![]() ![]() Her subject was the Second World War, on which the Soviet literature was enormous, but she had a genuinely new take: the war through the prism of women’s experiences. It made a big splash in Russia but wasn’t much noticed in the West. Her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face, appeared in Moscow in the mid-1980s, after a two-year hold-up by the censor. Only a sovok, she believes, could have persuaded all those other kindred souls to talk about their guilty, angry, nostalgic love of the world they have lost.Īlexievich came on the literary scene at the time of Gorbachev’s perestroika, the high point of her and many of her interviewees’ lives. She means the kind of sovok who suffers because of the Soviet identity and baggage they can’t disclaim, not the kind who glories in it. She is, she says, a sovok, the post-Soviet pejorative term for Homo sovieticus, and so are her parents and her friends. She writes about death and the soul – an important word in her lexicon. She writes about suffering, and that means that the Gulag and the Second World War are never far away. That voice is unmistakably Russian (though Alexievich, who writes in Russian, is actually of mixed Belorussian and Ukrainian origins). ![]() Her respondents, particularly the women, tend to speak in the same voice as Alexievich. That’s to say, it’s hers alone as a writer. Whatever her genre, Alexievich is an original, with a voice that is hers alone. But it’s a way of letting a Western audience know that what she’s doing is exploring suffering and loss through the voices of the sufferers. Her first book, with methodology already honed, was finished before Shoah was made, so that obviously can’t be taken literally. Lately, Alexievich has taken to citing Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as an inspiration. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since nobody has heard of him. In fact, they are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. ![]() S vetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some people still don’t think her books are literature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |