Svetlana Alexievich

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Svetlana Alexievich
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Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich

oral historian who writes in Russian. She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".[2][3][4][5] She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.[6][7]

Background

Born in the west Ukrainian town of Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk since 1962) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother,[8] Svetlana Alexievich grew up in Belarus. After graduating from high school she worked as a reporter in several local newspapers. In 1972 she graduated from Belarusian State University and became a correspondent for the literary magazine Nyoman in Minsk (1976).[9]

Alexievich as artist in residence at Bavarian Villa Waldberta in the 1990s

In a 2015 interview, she mentioned early influences: "I explored the world through people like

In 1989 Alexievich's book Zinky Boys, about the fallen soldiers who had returned in zinc coffins from the

political persecution by the Lukashenko administration,[15] she left Belarus in 2000.[16] The International Cities of Refuge Network offered her sanctuary, and during the following decade she lived in Paris, Gothenburg and Berlin. In 2011, Alexievich moved back to Minsk.[17][18]

Influences and legacy

Alexievich's books trace the emotional history of the

occupation of Belarus, as the main single book that has influenced Alexievich's attitude to literature.[21] Alexievich has confirmed the influence of Adamovich and Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ, among others.[22] She regards Varlam Shalamov as the best writer of the 20th century.[23]

Her most notable works in English translation include a collection of first-hand accounts from the war in Afghanistan (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War)[24] and an oral history of the Chernobyl disaster (Chernobyl Prayer / Voices from Chernobyl).[25] Alexievich describes the theme of her works this way:

If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialog of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet–Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.[26]

Works

Her first book, War's Unwomanly Face, came out in 1985. It was repeatedly reprinted and sold more than two million copies.[24] The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr, a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.[27] In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years.[28] This non-fiction oral history book is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of World War II that had never been related before.[24] Another book, The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories, describes personal memories of children during wartime. The war seen through women's and children's eyes revealed a new world of feelings.[29]

In 1992, Alexievich published "Boys in Zinc". The course of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) is told through emotive personal testimony from unnamed participants of the war; from nurses to commissioned officers and pilots, mothers and widows. Each provides an excerpt of the Soviet-Afghan War which was disguised in the face of criticism first as political support, then intervention, and finally humanitarian aid to the Afghan people. Alexievich writes at the beginning of the book:

After the great wars of the twentieth century and the mass deaths, writing about the modern (small) wars, like the war in Afghanistan, requires different ethical and metaphysical stances. What must be reclaimed is the small, the personal, and the specific. The single human being. The only human being for someone, not as the state regards him, but who he is for his mother, for his wife, for his child. How can we recover a normal vision of life?[30]

Alexievich was not embedded with the Red Army due to her reputation in the Soviet Union; instead, she travelled to Kabul on her own prerogative during the war and gathered many accounts from veterans returning from Afghanistan. In "Boys in Zinc", Alexievich calls herself 'a historian of the untraceable' and 'strive[s] desperately (from book to book) to do one thing - reduce history to the human being.'[31] She brings brutally honest accounts of the war to lay at the feet of the Soviet people but claims no heroism for herself: 'I went [to watch them assemble pieces of boys blown up by an anti-tank mine] and there was nothing heroic about it because I fainted there. Perhaps it was from the heat, perhaps from the shock. I want to be honest.'[32] The monologues which make up the book are honest (if edited for clarity) reproductions of the oral histories Alexievich collected, including those who perhaps did not understand her purpose: 'What's your book for? Who's it for? None of us who came back from there will like it anyway. How can you possibly tell people how it was? The dead camels and dead men lying in a single pool of blood, with their blood mingled together. Who wants that?'[33] Alexievich was brought to trial in Minsk between 1992 and 1996, accused of distorting and falsifying the testimony of Afghan veterans and their mothers who were 'offended [...] that their boys were portrayed exclusively as soulless killer-robots, pillagers, drug addicts and rapists...' [34] The trial, while apparently defending the honour of the army and veterans, is widely seen as an attempt to preserve old ideology in post-communist Belarus. The Belarus League for Human Rights claims that in the early 1990s, multiple cases were directed against democratically inclined intelligentsia with politically motivated verdicts.[35]

In 1993, she published Enchanted by Death, a book about attempted and completed suicides due to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Many people felt inseparable from the

Communist ideology and unable to accept the new order surely and the newly interpreted history.[36]

Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Chernobyl Prayer in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian.[37] As a result, Alexievich has been better known in the rest of world than in Belarus.[38]

She has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[39] She herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, Alexievich's chosen genre is sometimes called "documentary literature": an artistic rendering of real events, with a degree of poetic license.[11] In her own words:

I've been searching for a literary method that would allow the closest possible approximation to real life. Reality has always attracted me like a magnet, it tortured and hypnotized me, I wanted to capture it on paper. So I immediately appropriated this genre of actual human voices and confessions, witness evidences and documents. This is how I hear and see the world – as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist and preacher.

On 26 October 2019, Alexievich was elected chairman of the Belarusian PEN Center.[40]

Political activism

Alexievich in 2013

During the

2020 Belarusian protests Alexievich became a member of the Coordination Council of Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the leader of the Belarusian democratic movement and main opposition candidate against Lukashenko.[41]

On 20 August, Alexander Konyuk, the Prosecutor-General of Belarus, initiated criminal proceedings against the members of the Coordination Council under Article 361 of the Belarusian Criminal Code, on the grounds of attempting to seize state power and harming national security.[42][43]

On 26 August, Alexievich was questioned by Belarusian authorities about her involvement in the council.[44]

On 9 September 2020, Alexievich alerted the press that "men in black masks" were trying to enter her apartment in central Minsk. "I have no friends and companions left in the Coordinating Council. All are in prison or have been forcibly sent into exile," she wrote in a statement. "First they kidnapped the country; now it's the turn of the best among us. But hundreds more will replace those who have been torn from our ranks. It is not the Coordinating Council that has rebelled. It is the country."[45] Diplomats from Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovakia, and Sweden began to keep a round-the-clock watch on Alexievich's home to prevent her abduction by security services.[46][47]

On 28 September 2020, Alexievich left Belarus for Germany, promising to return depending on political conditions in Belarus. Prior to her departure, she was the last member of the Coordination Council who was not in exile or under arrest.[48]

In August 2021, her book The Last Witnesses was excluded from the school curriculum in Belarus and her name was removed from the curriculum.[49][50] It was assumed that the exclusion was made for her political activity.[51]

In her first public statement, after she was announced the Nobel Prize in 2015, Alexievich condemned

Belarusian involvement in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine.[53]

Awards and honours

Alexievich has received many awards, including:

Alexievich is a member of the advisory committee of the Lettre Ulysses Award. She will give the inaugural Anna Politkovskaya Memorial Lecture at the British Library on 9 October 2019.[73] The lecture is an international platform to amplify the voices of women journalists and human rights defenders working in war and conflict zones.

Publications

References

  1. ^ Her name is also transliterated as Aleksievich or Aleksiyevich. Belarusian: Святла́на Алякса́ндраўна Алексіе́віч Svyatlana Alaksandrawna Aleksiyevich Belarusian pronunciation: [alʲɛksʲiˈjɛvʲit͡ʂ]; Russian: Светла́на Алекса́ндровна Алексие́вич Russian pronunciation: [ɐlʲɪksʲɪˈjevʲɪt͡ɕ]; Ukrainian: Світлана Олександрівна Алексієвич.
  2. ^ Blissett, Chelly. "Author Svetlana Aleksievich nominated for 2014 Nobel Prize Archived 2015-01-07 at the Wayback Machine". Yekaterinburg News. 28 January 2014. Retrieved 28 January 2014.
  3. ^ Treijs, Erica (8 October 2015). "Nobelpriset i litteratur till Svetlana Aleksijevitj" [Nobel Prize in literature to Svetlana Aleksijevitj]. Svenska Dagbladet (in Swedish). Archived from the original on 18 November 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  4. ^ Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Literature prize Archived 2018-06-21 at the Wayback Machine, BBC News (8 October 2015).
  5. ^ Dickson, Daniel; Makhovsky, Andrei (8 October 2015). "Belarussian writer wins Nobel prize, denounces Russia over Ukraine". Stockholm/Minsk: Reuters. Archived from the original on 1 February 2016. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  6. ^ "Svetlana Alexievich, investigative journalist from Belarus, wins Nobel Prize in Literature". Pbs.org. 2013-10-13. Archived from the original on 2015-10-09. Retrieved 2015-10-08.
  7. ^ Colin Dwyer (2015-06-28). "Belarusian Journalist Svetlana Alexievich Wins Literature Nobel : The Two-Way". NPR. Archived from the original on 2015-10-09. Retrieved 2015-10-08.
  8. ^ "Remembering the Great Patriotic War was a political act". The Economist. 20 July 2017. Archived from the original on 21 July 2017. Retrieved 21 July 2017.
  9. ^ Brief biography of Svetlana Alexievich (Russian) Archived 2014-09-18 at the Wayback Machine, from Who is who in Belarus
  10. ^ "2015 Nobel Laureate Alexievich Discusses Polish Influences". Culture.pl. October 13, 2015. Retrieved 17 April 2022.
  11. ^ a b Pinkham, Sophie (29 August 2016). "Witness Tampering". The New Republic. Archived from the original on 30 August 2016. Retrieved 30 August 2016.
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  21. Dostoyevsky stated, from the Gogol
    's Overcoat, then the entire writings of Alexievich came from the documentary book of Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik I'm from the flamy village. Adamovich is her literary godfather".
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  25. ^ "Voices From Chernobyl". Fairewinds Education. 20 April 2015. Archived from the original on 17 October 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
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  30. ^ Alexievich, "Boys in Zinc" p.19
  31. ^ Alexievich, "Boys in Zinc" p.18
  32. ^ Alexievich, "Boys in Zinc", p. 20
  33. ^ Alexievich, "Boys in Zinc" p.30
  34. ^ Griegoriev. "Vecherny Minsk", 2 June 1992.
  35. ^ The Belarus League for Human Rights cited in the Epilogue of "Boys in Zinc"
  36. ^ Saxena, Ranjana. "On Reading 'Enchanted with Death' by Svetlana Aleksievich: Narratives of Nostalgia and Loss". 2013 ICCEES IX World Congress. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  37. ^ Госиздательства Беларуси не выпускали книги Алексиевич больше 20 лет. www.tut.by (in Russian). Tut.By. 8 October 2015. Archived from the original on 10 October 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015.
  38. ^ Впервые за долгое время премия вручается автору в жанре нон-фикшн. Kommersant (in Russian). 8 October 2015. Archived from the original on 9 October 2015. Retrieved 8 October 2015. Quote: "Но она известно гораздо больше за пределами Белоруссии, чем в Белоруссии. Она уважаемый европейский писатель".
  39. ^ Svetlana Alexievich wins Nobel Literature prize Archived 2018-06-21 at the Wayback Machine, by BBC
  40. ^ "ПЭН-ГЕЙт: вяртанне блуднага Севярынца насуперак "культурным марксістам"". Archived from the original on 2019-10-27. Retrieved 2019-10-27.
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  53. RadioFreeEurope. 5 March 2022. Archived
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External links

Interviews

Excerpts

Articles about Svetlana Alexievich

Academic articles about Svetlana Alexievich's works

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