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New book by prominent Belarusian writer Svyatlana Aleksiyevich published in Moscow

 

Second-hand Time: The Demise of the Red (Wo)man, a book by award-winning Belarusian writer Svyatlana Aleksiyevich (Svetlana Alexievich), has been published in Moscow by the Vremya Publishing House.

The book is the fifth of the writer’s seven-volume “factional” chronicle titled, The Autobiography of a Utopia, or the History of the Red Man.

As Ms. Aleksiyevich told BelaPAN, the Belarusian-language version of Second-hand Time is expected in late October.

In the foreword to the book, the author says: "Communists had a crazy plan to remake the old man, ancient Adam. And they succeeded…. This may be the only thing that they succeeded in. A unique human type, Homo Sovieticus, was created in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory during 70-odd years. Some believe this is a tragic character and others call it ‘Sovok.’ I seem to know this person. I know them very well. I am near them and have lived side by side with them for many years. This person is me, my acquaintances, friends and parents."

The monologues contained in the book were written down by the author during her trips around the post-Soviet region during the past decade.

In an interview with the Russian Service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Ms. Aleksiyevich described Second-hand Time as her “diagnosis for us, for what we have done in the past 20 years, for our criminal romanticism and for, as I believe now, our silence, our current muteness and the silence of the elite.” “We have surrendered power to bandits,” she said.
Svetlana Aleksiyevich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, on May 31, 1948. After graduating from the journalism department at Belarusian State University, she worked as a reporter and journalist and a correspondent for the literary magazine Neman in Minsk.

Her documentary prose has been translated into dozens of languages. Her books have won international awards, including the Peace Prize of the City of Osnabruck, RFI’s Prix Temoin du Monde, the Moscow Andrei Sinyavsky Prize, the Kurt Tucholsky Prize from the Swedish PEN and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. The history of the Soviet and post-Soviet person is the subject of most of her books, of which Voices from Chernobyl, for which she received the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award, is probably the most successful.

For the Polish edition of her first book, The Unwomanly Face of the War (1985), she received the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize in 2011 and the Angelus Central European Literature Award.

Ms. Aleksiyevich’s books have not been published in Belarus since Alyaksandr Lukashenka came to power in 1994. The writer left Belarus in 2000 and moved back to Minsk in 2011. //BelaPAN