16.12.2013

An interview with Sofi Oksanen

An interview with Sofi Oksanen, on the story of WHEN THE DOVES DISAPPEARED, a novel and a play

INDIVIDUAL – IDENTITY – CHOICES – LIE

One of the key characters in Doves, Edgar Parts, is a true survivor; he is prepared to change his identity, views, his own and his family’s history, by any means necessary. He is an Estonian who serves national socialist Germany during the war and spies for the Soviet administration after the war. Parts willingly feeds his friends and family to the wolves. To my mind, there is a sense of revenge in what Parts does, he is not only saving his own skin. A revenge that continues even up to the next generation. (Roland -> Evelin)

What makes Parts act like this?

I prefer to leave the interpretation of the characters to the audience, as everyone interprets each character in their own way.

As for Edgar’s background, it is said that he is a foster child, an orphan raised by his cousin’s family. He ends up at a farm despite being a city boy, both mentally and physically. He also does match the male image of the time (and the countryside) and does not identify himself in it, which results in mockery. Also, he continuously has to follow Roland, his cousin, whose parents are alive and who is a young master of the house, adapts and wants to be part of the rural community.

Edgar’s background does provide hints, but I also chose this kind of background for him because surprisingly many of those active in the KGB came from a similar world. Killer agents, those who performed wet tasks, etc., have certain similarities in their backgrounds, and that is a childhood without a father and financial security. The KGB, an organisation that provides opportunities, became a father figure, the authority they wanted to please. Children from middle-class, financially secure backgrounds were more likely to choose other paths.  

In today’s world, he could be a child bullied at school who decides to grab a gun and shoot all the pupils in the class. Or a child soldier in Uganda. Or a young student in a Russian military academy (Russian military academies are happy to recruit in orphanages and homes with no means to provide for their numerous children.)
 
In the dramatisation of the novel, you have made Edgar Parts a document movie maker and photographer. You have said that one of the reasons for this was to make the language of such a character more suitable for the stage. This shift of identity between the novel and the play is, to my mind, significant also in other respects: film, photograph, lie, truth, adapted truth. History can be cut up and assembled again as one wants.

What is a photograph/document in Doves, in the novel and in the theatre performance?

A photograph that looks like a documentary photo or news photo always carries with it an illusion of the truth, and it is easy to make use of it. Today, the speed of communication has been tuned up to the maximum, and the more reason there is for this being topical, unavoidable. Disinformation, both in pictures and words, is an old propaganda trick, a way of influencing what one makes the truth look like, how it is made to look exactly as one wants.

Both in the novel and in the play, document and photograph are tools of power, building blocks that can be used to construct the desired truth. Usually, it is the winner (in this case, the Soviet Union), who gets to assemble the truth. In general, those with more power are always the ones who assemble the truth.  
 
Juudit Parts’ way of surviving during the German occupation is also based on a double life. As the wife of Edgar Parts, mistress of an SS officer, hider and helper of war refugees, who escapes from the country when the German defeat takes place. In the post-war period you described, in the 1960s, Juudit Parts has shrunk into a sickly and delusional, anonymous “wife”. She is still married to Parts, but not fit for a war hero, which is what Edgar Parts has managed to make himself. To my mind, Juudit Parts is a tragic character, but not without a will; she has made choices as independently as one can in a country waging a war or in a totalitarian society.

What do you think of Juudit?

Juudit was named after the Book of Judith in the Bible. Judith is a rare character in the Bible in that she is an active person who saves her people from destruction and the occupier by seducing the commander of the army threatening her people, Holofernes, and decapitating him. In the Bible, it is rare to see a woman in such a role, and her fate after the rescue operation is also exceptional: Judith continues her life as an independent widow, she does not re-marry, etc.

Tammsaare has also written a play on the story of Judith, but here Judith is much more complex than the biblical Judith.

My Juudit also aims to save, she aims for the good, but she is captive to her marriage.

Marriage as an institution interested me as such because nowadays it is easy to forget how binding it can be (still today in many countries, and even in the Nordic countries a short time ago).  The same applies to contraception practices, which unavoidably determine the lives of women, and that is why such a mundane matter has been brought up both in the play and the novel. The equality propaganda of the Soviet Union culminates in contraception: there was none, and in practice abortion was used as birth control. So, a woman could become a bank manager (Evelin studies to become a bank manager), but she was not able to decide on contraception.

On the other hand, Juudit in Doves is also a reference to the classical Madwoman in the Attic thematics familiar from feminist studies and history.



PLAY – NOVEL – PLAY – THEATRE

Purge was first a play, then a novel. As for Doves, the situation is the opposite. The processes ran in the opposite direction. Could you tell us how you wrote these?

Actually, Doves could also have been written as a play first, but my editor was faster in reading manuscripts than the National Theatre. Thus, there is no content-related reason for the play coming after the novel. I saw the story as a play in fact for the reason that the Soviet Union as a whole was theatre; it tried to create an illusion of an equal society as its facade, and language and images were used to create an alternative truth in the media as well; the task of the media was not the same as in democratic countries, i.e. conveying information. The Soviet media’s task was to strengthen that fictional reality, which was completely separated from the real lives of real people.

Writing the play Doves was surprisingly easy, also due to the fact that the background work had already been done. Correspondingly, writing the novel Purge was more laborious, as writing a play does not require as much background work as writing a novel. You can leave so much air and space in a play. When writing a novel, the author must also do the tasks of the director, set decorator, composer, costumer and actor.

However, not all novels and stories belong to the stage; it is always the topic that determines the form. Theatre and play were justified solutions in both cases: in Purge, the extremely private and hidden experience that aims to avoid the look had to be brought to the stage, in the centre of collective experience (experiencing sexual violence).

The visuality of propaganda could not be presented in the novel Doves, while the rhetoric of propaganda cannot be handled in the same way on the stage as in the novel.
On the other hand, it is easier to remain true to the language of the time in a novel. In a play, the language should sound like spoken language, but each time has expressions that are not evident to subsequent generations without explanations and background. Many western viewers can find it a surprise that the word Nazi could not even be used in the play Doves, as this expression simply was not used in Estonia, not even in the 1960s in the entire Soviet Union. Language is always the mirror of its time, and therefore changing expressions to suit the modern ear better, for example, is problematic as such, since it then distorts the time that the play aims to depict.


You have been trained as a dramaturge/playwright at Theatre Academy Helsinki. What kind of an author are you? What is important to you?

I am a social author in the sense that I feel that it is the duty of an author living in a free and older democracy to deal with matters that are important also to wider experiences due to one reason or another. Rare professions allow one to exercise freedom of speech as that of an author, and therefore it is almost an obligation to do so.


Sofi Oksanen spoke to Sari Havukainen / TINFO, sari.havukainen(a)tinfo.fi

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View the play in New Plays from Finland, database