Svetlana Alexievich is the most recent winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the first non-fiction writer to win the accolade in 50 years.
Sara Danius, who announced the winner of the prize at the Swedish Academy earlier this week, commended Alexievich’s writing as “a true achievement in terms of material but also in terms of form.”
To date, three of Alexievich’s books are available in English: War’s Unwomanly Face, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War and Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. A translation of Second-hand Time is due to be published in 2016.
Marta Bausells wrote an article for The Guardian that provides the background to the Nobel Laureate and her work:
Who is she?
Alexievich was born 31 May 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into the family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father’s demobilisation from the army, the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. She left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. She went on to a career in journalism, and has written short stories and reportage, in which she’s covered the Chernobyl catastrophe, the Soviet war in Afghanistan and many other events – all based on thousands of interviews with witnesses.
She has been persecuted by Alexander Lukashenko’s dictatorial regime, which made her leave Belarus in 2000. She went on to live in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin, and could only return to Minsk in 2011.
On the front page of her website, Alexievich describes her choice of genre, and what she sets out to do in her writing. She says she “chose a genre where human voices speak for themselves” to match her perception of the world. She calls her work “a history of human feelings” rather than a straightforward report of facts and events. To compose such a history, she conducts a staggering number of interviews:
Art may lie but document never does. Although the document is also a product of someone’s will and passion. I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being. It took me three-four years to write each of my books. I meet and record my conversations with 500-700 persons for each book. My chronicle embraces several generations. It starts with the memories of people who witnessed the 1917 Revolution, through the wars and Stalinist gulags, and reaches the present times. This is a story of one Soviet-Russian soul.
Voices from Chernobyl is an attempt to give an account of the devastation of the nuclear accident, and the social fallout that resulted from it. On her website, Alexievich wrote that understanding the event – unprecedented in the history of her nation’s suffering – requires “different human experience and a different inner instrument, which does not exist yet”.
In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster Alexievich says: “We are now living with it, something is happening to us: the blood formula and the genetic codes change, familiar landscapes disappear.”
Read an excerpt from the book, shared by The Paris Review:
Lyudmilla Ignatenko Wife of deceased Fireman Vasily Ignatenko
We were newlyweds. We still walked around holding hands, even if we were just going to the store. I would say to him, “I love you.” But I didn’t know then how much. I had no idea . . . We lived in the dormitory of the fire station where he worked. I always knew what was happening—where he was, how he was.
One night I heard a noise. I looked out the window. He saw me. “Close the window and go back to sleep. There’s a fire at the reactor. I’ll be back soon.”
I didn’t see the explosion itself. Just the flames. Everything was radiant. The whole sky. A tall flame. And smoke. The heat was awful. And he still hadn’t come back.
They went off just as they were, in their shirtsleeves. No one told them. They had been called for a fire, that was it.
Seven o’clock in the morning. At seven I was told he was in the hospital. I ran over there‚ but the police had already encircled it, and they weren’t letting anyone through. Only ambulances. The policemen shouted: “The ambulances are radioactive‚ stay away!” I started looking for a friend, she was a doctor at that hospital. I grabbed her white coat when she came out of an ambulance. “Get me inside!” “I can’t. He’s bad. They all are.” I held onto her. “Just to see him!” “All right‚” she said. “Come with me. Just for fifteen or twenty minutes.”
I saw him. He was all swollen and puffed up. You could barely see his eyes.
“He needs milk. Lots of milk‚” my friend said. “They should drink at least three liters each.”
“But he doesn’t like milk.”
“He’ll drink it now.”
Book details
- War’s Unwomanly Face by Svetlana Alexievich
EAN: 9785010004941
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- Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War by Svetlana Alexievich
EAN: 9780393336863
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- Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich
EAN: 9780312425845
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Image courtesy of The New Yorker