Sasha Filipenko
Red crosses
Editions and / or, 188 pages, 16 euros
Still in his thirties, Filipenko was born in Minsk, Belarus, and is supported by Svetlana Aleksievič, who is attentive to what is happening in her country under dictatorship. Filipenko lives in St. Petersburg, among young people looking for a better world. More than Aleksievich, Red crosses it can recall the works of a great writer (more Nobel than many of the last or the last who have had it), Ljudmila Ulickaja (Bompiani), heir of Jurij Trifonov and further back of Chekhov.
A young football referee, a Saša who must be very similar to the Saša who tells it, moves into a new house and is amazed by the red crosses that on the stairs and on the various floors seem to mark a path. It is an old neighbor with Alzheimer’s who made them, so as not to get lost. With her the young referee slowly makes friends, and from her he hears a terrible story of yesterday: Stalin’s refusal to receive the help of the Red Cross for Hitler’s Soviet prisoners of war, whom the dictator considered possible traitors.
Filipenko knows how to captivate starting with a simplicity that reveals the passion from a present still marked by the weight of history, by the difficulty of fully understanding the horrors of yesterday and, consequently, of building a different present, under new and obtuse dictatorships. Really Red crosses it gives hope for a better future, in the hands of the Russian and Belarusian youth.
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