Svetlana Alexievitch (67) collects votes, has her literary life collected votes. With its own literary style from Belarus has become the moral memory of crumbling Soviet Union.
She has created collages that reappraise the whole suffering, the disasters and the harsh everyday life of people in their homeland. 2013 was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade Now they will also be honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature -. “For their polyphonic work that sets a monument to suffering and courage in our time”. For the first time the award for the Russian poet Joseph Brodsky 1987, the price goes back to the earlier Soviet-speaking world.
Alexijewitsch documented the voices of the people
“novels in votes” calls Alexijewitsch their method too. For the first time, the trained journalist turned in 1983 in the book “The war has no female face” . With interviews, she documented the fate of Soviet soldiers during World War II. These were not grandiose heroic tales, the old women told the horrors of killing, the difficult survival in the world of men and of the serious return to everyday life. “The men have forgotten their comrades-they have betrayed. You have them stolen victory and not divided, “says the author.
The book was then was a scandal in the Soviet Union, Irina Shcherbakova, a historian and human rights activist reminded the organization Memorial in Moscow. The Second World War is still the starting point of thinking and feeling for the Russians.
Belarus marked by war
Belarus, the westernmost Soviet republic, the war hit particularly hard. The violence ravaging the country only on the German advance, then by partisan struggles, then the advance of the Red Army. The experience is deeply rooted in the country until today. This would benefit artists in Belarus to deal with existential questions to said Shcherbakova. Also for the Belarusian writer Vasil Bykov (1924-2003 ), the war was the theme of life.
“She has a very sinister look at the people,” Shcherbakova says about Alexijewitsch. Also in other books looked from Belarus to the worst catastrophes of the Soviet Union. For “Zinc Boys” (1989) she spoke to more than 500 veterans of the Soviet Afghan campaign and mothers of fallen soldiers. Equally she portrayed 1997, the survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. As a major work is considered “thrift time” of 2013 -. A collage of voices about the harrowing experience of the communist experiment in the Soviet Union
Not happy, but calm and collected is
A Frohnatur not Alexijewitsch says her friend Shcherbakova. But who in their two-room apartment in the center of Minsk visited the author who is experiencing a quiet, level-headed woman. Speaking each set sit as printed. Alexijewitsch can bring in a sensitive and confidence-type people to speak. She takes a lot of time to listen, let’s talk the other. Then it compresses the votes to through-composed monologues, the monologues to large collages.
Alexijewitsch (now Ivano-Frankivsk) was born on 31 May 1948 for the western Ukrainian Stanislaw. She worked after studying journalism at first at a local newspaper as well as a teacher. Since it under the authoritarian regime of President Alexander Lukashenko publicly fell on deaf ears in Belarus and their works were not published, she went for several years abroad. She lived in Germany.
In 2011 she moved in spite of their oppositional stance back to Minsk. “I want to live at home, see grow up among my people, my grandson,” she said. In addition, source of her work had always been talking with the people. “And I do best here and in my own language,” says Alexijewitsch. For the Belarusian opposition, the price is likely to be a reinforcement. “A fantastic news! I congratulate, “tweeted the opposition and former presidential candidate Andrei Sannikov
- Svetlana Alexievitch. Thrift time. Life on the ruins of socialism, Hanser Verlag Berlin, 2013, from the Russian by Ganna-Maria Braungardt, 576 pages, 27.90 euros, ISBN 978-3-446-24150-3
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Svetlana Alexievitch: The war has no female face, Hanser Verlag Berlin, 2013, from the Russian by Ganna-Maria Braungardt, 368 pages, 21.90 euros, ISBN 978-3-446-24525-9
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