Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievich, 67, woke up famous on Oct. 8, 2015. On that day, the Swedish Academy announced that Alexievich had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, the world’s most prestigious writing award.
A former journalist, Alexievich has authored five non-fiction books on oral histories and personal accounts of some of the region’s biggest catastrophes: the Second World War, the Chornobyl nuclear disaster, the Afghan war and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Alexievich was well-known in literature circles in Ukraine, Russia, and her home country of Belarus, as well as across Western Europe. Her books have been translated into 50 languages.
But it took the Nobel Prize to turn this Belarusian writer into a mainstream author known to a global audience.
Nobel factor
In the months after the awarding of the prize, Alexievich’s books, reprinted by Ukrainian publishers, have been given prominent places on the “recommended” shelves in the bookstores across Kyiv.
Writer Oksana Zabuzhko, who translated Alexievich’s “Voices from Chornobyl” into Ukrainian back in 1998, said that 2,000 copies of that translation were sold within three weeks of the announcement that the writer had won the Nobel Prize. In comparison, the original print run of the 1998 translation was 1,000 copies, which took 15 years to sell out, Zabuzhko wrote in a blog on the Deutsche Welle Ukrainian website.
The prize, with its attendant publicity, has also brought scrutiny on the little-known writer.
Alexievich, a writer not used to the limelight, and who has the appearance of a kindly old school teacher, suddenly became a controversial figure for her political positions.
She was quickly attacked for a perceived lack of patriotism and loyalty to Belarus. The basis of these accusations was she wrote in Russian, not Belarusian. Besides, in her books Alexievich focuses on the Soviet Union and its aftermath, rather than Belarus.
Another criticism is that back in 2000, she left Belarus due to disagreements with President Aleksander Lukashenko – also known as Europe’s last dictator — and moved to Western Europe.
However, she returned in 2011, even though Lukashenko was still in power.
Alexievich addressed these and other issues during her lecture at the Taras Shevchenko University in Kyiv on April 6.
Belarusian writer and dissident Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Literature Prize, autographs one of her books in Berlin on Oct.10 (AFP)
Ukraine ties
The free lecture was little advertised, but still attracted several hundred attendees. As is traditional for visiting foreign artist, Alexievich started her speech by saying how much she likes Ukraine. But while others say that as a meaningless courtesy, Alexievich actually means it.
Although she grew up in Belarus, the writer spent her summers in a Ukrainian village with her grandparents. She was born in Ivano-Frankivsk in western Ukraine to a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother.
It was in western Ukraine that she first encountered oral history. All the talk in the village was about the war, dubbed in the Soviet Union as the Great Patriotic War. Few men had survived, so the stories that Alexievich heard were told by women.
Years later, these personal accounts of the war heard in a Ukrainian village inspired Alexievich to write her first book, “The Unwomanly Face of War,” a collection of memories of the Soviet women who participated in World War as volunteer soldiers or military nurses.
Published in 1983, the book contained shocking memories that contrasted bleakly to the way the Great Patriotic War was presented in Soviet literature and art.
One of the women whom Alexievich interviewed for the book recalled how, after she had returned as a much-decorated war hero to her own village, her own mother had refused to let her back into the family home. The mother was worried that nobody would want to marry her younger daughters when they found out that their older sister had disgraced herself by living side-by-side with male soldiers for several years.
“The Unwomanly Face of War” was the first book in a series called “The Voices From Utopia,” currently consisting of five volumes. Each is based on hundreds of interviews and each one took Alexievich from seven to 10 years to write.
Now, the writer is working on two more books that she says will be her last literary works. She says the two future books focus on old age and death.
Alexievich is the first author to win the Nobel Prize for a non-fiction book. By granting her the prize, the Swedish Academy elevated Alexievich to the same rank as previous Nobel laureates William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett and Rudyard Kipling.
Alexievich said the decision to grant the prize to a non-fiction writer had been an inevitable one.
“This idea has been hanging in the air for a long time,” she said. “Everyone is looking for new forms. Just look at modern art.”
Belarus pressure
As a writer, Alexievich is caught in a tough position. While she is a self-proclaimed anatomist of the soul of “homo sovieticus,” she is also the best known Belarusian writer in the world. She attracts a great deal of attention from Belarusian nationalists keen to know her political opinions, and who accuse her of a lack of patriotism.
“I love Belarus and support the Belarusian language. But I write about the (Soviet) empire, and its language was Russian,” Alexievich said at the lecture in Kyiv.
She sighed when she talked about her native country and the dictatorship of Lukashenko, who has been the president of Belarus for 22 years.
“We have fallen behind considerably during the reign of Lukashenko. As a nation, we are behind the times. Lukashenko has stopped time,” she said.
Top 5 quotes from Svetlana Alexievich’s lecture in Kyiv on April 6:
About her genre: “The time of heroes is gone. The little man deserves his right to a story. This is what I was thinking about when I looked for a new form (of literature).”
About Ukraine: “You are worthy of envy. However hard it is for you now, you are in a new life. You have done it.”
About her experience in journalism: “I worked in a newspaper for seven years and I felt like I was a cat in a mouse trap. Everything I was interested in, the paper was not.”
About the interviews she recorded: “People speak beautifully when they are in love, or after they have seen death. Love and death are the two experiences that lift a man higher than his usual self.”
On how she feels after authoring three books about war: “I don’t visit war museums and don’t like reading war books. My armor is worn out.”
