With her "documentary novels", Svetlana Alexievich, who is a journalist, moves in the boundary between reporting and fiction. In her books she uses interviews to create a collage of a wide range of voices. Svetlana Alexievich depicts life during and after the Soviet Union through the experience of individuals. In Minsk she has worked at the newspaper Sel'skaja Gazeta, Alexievich's criticism of the political regimes in the Soviet Union and thereafter Belarus has periodically forced her to live abroad, for example in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. She studied to be a journalist at the University of Minsk and worked a teacher, journalist and editor. Alexievich grew up in Belarus, where both her parents were teachers. Her father was Belarusian and her mother Ukrainian. Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano Frankivsk, Ukraine. I am fascinated by people.’įrom this fascination emerges a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society, built on the traumatisms of its predecessors’ collapse. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. It’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. History’s sole concern is the facts emotions are out of its realm of interest. There are an endless number of human truths.
It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story.
The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl reinvents a singular, polyphonic literary form, bringing together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble.Īlexievich’s method is simple: ‘I don’t ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age. Seventy plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new kind of man, the Homo sovieticus.’ This ‘red man’: that’s whom Alexievich has been studying since her first book, published in 1985 – a people and a culture condemned to extinction by the implosion of the ‘This was perhaps communism’s only achievement. And it accomplished this.’ writes Svetlana Alexievich. ‘Communism had an insane plan: to refashion the “old” breed of man, ancient Adam.
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