Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich (born May 31, 1948, Stanislav, Ukraine, U.S.S.R. [now Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine]) is a Belarusian journalist and prose writer, a Russian-language author of meticulously crafted works of depth and introspection that provided a compelling and uncompromising portrayal of the social and political upheaval within the Soviet Union from the postwar era to the fall of communism. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. One of a minority of laureates recognized as a dedicated writer of nonfiction, Alexievich devised a hybrid literary genre that evolved as “the closest possible approximation to real life,” wherein human voices were allowed to speak for themselves about the main events of the age. Her body of work constituted “a living history” of Soviet and post-Soviet culture that provoked controversy and official repudiation. The first Belarusian author and the 14th woman to win the literature prize, Alexievich was cited by the Swedish Academy “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

Alexievich was born to a Belarusian father in military service and a Ukrainian mother; both were teachers. From 1967 to 1972 she studied journalism at the University of Minsk; afterward she worked as a reporter in Byaroza, Brest region, near the Polish border, and then in Minsk. Influenced by the oral tradition of Russian storytelling and the innovative literary reportage of prominent contemporary authors Ales Adamovich and Artyom Borovik, she blended journalism and literature as a means to create what she described as “a history of human feelings.” Deemed unpatriotic and seditious by authorities, her early works remained unpublished until the political reformation in the mid-1980s initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s liberalizing policy of perestroika.

In 1985 Alexievich published U voyny ne zhenskoe litso (War’s Unwomanly Face; also translated as The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II), an investigative study that chronicled the lives of Soviet women during World War II, followed that same year by Poslednie svideteli (Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II), a collection of reminiscences of war as seen through the eyes of children. Based on detailed research and interviews with hundreds of women, U voyny ne zhenskoe litso earned widespread critical recognition and established her reputation as an “oral historian” of collective identity. Alexievich designated the publication as the first volume of a literary cycle, Voices of Utopia, which was designed to depict life in the Soviet Union through what people “thought, understood, and remembered.”

Published in 1990, Tsinkovye malchiki (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War; also translated as Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War) exposed the hidden, undocumented futility of the Soviet intervention (1979–89) in the Afghan War (1978–92) and served to demystify the role of nationalism and Soviet autonomy. The title referred to the zinc coffins used by the military to return the Soviet dead. In 1997 she published Chernobylskaya molitva: khronika budushchego (Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the Future; also translated as Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster), which confronted the devastating consequences of the Chernobyl disaster as told by witnesses and victims of the catastrophic nuclear power station accident. Labeled a dissident journalist with anti-Soviet sentiments, she experienced intimidation as well as harassment: her writing was subjected to censorship or banned from publication, she was publicly denounced for “defamation” and “slander,” and her opposition to the political regime in Belarus forced her into an extended period of self-imposed exile. Nevertheless, she persisted on her chosen path. She enlarged the scope of her creative vision with the publication in 2013 of Vremya sekond chend (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets), which examined the legacy of communism in the aftermath of the demise of the Soviet Union.

As a writer, Alexievich achieved international stature and garnered numerous literary awards, notably the Kurt Tucholsky Prize (1996), the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding (1998), the Herder Prize (1999), the Sandro Onofri Prize (2002), the National Book Critics Circle Award (2005), the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award for Freedom of Expression (2007), and the Prix Médicis Essai (2013). Determined to capture and preserve the essence of humanity from the stories of those who lived through the events that shaped the history of the former Soviet Union and modern-day Belarus, Alexievich perceived her craft as a literary art that reflected the struggle for truth, dignity, and self-worth. She explained:

This is how I hear and see the world—as a chorus of individual voices and a collage of everyday details. This is how my eye and ear function. In this way all my mental and emotional potential is realized to the full. In this way I can be simultaneously a writer, reporter, sociologist, psychologist, and preacher.