Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich
Alexievich in 2013
Native name	Святлана Аляксандраўна Алексіевіч
Born	Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (1948-05-31) 31 May 1948 Stanislav, Ukrainian SSR, Soviet Union (modern Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine)
Occupation	Journalist, author
Language	Russian
Nationality	Belarusian
Alma mater	Belarusian State University
Notable awards	Nobel Prize in Literature (2015) Order of the Badge of Honour (1984) Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2013) Prix Médicis (2013)
Signature
Website
alexievich.info/indexEN.html

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich^[1] (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist and non-fiction prose writer 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 (since 1962 Ivano-Frankivsk) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother,^[8] Svetlana Alexievich grew up in Belarus. After finishing school she worked as a reporter in several local newspapers before graduating from Belarusian State University (1972) and becoming a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman in Minsk (1976).^[9]

During her career in journalism, Alexievich specialised in crafting narratives based on witness testimonies. In the process, she wrote oral histories of several dramatic events in Soviet history: the Second World War,^[10] the Afghan War,^[11] the fall of the Soviet Union,^[10] and the Chernobyl disaster.^[10][12] After political persecution by the Lukashenko administration,^[13] she left Belarus in 2000.^[14] 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.^[15][16]

Literary work

Alexievich's books trace the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual through carefully constructed collages of interviews.^[17] According to Russian writer and critic Dmitry Bykov, her books owe much to the ideas of Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, who felt that the best way to describe the horrors of the 20th century was not by creating fiction but through recording the testimonies of witnesses.^[18] Belarusian poet Uladzimir Nyaklyayew called Adamovich "her literary godfather". He also named the documentary novel I'm from the Burned Village (Belarusian: Я з вогненнай вёскі) by Ales Adamovich, Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik, about the villages burned by the German troops during the occupation of Belarus, as the main single book that has influenced Alexievich's attitude to literature.^[19] Alexievich has confirmed the influence of Adamovich and Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ, among others.^[20] She regards Varlam Shalamov as the best writer of the 20th century.^[21]

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)^[22] and a highly praised oral history of the Chernobyl disaster (Chernobyl Prayer / Voices from Chernobyl).^[23] 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.^[24]

Her first book, War's Unwomanly Face, came out in 1985. It was repeatedly reprinted and sold more than two million copies.^[22] The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr, a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.^[25] In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years.^[26] This novel is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of World War II that had never been related before.^[22] 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.^[27] In 1993, she published Enchanted with 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.^[28]

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.^[29] As a result, Alexievich has been better known in the rest of world than in Belarus.^[30]

She has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[31] She herself rejects the notion that she is a journalist, and, in fact, what appears in her books as witnesses, are fiction and are changed between different editions of the same book.^[32]

Awards and honours

Alexievich has been awarded many awards, including:

• Order of the Badge of Honour (USSR, 1984)^[33]
• Saint Euphrosyne of Polotsk Medal (Медаль имени Святой Евфросиньи Полоцкой)^[34]
• Nikolay Ostrovskiy literary award of the Union of Soviet Writers (1984)^[33]
• Oktyabr Magazine Prize (1984)^[33]
• Литературная премия имени Константина Федина of the Union of Soviet Writers (1985)^[33]
• Lenin Komsomol Prize (1986) — за книгу «У войны не женское лицо»^[33]
• Literaturnaya Gazeta Prize (1987)^[33]
• Премия имени Андрея Синявского of Novaya Gazeta — «За творческое поведение и благородство в литературе» (1997)^[33]
• Friendship of the Peoples Magazine Prize (1997)^[33]
• Триумф (премия) (Russia, 1997)^[33]
• 1996 Tucholsky-Preis (Swedish PEN) ^[35]
• 1997 Andrei Sinyavsky Prize ^[36][37]
• 1998 Leipziger Book Prize on European Understanding ^[35][36]
• 1998 Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung-Preis ^[35]
• 1999 Herder Prize
• 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award, Voices from Chernobyl
• 2007 Oxfam Novib/PEN Award ^[38]
• 2011 Ryszard Kapuściński Award for literary reportage (Polish) ^[15]
• 2013 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade ^[39]
• 2013 Prix Médicis essai, La Fin de l'homme rouge ou le temps du désenchantement (Время секонд хэнд)^[40]
• 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature^[41]

She is a member of the advisory committee of the Lettre Ulysses Award.

Books

• У войны не женское лицо (U voyny ne zhenskoe litso, War Does Not Have a Woman's Face), Minsk: Mastatskaya litaratura, 1985.
  • (English) The Unwomanly Face of War, (extracts), from Always a Woman: Stories by Soviet Women Writers, Raduga Publishers, 1987.
  • (English) War’s Unwomanly Face, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1988, ISBN 5-01-000494-1.
  • (English) The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, Random House, 2017, ISBN 978-0399588723
  • (German) Der Krieg hat kein weibliches Gesicht. Henschel, Berlin 1987, ISBN 978-3-362-00159-5.
  • (German) New, expanded edition; übersetzt von Ganna-Maria Braungardt. Hanser Berlin, München 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24525-9.
• Цинковые мальчики (Tsinkovye malchiki, Boys in Zinc), Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1991.
  • (English, US) Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War. W W Norton 1992 (ISBN 0-393-03415-1), translated by Julia and Robin Whitby.
  • (English, UK) Boys in Zinc. Penguin Modern Classics 2016, translated by Andrew Bromfield.
  • (German) Zinkjungen. Afghanistan und die Folgen. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 978-3-10-000816-9.^[42]
  • (German) New, expanded edition; Hanser Berlin, München 2014, ISBN 978-3-446-24528-0.*Зачарованные смертью (Zacharovannye smertyu, Enchanted with Death), Moscow: Slovo, 1994. ISBN 5-85050-357-9
• Чернобыльская молитва (Chernobylskaya molitva, Chernobyl Prayer), Moscow: Ostozhye, 1997. ISBN 5-86095-088-8
  • (English, US) Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. Dalkey Archive Press 2005 (ISBN 1-56478-401-0), translated by Keith Gessen.
  • (English, UK) Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future. Penguin Modern Classics 2016 (ISBN 978-0241270530), translated by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait. New translation of the revised edition published in 2013.
  • (German) Tschernobyl. Eine Chronik der Zukunft. Aufbau, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-7466-7023-3.
• Последние свидетели: сто недетских колыбельных (Poslednie svideteli: sto nedetskikh kolybelnykh, The Last Witnesses: A Hundred of Unchildlike Lullabys), Moscow, Palmira, 2004, ISBN 5-94957-040-5 (first edition: Moscow: Molodaya Gvardiya, 1985)
  • (German) Die letzten Zeugen. Kinder im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neues Leben, Berlin 1989; neu: Aufbau, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-7466-8133-2. (Originaltitel: Poslednyje swedeteli). Neubearbeitung und Aktualisierung 2008. Aus dem Russischen von Ganna-Maria Braungardt. Berlin: Hanser-Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3446246478
• Время секонд хэнд (Vremya sekond khend, Second-hand Time), Moscow: Vremia, 2013. ISBN 978-5-9691-1129-5
  • (Belarusian) Час сэканд-хэнд (Канец чырвонага чалавека) / Святлана Алексіевіч. Перакл. з руск. Ц. Чарнякевіч, В. Стралко. — Мн.: Логвінаў, 2014. — 384 с. — (Бібліятэка Саюза беларускіх пісьменнікаў «Кнігарня пісьменніка»; выпуск 46). — ISBN 978-985-562-096-0.
  • (German) Secondhand-Zeit. Leben auf den Trümmern des Sozialismus. Hanser Berlin, München 2013, ISBN 978-3-446-24150-3; als Taschenbuch: Suhrkamp, Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-46572-1.^[43]
  • (English, US) Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Random House 2016 (ISBN 978-0399588808), translated by Bela Shayevich.
• Зачарованные смертью (Zacharovannye Smertyu, Enchanted with Death) (Belarusian: 1993, Russian: 1994)
  • (German) Im Banne des Todes. Geschichten russischer Selbstmörder. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3-10-000818-9).
  • (German) Seht mal, wie ihr lebt. Russische Schicksale nach dem Umbruch. Berlin (Aufbau, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-7466-7020-9.

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Svetlana Alexievich.

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Svetlana Alexievich

• Svetlana Alexievich's website - Contains biography, bibliography and excerpts.
• Biography at the international literature festival berlin

Interviews

• "The Guardian, A Life In..." , Interview by Luke Harding, April 2016
• "A Conversation with Svetlana Alexievich", Dalkey Archive Press

Excerpts

• Selections from Voices From Chernobyl in The Paris Review, 2015

Articles about Svetlana Alexievich

• "The Truth in Many Voices" Timothy Snyder, NYRB, October 2015
• "The Memory Keeper" Masha Gessen, The New Yorker, October 2015.
• A conspiracy of ignorance and obedience, The Telegraph, 2015
• Svetlana Alexievich: Belarusian Language Is Rural And Literary Unripe, Belarus Digest, June 2013

Other

• Lukashenko's comment on Alexievich (1''12 video, in Russian, no subtitles)
• Svetlana Alexievich at Goodreads
• Svetlana Alexievich Quotes With Pictures at Rugusavay.com
• Appearances on C-SPAN

Can someone fix this page?