The writer and journalist Svetlana Aleksievich entered the shortlist of the Big Book Prize with her book “Second Hand Time” and won the reader’s vote. The winners of the award will be announced today, November 25. Psychologies magazine wishes Svetlana Alexandrovna victory and publishes a translation of a fragment of her interview for the French edition of Philosophie magazine.
Psychologies: Your latest book Second Hand Time completes the feature-documentary series Voices of Utopia. The theme of nostalgia for the Soviet Union, which collapsed a quarter of a century ago, sounds very strongly and clearly in it. And Minsk, where you live, remains a vivid example of the Soviet lifestyle.
Svetlana Alexievich: This book explores the roots of a phenomenon that we are witnessing today in Russia and in many of the former Soviet republics – the return to the Soviet system. Belarus is a slightly different case: we don’t have to go back to socialism because we never left! After the collapse of the USSR, President Alexander Lukashenko stopped time. And, having seen that reforms in other countries of the post-Soviet space led to instability and did not give a quick result, Belarusians gladly remained in Soviet life. They are afraid of change.
The collapse of the USSR was perceived by most people as a tragedy. For example, my father was completely bewildered when this happened. He sincerely believed in communism. He believed that it would be enough just to wash and clean this structure a little, but not to destroy it to the ground. However, he was not spoiled, but a very honest and sincere person. And there are many such examples in Second Hand Time.
Many regret the passing of an era in which the cult of sacrificing the personal for the benefit of the public was maintained. When it was considered indecent to have a lot of money, when altruism was valued. The worst thing is that not only those who already lived there want to return, but also their children. There are many communists among today’s young people. I do not think that it will be easy for us to free ourselves from the socialist past.
The well-known Polish dissident Adam Michnik, when asked what was the worst thing in socialism, replied: “What came after him …”
S.A.: This is a very accurate phrase. After socialism, an absolutely bewildered person remained, not knowing how to live on. The people who came to power in Russia after the collapse of the USSR plundered the country and brought people to a state of rage. As a result, the words “liberal” and “democrat” have become swearwords. People wanted retribution. They are used to living like this. They have never lived differently, they have never been free. They know that at any moment everything can be taken away from them. And by the way, the origins of this feeling are much deeper than socialism. They lead to the era of Ivan the Terrible.
You have your own way in literature, a special way of writing, what degree of reliability, credibility do you want to achieve?
S.A.: I am not trying to present a document, I rather want to sculpt, to create a portrait of an era. That’s why it takes me seven to ten years to write each book: I record the stories of hundreds of people.
I visit each person several times. First you need to free him from the banality that lives inside him. In the beginning, we all tend to repeat what we read in newspapers or books. But gradually, little by little, we delve into ourselves and pronounce the words that we draw from our own experience, living and unique. As a result, from fifty or seventy pages, I often leave only half a page, a maximum of five. But at the same time, I do not do styling and I try to preserve the language that people use. And if you get the impression that they speak beautifully, it means that I managed to catch the moment when they are in a special state – for example, when they remember love or death. Then their thought becomes refined, they are somehow internally mobilized. And the results are often amazing. Let’s not forget that verbal art is traditionally inherent in Russian people. The Italians have great painting, the Germans have great music. And the Russians diligently developed a logocentric culture that glorified the word.
Read more:
- Svetlana Aleksievich: “To find a person in a person”
I am not a journalist. I’m not just collecting information – I’m researching people’s lives, I’m interested in what they understood about life. I am not a historian either, because my work begins exactly where the historian considers his task accomplished: I want to know what goes on in people’s minds after the Battle of Stalingrad or after the Chernobyl explosion. I am not writing the history of facts, but the history of human souls.
What issues are of particular concern to you?
S.A.: The same ones that haunted Dostoevsky already. Why are we willing to sacrifice our freedom? How can the desire to do good lead to absolute evil? How to explain the dark side of the human soul? In my youth, I read the diaries of the main characters of the Russian revolution. I was interested to know what these people were like, for example, Felix Dzerzhinsky, the future head of the Cheka. So, it turned out that in his youth he was full of bright aspirations and dreamed of the spiritual rebirth of a person. How mysteriously did these young idealists turn into bloodthirsty leaders? This is what I would like to understand. That is why in the epigraph of the book “Second Hand Time” I placed the phrase of Fyodor Stepun: “We must remember that it is not its blind executors who are responsible for the victory of evil in the world, but spiritually sighted servants of good.” This is what shocked me as a child, and this remains the main issue for me.
1 Read the full interview in Philosophie magazine: philomag.com