The day after the 2020 election, which marked the Belarusian president’s sixth consecutive term in office, Svetlana Alexievich watched as “hundreds of thousands of people” marched outside her apartment in Minsk.
“I thought they would never get up, but they did. It was perhaps one of the most intense sensations I have experienced in my life,” says the author and 2015 Nobel Prize winner for literature.
Part of that feeling was “a naive hope, but hope nonetheless.”
Alexievich took part in the protests against elections that are considered rigged and against the Coordination Council, which is responsible for preparing new elections and a peaceful transfer of power.
But little by little, as the weeks went by, hope faded.
“Now it’s clear how romantic we were,” he says.
The protests were brutally suppressed and members of the Coordination Council were arrested one after another until Alexievich, then 72, was the only one who had not yet been arrested.
When masked men tried to break into his apartment, several foreign embassies came to his aid. For two weeks, European diplomats and their wives took turns guarding the house, but eventually she had no choice but to leave.
Alexievich says that she was able to take a flight to Berlin thanks to the accompaniment of German Deputy Ambassador Anna Luther to the airport. He took almost nothing with him and hoped to return soon. But he has now been in the German capital for five years and has little prospect of returning home.
Svetlana Alexievich, 77, has dedicated more than 40 years to chronicling the lives of people in the Soviet Union and the independent states that emerged after the dissolution of the communist bloc. Also the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan War and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
His books are called Voices of Utopia, an ironic reference to the communist experiment that lasted 70 years.
“I wanted to describe this attempt at a utopia and show how people lived it in their hearts and homes,” he says.
But the reality that Alexievich describes in his books is anything but utopian. For this reason, his books were removed from the study programs in Russia and Belarus. Furthermore, she was censored and prosecuted until she ended up in exile.
Internationally the story is different. Alexievich’s books have been translated into 52 languages, published in 55 countries and won him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015.
In his Berlin apartment, on a large wooden table, there are dozens of notes for his next book, which he began writing after the events of 2020.
He speaks to young people who took to the streets that day and asks them what they wanted and what disappointed them today.
“Maybe we love revolutions too much. They don’t always fulfill our hopes… Well, now I don’t support revolutions, I don’t support bloodshed.”
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s, “it seemed as if we were all freed from captivity,” Alexievich says. However, the “red man,” the incarnation of the Soviet regime, did not die with the empire.
“He’s shooting in Ukraine, he’s sitting in the Kremlin. No, he’s not dead yet,” he adds.
In each of her books, Alexievich interviews hundreds of people and artfully combines their testimonies into what she calls “a novel with voices.”
“It’s an attempt to turn everyday life into literature. I choose works of art from real life,” he says, comparing it to the method of the sculptor Rodin, who said he started with a block of marble and cut out what he didn’t need.
“I love the way people talk,” he said in his 2015 Nobel Prize speech. “I love the lone human voice. It is my greatest love and my greatest passion.”
The reaction to her Nobel Prize in Belarus was “wonderful” and in Minsk she ran out of champagne and people hugged her in the street, she says.
Even Alexander Lukashenko, a former collective farm manager and the country’s president for 31 years, said he would read her books, although she does not believe he has done so.
“He has a different view of the world,” he says.
Alexievich remembers growing up in villages populated mostly by women after the devastation of World War II.
Millions of Belarusians died in the war, and millions of those who fought in Europe were sent to the gulags upon their return.
“You were only happy at weddings, but those were very rare occasions because most of the young people had died.”
For this reason, women are Alexievich’s most popular heroines in his books. Her first book, “The Unfeminine Face of War” (1985), was about female veterans.
A million Soviet women volunteered as soldiers and doctors, but their contribution was virtually invisible until Alexievich brought it to light in her books.
The stories are terrible and frightening, but not without humor. For example, a woman told Alexievich that the worst thing about military service was having to wear men’s underwear.
“If they hadn’t told their stories and I hadn’t recorded them, everything would have disappeared without us knowing,” he says.
After the perestroika reforms of the 1980s, Alexievich’s book became a bestseller with a circulation of two million copies in Russian.
But his next book, The Zinc Boys (1991), sparked controversy. It was named after the galvanized coffins in which the bodies of Soviet soldiers were shipped from Afghanistan.
Alexievich had been in Kabul as a journalist. On this occasion he found something beautiful in the handsome men in uniform and their shiny weapons.
But he didn’t like war, especially when he saw entire cities destroyed by multiple rocket launchers. The author says it was important for her to see how far people can go.
“Art is generally immoral because you are spying on the pain of others. It is the pain of others that gives you the opportunity to grow.”
After the book was published, Alexievich was taken to court by veterans and mothers of fallen soldiers who accused her of slander and desecration of soldiers’ honor.
“The book was about the terrible situation their children were put in and became murderers. And then they faced the truths they feared most.”
But the book he most wants to read is “Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future” (1997).
“I am afraid that today every modern person should know something about the atom and its dangers,” he says.
He fears that Russian attacks on Ukrainian power plants, including those that provide emergency power for the safety of nuclear reactors, could trigger a new catastrophe.
The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 sent radioactive clouds north over his home in Minsk.
He then spent time in the exclusion zone around the damaged plant, interviewing people who continued to live there and pass on their food despite the risk of contamination.
“I couldn’t, like Western journalists, listen to all these terrible stories about how a daughter died, was born without arms and legs, and then, when we were invited to the table, casually eat a sandwich,” he says.
Alexievich’s book inspired several characters in the popular 2019 television miniseries “Chernobyl,” including the wife of one of the first firefighters to die of radiation poisoning, Lyudmila Ignatenko. When the series aired, she was upset by the enormous media interest in her life.
“But there is no way to tell a story without intervening in someone’s life,” says Alexievich.
And many people want their stories to be known.
The wife of another firefighter Alexievich interviewed bribed her way to the hospital where her husband was dying so that she could be with him in his final days. Her pain was only eased, she said to Alexievich, when they made love; “Then he was silent for a while.”
To protect the woman from public condemnation, Alexievich gave her a false name. But she called her after the first issue came out and asked why she did that.
“I didn’t want them to hurt you,” Alexievich told him. She replied: “No, I suffered a lot, he suffered a lot. Tell the truth, even if it costs my heart.”
Despite the dark subject matter, love is a recurring theme in Alexievich’s books.
“I’ve always believed that I write about love. I don’t collect horrors, I collect demonstrations of the human spirit,” he said in 2015.
The Nobel Prize judges described his works as “a monument to the suffering and courage of our time.”
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