The day after the 2020 election which guaranteed the Belarusian president his sixth consecutive term, Belarusian writer Svetlana Alexievitch remembers seeing “hundreds of thousands of people” parade in front of her apartment in Minsk (Belarus).
“I thought they would never get back up, but they did. It was perhaps one of the strongest feelings I have ever felt in my life,” said the 2015 Nobel Prize-winning writer.
Part of that feeling, he said, was “naive hope – but hope nonetheless.”
Alexievich joined protests against elections widely seen as rigged and joined a Coordination Council created to prepare for new elections and a peaceful transition of power.
But little by little, as the weeks went by, the feeling of hope faded.
“Now it’s clear how romantic we were,” he said.
The protests were brutally suppressed, while members of the Coordination Council were arrested one by one, until Alexievich, then aged 72, was the only one left free.
When masked men tried to break into his apartment, foreign embassies came to his aid. For two weeks, European diplomats and their spouses took turns guarding her home, but it eventually became clear that she would have to leave the country.
Alexievich said she was only able to board a flight to Berlin, Germany, because she was accompanied to the airport by Germany’s deputy ambassador, Anna Luther.
She took almost nothing with her, hoping to return soon, but she has already lived in the German capital for five years and has little chance of returning home.
Describe “utopia”
Now 77, Svetlana Alexievich has spent more than 40 years documenting the lives of people in the Soviet Union and the independent states that emerged after its collapse. She recorded her experiences during World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The books are collectively known as Voices of utopiain an ironic reference to the 70-year communist experience.
“I wanted to describe this attempt at utopia, to show how it lived in people’s hearts and homes,” he said.
But the reality she describes is far from utopian. As a result, his books were removed from school curricula in Russia and Belarus. She was censored, prosecuted and is now effectively exiled.
Internationally, the story is different. Alexievich’s books have been translated into 52 languages and published in 55 countries. She won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.
In his Berlin apartment, a large wooden table is covered with notes for his next book, which he began writing after the events of 2020.
For this work, she interviews young people who took to the streets, asking them what they wanted at the time and what disappoints them today.
“Maybe we loved revolutions too much,” he said. “They do not always justify our hopes… Well, now I no longer support revolutions, I do not support bloodshed.”
“I love the lonely human voice”
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, “it seemed like we were all freed from captivity,” Alexievich said, recalling another moment of hope.
But, according to her, “the red man”, personification of the Soviet regime, did not disappear with the empire.
“He’s filming in Ukraine, he’s sitting in the Kremlin,” he said. “No, he’s not dead yet.”
For each of her books, Alexievich interviews hundreds of people, carefully combining their testimonies into what she calls “a novel of voices.”
“It’s an attempt to transform everyday life into literature. We simply choose works of art taken from real life,” he says, comparing the method to that of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), who claimed to start with a block of marble and remove everything that was not necessary.
“I love the way humans speak,” she said during her Nobel Prize lecture in 2015. “I love the solitary human voice. It is my greatest love and my greatest passion.”
The reaction to her Nobel Prize in Belarus was “wonderful”, she said. Minsk would run out of champagne and people would crowd her in the streets.
Even Alexander Lukashenko, former director of a state collective farm in the Soviet Union and president of Belarus for 31 years, said he would read her books, although she doubts that is the case.
“He has a different view of the world,” he said.
“Beloved Heroines”
Alexievich remembers growing up in villages populated mainly by women, after the devastation of World War II.
Millions of Belarusians died during the war, and millions of those who fought in Europe were sent to the gulag (the Soviet Union’s labor camp system) upon their return.
“It was only at weddings that people were happy, but it was very rare because most of the young people were dead.”
This is why, she says, women are the “main beloved heroines” of her books. The first of them, War has no woman’s face (1985), deals with women war veterans.
About a million Soviet women volunteered as soldiers or doctors, but their contributions were largely ignored until Alexievich wrote about them.
The stories are gruesome and terrifying, but not without humor: One of the women told the author that one of the worst things about serving in the army was having to wear men’s underwear.
“Spying” on pain
“If they hadn’t told their stories and if I hadn’t recorded them, all of this would have disappeared and we wouldn’t know anything about it,” he said.
After the Perestroika (economic restructuring) reforms in the 1980s, Alexievich’s book became a bestsellerwith 2 million copies published in Russian.
But his next book, Zinc Boysfrom 1991, caused controversy. The title refers to the zinc-plated coffins in which the bodies of Soviet soldiers killed in Afghanistan were repatriated.
Alexievich had gone to Kabul, Afghanistan, as a journalist and said he found something beautiful in the men in uniform and their shiny weapons. But the war also repelled her, especially the sight of entire villages razed by multiple rocket launchers.
She said it was important as a writer to witness what people are capable of.
“In general, art is immoral. You spy on the pain of others. It is the pain of others that gives you the opportunity to grow.”
After the book was released, Alexievich was sued by veterans and mothers of fallen soldiers, who accused her of defamation and desecration of the honor of the army.
“The book was about the terrible thing his children had been involved in, how they had become murderers,” he said. “And then they came face to face with the truths they feared.”
Chernobyl Prayer
But the book she would most like everyone to read is Voices from Chernobylfrom 1997, which bears the subtitle “Chronicle of the Future”.
“I fear that today every modern person needs to know something about the atom and its dangers,” he said.
She fears that Russian attacks on power plants in Ukraine, including those that provide backup electricity to keep nuclear reactors safe, could trigger a new disaster.
The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 sent radioactive clouds north over his hometown of Minsk, Belarus.
She then spent time in the exclusion zone around the stricken nuclear power plant, interviewing people who continued to live there and share their food – despite the risk of contamination.
“I could not, as Western journalists did, hear all these terrible stories about a dead girl, born without arms, without legs, and then, when we were invited to the table, eat a separate sandwich,” he said.
Alexievitch’s book inspired several characters in the television miniseries Chernobyl (2019), of great repercussion – notably the wife of one of the first firefighters to die of radiation poisoning, Lyudmila Ignatenko. When the series aired, she said she was upset by the enormous media interest in her life.
“But there’s no way to tell a story without invading someone’s life,” Alexievich said.
And many people want their story to be known.
The wife of another firefighter interviewed by Alexievich bribed employees to enter the hospital where her husband was dying, in order to stay with him in the final days of his life.
Her pain was only relieved, she told the writer, when they made love – “then he would be silent for a while.”
To protect her from public condemnation, Alexievich gave the woman a false name. But after the first edition of the book came out, she called to ask why.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” Alexievitch told him.
She replied: “No. I suffered so much, he suffered so much. Tell the truth, even if it costs my heart.”
Despite the dark themes, love is a constant element in Alexievich’s books.
“I always believed that I write about love. I don’t collect horrors, I collect manifestations of the human spirit,” she said in 2015.
Nobel jurors described his work as “a monument to the suffering and courage of our times”.
This content was created as a co-production between Nobel Prize Outreach and the BBC.
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