Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War’s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time
“There are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and
Putin’s ascent. . . . But the nonfiction volume that has done the
most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and
after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana
Alexievich’s oral history Secondhand Time.”—David Remnick, The New
Yorker
“Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a
comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. .
. . Alexievich’s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet
in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable
to War and Peace.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand
Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning
after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s
plunged it into existential crisis. A series of monologues by
people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope,
driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players
but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.”—The New
York Times
“The most ambitious Russian literary work of art of the century . .
. There’s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal
or troubling as Secondhand Time since Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as
necessary and overdue. . . . Alexievich’s witnesses are those who
haven’t had a say. She shows us from these conversations, many of
them coming at the confessional kitchen table of Russian
apartments, that it’s powerful simply to be allowed to tell one’s
own story. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost
unacknowledged by today’s dictatorships, that matters.”—The
Christian Science Monitor
“Alexievich’s masterpiece—not only for what it says about the fall
of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of
Russia and its former satellites. . .
Stylistically, Secondhand Time, like her other books, produces
a mosaic of overlapping voices… deepened by extraordinary stories
of love and perseverance.”—Newsweek
“A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful . . .
[Secondhand Time] is one of the most vivid and incandescent
accounts of [Soviet] society caught in the throes of change that
anyone has yet attempted. . . . Alexievich stations herself at a
crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. . . . [She]
makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with
the characters, sharing in their happiness and
agony.”—The Washington Post
“An enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism
fall, [Secondhand Time] gives a staggeringly deep and plural
picture of a people that has lost its place in history.”—San
Francisco Chronicle
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