This work shows evil seeping deeply into the soul, with terrifyingly persistent effect.Īlexievich begins by describing herself, her family, and most of those she knows in the different nations of the old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as sovoks-people who were nurtured from birth into an “interior” socialism that, she says, molded every “person’s soul.” While she sought out people to interview who were “bound to the Soviet ideal,” the range of views is wide if not necessarily representative. In a way, her narrative surpasses Solzhenitsyn’s tragedy, which simply exposed unbearable brutality and evil. Even the materialistic Scandinavians were obliged to use the proper term, “soul.” The Nobel presentation described Secondhand Time as “a history of emotions-a history of the soul.” It truly is about emotions, especially the later chapters, but it is much deeper. The book is too daunting to summarize like Gulag it must be read. Alexievich simply interviews a surprisingly large number of people who lived through the Soviet days and they basically write the book for her.
It is an absolutely indispensable look into the human condition.Įven the Swedish Academy had the sense to award the Belarusian, Russian-language author the Nobel Prize for literature, hailing it as “a new kind of literary genre.” Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets can only be compared to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago (1973).
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