“Beyond the threshold of pain”, voices from the Ukrainian-Russian front in the book by Katerina Gordeeva

There war changes lives, forever. She is one of those experiences that mark a “before” and an “after”. You can survive war, of course. One cannot be indifferent to it. It leaves a legacy of pain, death, wounds in the body and soul. It leaves a legacy of resentment, hatred and more hatred. This legacy is shared by all, even if its weight is not the same for everyone. It is a deadly legacy that unites victim and executioner, innocent and guilty, attacker and attacked.

For this reason it is it is important to talk about war, or rather what happens to the people involved in a conflict. This is why it is so difficult to do it because none of us knows exactly what the thunder of cannons and the hiss of missiles triggers in the souls of human beings. None of us knows what the pain threshold of a man or a woman is or what is really hidden in his nature.

The independent Russian journalist Katerina Gordeeva However, he chose to tell the story of humanity at war, or rather overwhelmed by war. She has chosen to collect the voices of women and men from Ukraine and Russia who found themselves face to face with one of the horsemen of the Apocalypse. Men and women who have experienced war and continue to experience it first-hand. From their testimonies, often painful, sometimes furious, he was born “Beyond the pain threshold” (21lettere, 2024, pp. 416), the result of Gordeeva’s continuous travels among the refugee centers established after February 24, 2022.

Naturally, these are testimonies that do not leave anyone indifferent. Indeed, they are often real punches in the stomach for those of us who experience the war through the media and tend to focus on the supplies of weapons, on the big announcements of the leaders of one side or the other, on the opinions of experts.

Gordeeva thinks, however, that in dark times it is no longer the time to chase scoops or special effects. Conversely, the time comes when we need to go and see with our own eyes, we need to investigate and document. Above all, we must listen to the protagonists, even if their voices are often incomplete, contradictory, the result of their own personal experience and their own experiences. In the face of tragedy, for the author nothing matters more than the painful voice of a painful and fleeing human being, whatever nationality he belongs to. In her story, therefore, the voices of Ukrainians, Russians, Russian-speaking inhabitants of the disputed territories of Donbass find their unity in the torment of the direct experience of the war and the evidence of its senselessness.

The great German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder once said that even if you can’t change anything, it doesn’t take away from the fact that we all have a duty to document everything. In the face of pain and suffering, in fact, even silence becomes guilty.

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