![]() ![]() She writes about suffering, and that means that the Gulag and the Second World War are never far away. That voice is unmistakably Russian (though Alexievich, who writes in Russian, is actually of mixed Belorussian and Ukrainian origins). Her respondents, particularly the women, tend to speak in the same voice as Alexievich. That’s to say, it’s hers alone as a writer. Whatever her genre, Alexievich is an original, with a voice that is hers alone. But it’s a way of letting a Western audience know that what she’s doing is exploring suffering and loss through the voices of the sufferers. Her first book, with methodology already honed, was finished before Shoah was made, so that obviously can’t be taken literally. Lately, Alexievich has taken to citing Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah as an inspiration. ![]() Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since nobody has heard of him. ![]() In fact, they are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. S vetlana Alexievich won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some people still don’t think her books are literature. ![]()
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