Well, you probably know the history of the evacuation of Kashchenko?» He said, «Of course not.» I said, «They were evacuated on two barges.» And then he said to me: «Sorry, we were evacuated on two barges.» So I learned that in parallel there is a story of another psychiatric hospital, which was evacuated in the same way. There are a lot of these tiny stories. The whole war is made up of these stories. It is impossible to know all of them.
Vladimir Eremin: Please tell us in more detail: how did you conduct the research, did you research this little-known story? In an interview with Radio Liberty (entered by the Ministry of Justice in the register of media performing the functions of a foreign agent), you said that you even consulted with your dad, if I am not mistaken. And at the same time, you mentioned that there is very little information on this matter on the Internet. Still: how did you get the information, given that your novel, with all the fantastic assumptions, is based on a real story?
Linor Goralik: It is very loosely based on real history. The whole real story is what I know and what I tell in the afterword. But in parallel, I was trying to find a document, the existence of which I knew almost 16 years ago. This is a note from the person in charge of the evacuation, in which he described how life was arranged on these exchanges. Since then, we have tried to find this document (I have not preserved a copy of it) again, but in these 16 years everything has changed. Archives collapsed, merged with each other, documents moved. In addition, it became impossible to simply go to the archive and delve into it, it was necessary to order documents. I was assisted by an excellent historian, specialist in archives Nikolai Ermilov. And we painfully searched for this note and all could not find it. And three days ago the novel was already published, three days before the presentation I received a document. I am absolutely stunned, I open it with shaking hands. And it turns out that this is another note. This is a note from the second barge. We did not know about its existence, and in the archive we could not find the note that I used 16 years ago. But it turned out that there was one more person who wrote a memo after the barges reached Kazan.
And these twin notes, of course, they tell the same story, but with different details. & Nbsp;
On that barge, for example, there were lice, dysentery, and the patients were also sure that they were being taken to execution, and tried to throw themselves overboard. And this new note says that the patients tried to start a fire. And I, apparently, guessed it, where it happens to me. That is, these are notes that overlap with each other, but are clearly written independently of each other. In addition, since no additional documents have survived, no one kept, apparently, or deliberately destroyed, as often happened with military documents, we will never know. I could not find an additional document, despite the fact that we applied to Ryazan, Kazan, and Nizhny Novgorod — we tried. And so I emphasize once again that this is not a historical document — my novel is, of course, a fantasy on the topic, but I read a terrible amount of everything I could find, because in general, this is very little, psychiatric hospitals were evacuated, as it was psychiatry is arranged at this time. And this is very scary, of course, this is a terrible story. But somehow … basically you are not reading about how psychiatric hospitals were evacuated, but about how they could not evacuate [patients] from a psychiatric hospital. This is monstrous.
Sergei Lebedenko: And if we talk not about research, but about the writing process, how did you manage to write a novel so quickly? That is, you just already had a ready-made plan in your head, or did you write a plan in advance and it worked out very quickly?
Linor Goralik: First, the novel is small. Secondly, when you have been walking for 16 years and inventing a book, you have it to some extent … I had neither a plan, nor an idea. Moreover, when I started to get close to her, I generally thought to do everything differently. I generally had a different idea of how it should look. Third, I usually write 2-3 hours a day.
But then this book ate me from the inside, this is the hardest book I have written so far. I wrote for 8-9 hours.
So if I was writing at my usual pace, it would be just about six months, if not more. It was quite difficult to write. And whether to write it quickly or slowly, I had absolutely no choice at all. The novel just ate me up. I was terribly lucky that this was the moment when my job as a marketer required a lot of intellectual effort from me, but not very much effort in hours, and I had time to write at that pace. It was just a lucky coincidence.
Sergey Lebedenko: Is this something you would not recommend to any other writers?
Linor Goralik: No.
Vladimir Eremin : During your research, you learned that during the evacuation, the patients of this hospital had to sail on a barge for two whole weeks instead of the normal five days, because no city was willing to accept them. And this, of course, is an amazing fact. During your research, you probably learned many more such facts, and most likely not all of them were reflected in the book. Can you give examples?
Linor Goralik: In reality, other cities — both Ryazan and Nizhny Novgorod — not that they didn’t accept them, they didn’t accept them a little. For example, in Ryazan, where they were supposed to stay for good, 375 people were supposed to be admitted there, instead they accepted 10 adults and 10 children. But the biggest thing I learned was how the Germans treated prisoners, psychiatric patients and medical staff. But honestly, I don’t want to talk about this, it’s terribly difficult, it’s completely unnecessary. But … In general, what you learn is that, of course, people are very different. There were doctors who ran away in this situation. There were doctors who, in this situation, went over to the side of the enemy, very few are the rarest cases, and it is not very clear whether this is so, such hints. But for the most part, the degree of dedication of the medical staff is absolutely inconceivable. People who take the Hippocratic Oath with such a degree of seriousness and dedication that it is difficult to imagine. This is, of course, amazing.
Linor Goralik. Photos from social networks
Stylistics
Sergey Lebedenko: The novel is, in fact, a historical genre, but at the same time stylistically there are many things that, well, slightly blur the sense of reality. A revived barge with legs, with a tail, experiments that are carried out in a hospital, when people go to other dimensions, recording what is happening there. Why is it written in this style? Or did you just realize that you can't write otherwise?
Linor Goralik: No, there is a very specific answer. My task was not to exploit the disease, that is, not to exploit the madness of the patients, not to exploit the condition of the patients, not to create a feeling of shift at the expense of the patients. And then I decided that I would not move the train relative to the platform, but the platform relative to the train, that I would not move people relative to reality, but reality relative to people. And that this feeling of insanity of what is happening, I will do due to the fact that I will move reality. As a result, all patients actually show absolutely no signs of illness, but this feeling that everything has gone a little bit is created by what is happening around.
Vladimir Eremin: You call a mental illness letter exploitation. Can you please explain why such a term? And if we mentally imagine this situation that you are writing about, then all the same, the illness of the patients probably mattered. That is, it’s one thing if you send healthy people to evacuate, it’s another thing if you are sick. And yet why did you decide, as you say, not to exploit this topic? And an additional question in connection with this: where is the border between the normal and the abnormal for you? How can you define it? And in general — is it there?
Linor Goralik: First, why I decided not to exploit this topic. There are two answers, and the first one is very simple, it is technical because it is too easy. Well, that is, to make a ship of fools out of this book would be too … It's not worth the effort, it just doesn't make sense. Secondly, it seems to me that transferring this work to the reader is much more interesting. It is enough to tell the reader: “this is a psychiatric clinic,” and let him read this meaning into everything that happens.
It seemed to me that this is an honest division of labor with the reader. And that the reader will also be interested if this part of the work gets to him.
Third, if a person feels that he is sick, he is sick. In this sense, I have a very simple approach. If a person feels that he is not okay, it means that he is not okay. I don't care what psychiatrists think about it, or what Mork says about it, or what the classification says about it. In my opinion, it is impossible to give any other definition here from a humanistic point of view.
Vladimir Eremin: Does the political, social situation in the country at a certain period of time influence this somehow?
Linor Goralik: Yes, it seems to me that our sense of the subjective, whether we are okay, it, of course, grows out of the cultural context. And for a huge number of people, the feeling “I'm okay”, for example, is constructed by the prohibition on talking about psychiatric disorders. A person who, perhaps, is seriously ill, who is very difficult to live and who could receive elementary psychiatric help, suffers, believing that he … it does not occur to him that he is sick and could be cured, simply because the prohibition in society on such a discourse on such a scale that it never occurred to him to turn to this topic. And that's pretty awful. Yes, of course it does. How it affects, we know, and the reverse story — excessive medicalization, for example, or excessive radicalization of conversation about mental problems. But if a person feels that he is not ok in any situation, it means for me that he is not ok, he needs help. Only a subjective assessment.
Facts
Sergey Lebedenko: In this section we study the most interesting and unusual facts about our guest.
Fact No. 1
We write denunciations for poems against writers. Your poem «How they lay in a hole with a spinning top» got into the Olympiad in literature 2020/2021. Conservative, conventionally, circles did not like this. A certain Irina Ushakova wrote in the Istoricheskaya Pravda newspaper that Linor Goralik's poems are immoral, they corrupt young people. And it came almost to the point that Linor Goralik, who read the poems, could commit suicide. What is your general attitude to these statements and how do you think, where did the culture of denunciations come from now? Is it something Soviet that has resurrected again or is it something new — something that has appeared just now?