There was no sensation that literary prize this year went to Aleksijevitsj. She was among the favorites again last year.
Aleksijevitsjs literary universe is the post-Soviet people. She has portrayed them in “War does not have a human face,” about female partisans who fought against Nazism during World War 2, in “The Last Witnesses”, about children’s experience of war, in “Sink boys”, about the dead soldiers who came home from the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, the “Prayer for Chernobyl”, about the victims of the world’s largest nuclear disaster, and in “The End of the red man. Currently secondhand, “about Soviet human struggle for dignity after their world collapsed. All the books are part of the cycle “Utopia votes.”
– For her mangestemmige works, a monument to suffering and courage in our time, according to the reasoning of Swedish Academy. They could added; for her nakedness:
– I do not write about war, but about man in war. I am not writing war history, but the emotions of history, writes Aleksijevitsj in the introduction to “The war has no female face”.
Svetlana Alekseijevitsj is in its own self a typical Soviet man. She is Belarusian citizen, has a Ukrainian father and Russian as literary languages. In a time of war between Russians and Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine also shows Alekseijevitsjs biography us how difficult the post-Soviet life in the East Slavic countries. For what is really Svetlana Alekseijevitsj? Who is she ethnically and culturally, in this world who collapsed and became three eastern Slavic states that everyone has growing pains.
Nobel Laureate has a literary method that is special. Alekseijevitsj is a qualified journalist and practiced for many years in the profession. Her form is also distinctly documentary. Her books are based on a series of interviews with people who all eases their hearts and tell their stories to Alekseijevitsj. Patiently she speaks to them, wash wives, doctors, former generals and people of the Soviet nomenclature. And then she gets them magically to speak their language, mild and humanizes her their stories to his story.
In many ways she’s the time Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He also documented what he saw, and the other prisoners in Stalin’s Gulag told him. But where Solzhenitsyn was preachy and finally insistent, is Alekseijevitsj questioning. And that Solzhenitsyn is she on his vis a regime critic.
But she is a hushed critic. Alerkseijevitsj content to tell it like it is. And it is critical enough in today’s Belarus, where the author lives as a non-human, not acknowledged, but not jailed. And it is critical enough in Russia, where there are at times difficult to obtain in her books. If one reads her one understands why.
This is from an interview I did with Svatlana Alekseijevitsj in Oslo last fall:
– We live in confusion time, our values are disintegrating , the former Soviet man looking for himself, says Svetlana Alexievich. She is Belarusian citizen, and has in recent years been one of the hottest candidates to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Her literary universe is WW2, the Soviet Union collapse, and post-communism people. Where the debate about the Soviet Union’s downfall marked by crass opinions and harsh words about villains and angels, are Aleksijevitsjs words gentle and magically fortoner themselves as true. She sees through the fog of arguments for how Russia could get a leader Vladimir Putin, and for how brother kill brother in eastern Ukraine.
– I’ve had people that theme and focus in my books, says Aleksijevitsj. She chooses his words, simple and non-academic, but precisely why the stronger. When she talks about confusion time – smutnoje Vremya in Russian – she uses the concept of the greatest catastrophe in Russian history, when the country was without leadership, invaded by Poles and Lithuanians, ruled by false princes and ravaged by a famine that killed one third of the population before the first Romanov in 1613 came and saved the country from chaos. And even if the words of Aleksijevitsj is low-key, they are in the same store. The term smutnoje Vremya has enormous power in Russian and East Slavic consciousness. But from Aleksijevitsjs mouth said those on a low-key way that makes them obvious.
– You mean the Soviet Union really was a major disaster for the people?
– For many people, yes. They did not know how to live without communism and the Communist Party as the norm. Value systems collapsed. Some searched belief, some were apathetic, many were cynical, says Aleksijevitsj.
– Then you mean about the same as Putin. He also believes that the Soviet Union was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th århun …?
– He talked about the greatest geopolitical catastrophe. I’m talking about the human disasters, parries
Aleksijevitsj. She recalls that neither the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s revolution was a popular revolution. Also it was a revolution from above, like Peter the Great from the beginning in the 1700s, as the Bolsheviks in 1917.
– Gorbachev’s revolution meant that people were rundstjålet. Capitalism was a disaster for most people, she says.
Svetlana Alexievich writes not as giants of Russian literature, the neurotic Fyodor Dostoyevsky or the often preachy Leo Tolstoy. But as Dostoevsky and Tolstoy read she also as prophetic. As a prophet of his time, confusion time.
– What is happening in Russia today with Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, and the closing of the country, is going to last long. Freedom in the 1990s does not come back, says Aleksijevitsj.
Equal Dagbladet Opinions on Facebook.
No comments:
Post a Comment