Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexandrovna Alexievich (born 31 May 1948) is a Belarusian investigative journalist, essayist and oral historian who writes in Russian.

Born in the west Ukrainian town of Stanislav (Ivano-Frankivsk since 1962) to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, Svetlana Alexievich grew up in Belarus.

After graduating from high school she worked as a reporter in several local newspapers.

In 1972 she graduated from Belarusian State University and became a correspondent for the literary magazine Nyoman in Minsk (1976).

The course of the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989) is told through emotive personal testimony from unnamed participants of the war; from nurses to commissioned officers and pilots, mothers and widows.

Each provides an excerpt of the Soviet-Afghan War which was disguised in the face of criticism first as political support, then intervention, and finally humanitarian aid to the Afghan people.

Alexievich writes at the beginning of the book:

"After the great wars of the twentieth century and the mass deaths, writing about the modern (small) wars, like the war in Afghanistan, requires different ethical and metaphysical stances. What must be reclaimed is the small, the personal, and the specific. The single human being. The only human being for someone, not as the state regards him, but who he is for his mother, for his wife, for his child. How can we recover a normal vision of life?"

Alexievich was not embedded with the Red Army due to her reputation in the Soviet Union; instead, she travelled to Kabul on her own prerogative during the war and gathered many accounts from veterans returning from Afghanistan.

In "Boys in Zinc", Alexievich calls herself 'a historian of the untraceable' and 'strive[s] desperately (from book to book) to do one thing - reduce history to the human being.' She brings brutally honest accounts of the war to lay at the feet of the Soviet people but claims no heroism for herself: 'I went [to watch them assemble pieces of boys blown up by an anti-tank mine] and there was nothing heroic about it because I fainted there.

Perhaps it was from the heat, perhaps from the shock.

I want to be honest.' The monologues which make up the book are honest (if edited for clarity) reproductions of the oral histories Alexievich collected, including those who perhaps did not understand her purpose: 'What's your book for?

Who's it for?

The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr, a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.

Her first book, War's Unwomanly Face, came out in 1985.

It was repeatedly reprinted and sold more than two million copies.

In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years.

This non-fiction oral history book is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of World War II that had never been related before.

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.

In 1989 Alexievich's book Zinky Boys, about the fallen soldiers who had returned in zinc coffins from the Soviet-Afghan War of 1979 – 1985, was the subject of controversy, and she was accused of "defamation" and "desecration of the soldiers' honor".

Alexievich was tried a number of times between 1992 and 1996.

In 1992, Alexievich published "Boys in Zinc".

After political persecution by the Lukashenko administration, she left Belarus in 2000.

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.

Alexievich's books trace the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual through carefully constructed collages of interviews.

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.

Belarusian poet Uladzimir Nyaklyayew called Adamovich "her literary godfather".

He also named the documentary novel I'm From Fire Village (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.

Alexievich has confirmed the influence of Adamovich and Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ, among others.

She regards Varlam Shalamov as the best writer of the 20th century.

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) and an oral history of the Chernobyl disaster (Chernobyl Prayer / Voices from Chernobyl).

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."

She was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".

She is the first writer from Belarus to receive the award.

In a 2015 interview, she mentioned early influences: "I explored the world through people like Hanna Krall and Ryszard Kapuściński."

During her career in journalism, Alexievich specialized in crafting narratives based on witness testimonies.

In the process, she wrote artfully constructed oral histories of several dramatic events in Soviet history: the Second World War, Afghan War, dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl disaster.