I am fascinated by people.'From this fascination emerges a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society, built on the traumatismsof its predecessors' collapse. I look at the world as a writer, not strictlyan historian.
It's considered improper to admit feelings into history. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past 30 years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what its like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. There are an endless number of human truths.History's sole concern is the facts emotions areout of its realm of interest. In Secondhand Time, Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. It never ceases to amaze me how interestingordinary, everyday life is. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into theframework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the winne of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature reinvents a singular, polyphonic literary form, bringing together the voices of dozens of witnesses to the collapse of the USSR in a formidable attempt to chart the disappearance of a culture and to surmise what new kind of man may emerge from the rubble.Alexievich's method is simple: 'I don't ask people about socialism, I ask about love, jealousy, childhood, old age.
The book contains few comments from the author herself. An oral history of the Soviet Union and its end, it shares the feelings and views of its people as the country transitioned to capitalism. LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets is a 2013 book by Belarusian Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.
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