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How can language serve in the face of staggering violence? In Requiem, her poem cycle that bears witness to the Soviet Great Terror, Anna Akhmatova renders a striking scene. The poet, whose son had been taken by the KGB, waits with other women outside Leningrad Prison. They are hoping to catch a glimpse of their loved ones.
On that occasion there was a woman standing
behind me,
her lips blue with cold, who, of course, had
never in
her life heard my name. Jolted out of the
torpor
characteristic of all of us, she said into my ear
(everyone whispered there)-"Could one ever
describe
this?' And I answered-"I can." It was then that
something like a smile slid across what had
previously
been just a face.
These lines came back to me as I made my way through Masha Gessen's work in preparation for this interview. In her 2017 article "The Autocrat's Language," published in the New York Review of Books, Gessen outlines a relationship between the health of language and the possibilities of social change: "When something cannot be described, it does not become a fact of shared reality." From her reporting on the war in Chechnya to her historical account of "Hitler's War and Stalin's Peace" told through her grandmothers' lives to her writing on the risks and repressions of the current US government, Gessen refuses those lenses of nationalism, totalitarianism, and autocracy that distort language in service of consolidating power. Amid attacks on language-which preempt and justify other violences-Gessen's careful looking and precise naming has often offered a common place to be, a way to imagine otherwise.
Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Masha Gessen immigrated to the United States as a teenager. At seventeen, she began reporting for a gay newspaper in Boston. Between 1984 and 1992, Gessen covered the AIDS crisis, distilling and amplifying information in the context of deliberate government confusion and opacity. In 1991, Gessen returned to the Soviet Union on a magazine assignment. She stayed for twenty-two years, building a life as a journalist and activist. Following the 2012 protests, Putin capitalized on the efficacy of queer-baiting protestors and began a systematic anti-gay campaign. Gessen- who had been the first openly gay public figure in Russia...