The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Belarusian journalist and writer of 67 years for “his polyphonic work, a monument to the courage and suffering of our time”.
Background reports journalist Svetlana Alexievich on the political turmoil in Russia, along with his literary style, had become a favorite among critics for many years.
The Academy has never chosen a winner for their work (Gabriel García Márquez was a journalist before to write his novels, and the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa had an early flirtation with the genre, which quickly abandoned), but Maria Schottenius, literary critic of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, said that they had set their sights on the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski, and possibly They would have given if he had not died in 2007. The work of Alexievich
, which highlights their literary reports about Chernobyl or women in World War II, has to do primarily with the former Union Soviet.
However, there are other jobs that also addresses the current situation in his country, Belarus, and Russia.
End of Soviet utopia
The truth is that Alexievich is a masterpiece of literary reportage, genre with which starkly recounts the failure of the Soviet utopia.
“Soviet man has not disappeared. It is a mixture of prison and nursery. No decisions and is just waiting for the deal. For that kind of man, freedom is to have twenty kinds of sausage to choose, “he told EFE on receiving the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade (2013).
Image of an archaeologist, is Alexievich immersed with the help of hundreds of interviews in the most traumatic events that have marked the life of homo Sovieticus, as the Second World War, the Afghanistan War, the Chernobyl catastrophe and the disintegration of the USSR.
not Alexievich it remains stuck in the past, but documented very critically the course that have been taken since 1991 countries like Russia, whose President Vladimir Putin, accused of leading his country to the Middle Ages, with its “cult of force.”
Born Sovieticus homo
the Belarusian father and Ukrainian mother, Alexievich he born on May 31, 1948 in western Ukraine, but later his family emigrated to neighboring Belarus.
He worked as a teacher of history and German language, but soon decided to pursue his true passion, the story, and in fact, in 1972 graduated from the Faculty of Journalism of Minsk and worked as an editor for several newspapers in his country.
His first book, The war has no woman’s face (1983), it took a drubbing from the Soviet authorities, who accused her of naturalism and pacifism, harsh criticism at the time, which prevented its publication.
Although he joined in 1984 at the Union of Writers of the Soviet Union, could not publish until the arrival of perestroika in 1985 the first book of its cycle The red man, the voice of utopia.
translated into more twenty languages, the book tells the immeasurable cost of the victory over Nazi Germany in the Great Patriotic War (1941-1945), as it is known in that part of World War II world.
Although most Soviet soldiers were men-about one million women served in the Red Army, both women suffered in the battle front as in the rear as mothers, daughters and sisters.
That same year, he also published Latest witness accounts that were highly praised by critics as precursors of the “new war prose” and that includes the voices of those who lived Children (6-12 years) the contest.
Afghanistan War, an event that precipitated the Soviet collapse, is the protagonist of Children of zinc (1989), but from the standpoint of veterans and mothers of those killed in the Central Asian country.
To write this book, devoted four Alexievich years traveling the Soviet Union, and even visited Afghanistan, but its publication was surrounded by controversy, as the writer was accused of desecrating the memory of war heroes.
The end dela USSR
Once consummated the fall of the USSR, Alexievich gave a new twist in his research on the failure of the communist utopia with Bewitched by death, a literary story about the suicide of those who could not stand failure socialist myth (1994).
Voices of Chernobyl (1997) documents the experiences on oral trauma of the worst nuclear disaster in history (1986), which highlighted the threat that failed Soviet project represented to the world.
Alexievich closed the cycle on homo Sovieticus used with Time, published in 2013, a year that sounded like one of the favorites for the Nobel.
your opinion, the title of the book refers to the Soviets living on borrowed time, because they were not prepared either for the Bolshevik Revolution, or for perestroika or for the heavy burden of freedom that brought about the downfall of the communist system.
> “The homo Sovieticus has never had experience of freedom or democracy. We thought nothing down statue (KGB founder Felix) Dzherzhinski, we would be Europe. Democracy is hard work that takes generations, “said
The writer recalls the old debate between Alexander Solzhenitsyn -.” Fieldwork makes the strongest man “- and Varlam Shalamov, who believed that” destroys the field man, because leaving can no longer keep watching, believing that the world is a GULAG “.
Alexievich partners are gripped by a deep” defeatist sense, “not so much for the disappointment of the fall of the Soviet Union, but by the end of a great empire.
often compared to Solzhenitsyn and the Polish Ryszard Kapuscinski, Belarus, author of three plays and 21 screenplays, now preparing a new novel leaves his red cycle: love
.
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