The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015
Photo: Margarita Kabakova/Ersatz AB
Svetlana Alexievich
Prize share: 1/1
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time".
Belarusian author Svetlana Alexievich, known for chronicling the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize for literature Thursday "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
She is only the 14th woman to win the prize, which has been awarded 107 times.
On her website, Alexievich says she records conversations with 500 to 700 people for each book she writes.
"Real
people speak in my books about the main events of the age such as the
war, the Chernobyl disaster, and the downfall of a great empire," she
says. "Together they record verbally the history of the country, their
common history, while each person puts into words the story of his/her
own life."
Her books are described as a literary chronicle of the emotional history of the Soviet and post-Soviet individual, as told by means of a carefully constructed collage of interviews.[12] According to Russian writer and critic Dmitry Bykov, her books owe much to the ideas of Belarusian writer Ales Adamovich, who insisted that the only way to describe the horrors of the 20th century was not to create fiction but to document the testimonies of the witnesses.[13] Belarusian poet Uladzimir Nyaklyayew called Adamovich "her literary godfather". He also named the documentary novel I'm from the Burned Village (Belarusian: Я з вогненнай вёскі) by Ales Adamovich, Janka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik, about the villages burned by the Nazi troops during the occupation of Belarus, as the main single book that has influenced Alexievich's attitude to literature.[14] Alexievich admitted the influence of Adamovich and added, among others, Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ as another source of impact on her.[15] Her most notable works in English translation include a collection of first-hand accounts from the war in Afghanistan (Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from a Forgotten War)[16] and a highly praised oral history of the Chernobyl disaster (Voices from Chernobyl).[17] Alexievich describes the theme of her works this way:
If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialog of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet–Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.[18]Her first book, War's Unwomanly Face, came out in 1985. It was repeatedly reprinted and sold more than two million copies.[16] The book was finished in 1983 and published (in short edition) in Oktyabr, a Soviet monthly literary magazine, in February 1984.[19] In 1985, the book was published by several publishers, and the number of printed copies reached 2,000,000 in the next five years.[20] This novel is made up of monologues of women in the war speaking about the aspects of World War II that had never been related before.[16] Another book, The Last Witnesses: the Book of Unchildlike Stories, describes personal memories of children during war time. The war seen through women's and children's eyes revealed a new world of feelings.[21] In 1993, she published Enchanted with Death, a book about attempted and completed suicides due to the downfall of the Soviet Union. Many people felt inseparable from the Communist ideology and unable to accept the new order surely and the newly interpreted history.[22]
Her books were not published by Belarusian state-owned publishing houses after 1993, while private publishers in Belarus have only published two of her books: Voices from Chernobyl in 1999 and Second-hand Time in 2013, both translated into Belarusian.[23] As a result, Alexievich has been better known in the rest of world than in Belarus.[24]
She has been described as the first journalist to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.[25]
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2015/
