Belarusian Voice of Survivors Alexievich awarded Nobel Literature Prize

Unlike other literary awards, the Nobel has no shortlist, no long list, no hyped announcements of judges and juries. It is, in other words, open to endless speculation. The names of Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich, Japanese novelist and spaghetti-enthusiast Haruki Murakami, and Kenyan novelist Ngugi Wa Thiong'o were waving in the air that either of them would win this prestigious award this year and finally we came to learn the name of  67-year-old Belarusian writer and journalist Svetlana Alexievich. She is the 14th woman to receive this prestigious honour. Her investigative reports from a politically turbulent Russia, along with her literary style of writing, has made her a favourite among critics for many years.
The literature Alexievich expresses is the great chronicled tragedies of the Soviet Union and its collapse, World War II, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and the suicides that ensued from the death of Communism. Her first novel, "The Unwomanly Face of the War," published in 1985 and based on the previously untold stories of women who had fought against the Nazi Germans, sold more than two million copies. Her books have been published in nineteen countries. The significant features of her literature is that she collected hundreds of interviews from people whose lives were affected by these tumultuous events, putting them together in works that were like a "musical composition". She went around Russia interviewing people after the fall of the Soviet Union, in an attempt to surmise what the collective post-Soviet psyche is. As with all her books, it's really harrowing - a story about loss of identity, about finding yourself in a country which you don't recognise any more. It's a micro-historical survey of Russia in the second half of the 20th century, and it goes up to the Putin years. We can learn the theme of her works when she clandestinely says: "I love the good Russian world, the humanitarian Russian world, but I do not love the Russian world of Beria, Stalin and Shoigu". The Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expresses reactions thus: "Of course, we congratulate her. But I'm sure she does not possess the information to make a positive evaluation of what is happening in Ukraine."
Alexievich was born on May 31, 1948 in the Ukrainian town of Ivano-Frankovsk into a family of a serviceman. Her father is Belarusian and her mother is Ukrainian. After her father's demobilisation from the army the family returned to his native Belorussia and settled in a village where both parents worked as schoolteachers. Aleixevich left school to work as a reporter on the local paper in the town of Narovl. She studied journalism in college, and after graduation, worked at a newspaper in Brest, near the Polish border. Later, she began searching for a literary form that would allow her to capture the lives and voices of the individuals at the centre of historic events. She gravitated toward oral history, which allowed her to adopt her subject's voices like a chameleon and to reflect a diverse range of experience. Because of her criticism of the government in Belarus, a former Soviet republic, Ms Alexievich has periodically lived abroad, in Italy, France, Germany and Sweden, among other places. In a 2013 interview with German television, she said she hoped the international attention would give her "a degree of protection" in Belarus, where press freedom is under constant threat.
Alexievich  has written short stories, essays and reportage but says she found her voice under the influence of the Belorusian writer Ales Adamovich, who developed a genre which he variously called the "collective novel", "novel-oratorio", "novel-evidence", "people talking about themselves" and the "epic chorus". "For the past 30 or 40 years Alexievich has been busy mapping the Soviet and Post-Soviet individual," Danius said, "but it's not really about a history of events. It's a history of emotions - what she's offering us is really an emotional world, so these historical events she's covering in her various books, for example the Chernobyl disaster, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, these are in a way just pretexts for exploring the Soviet individual and the post-Soviet individual". She has  conducted thousands and thousands of interviews with children, with women and with men, and in this way she is  offering us a history of human beings about whom we didn't know that much  and at the same time she's offering us a history of emotions, a history of the soul. In Voices From Chernobyl, Alexievich interviews hundreds of those affected by the nuclear disaster, from a woman holding her dying husband despite being told by nurses that "that's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor" to the soldiers sent in to help, angry at being "flung there, like sand on the reactor". In Zinky Boys, she gathers voices from the Afghan war: soldiers, doctors, widows and mothers.
"I don't ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age," Alexievich writes in the introduction to Second-hand Time, which is due from independent publisher Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2016. "Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths. History is only interested in facts; emotions are excluded from its realm of interest. It's considered improper to admit them into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people. "Almost one million Soviet women participated in the war, and it's a largely unknown history. She wants the world to know this fact through her work. Her works are touching documents which tend to bring close to every individual.  
While Alexievich has developed a global audience over the years, currently just three of her books are available in English, though more translations are in the works. In the United States, Ms Alexievich is best known for the oral history "Voices From Chernobyl," which was published in 2005. The book, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a compilation of interviews with survivors of the nuclear reactor accident. She spent ten years visiting the Chernobyl zone and conducted more than five hundred interviews. Her most recent book, "Second-Hand Time," which was published in 2013 and is currently being translated into English, is her biggest and most ambitious - another work of oral history that draws on hundreds of interviews with Russians who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union, spanning from the early 1990s to 2012. Bela Shayevich, who is currently translating Alexievich into English for Fitzcarraldo, also paid tribute to her skills as an interviewer which leave her work "resounding with nothing but the truth". "The truth of life in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia is not an easy thing to swallow," Shayevich said. "I'm thrilled that this win will mean that more readers will be exposed to the metaphysical dimensions of her subjects' survival and despair through the tragedies of Soviet history. I hope that in reading her, more people will see the ways that suffering - even suffering brought on by geopolitical circumstances which are foreign to many readers." We congratulate Alexievich on her winning the prestigious Nobel Prize in Literature for bringing people closer to one another through her works and chronicling the horrors of war and life under the repressive Soviet regime.

The writer works as an education specialist in BRAC Education Program and is on the BELTA Executive Committee. Email: [email protected]