‘Communism had an insane plan: to refashion the “old” breed of man, ancient Adam. And it accomplished this...’ writes Svetlana Alexievich. ‘This was perhaps communism’s only achievement. Seventy plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new kind of man, the Homo sovieticus.’ This ‘red man’: that’s whom Alexievich has been studying since her first book, published in 1985 – a people and a culture condemned to extinction by the implosion of the
Soviet Union. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl 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, …
‘Communism had an insane plan: to refashion the “old” breed of man, ancient Adam. And it accomplished this...’ writes Svetlana Alexievich. ‘This was perhaps communism’s only achievement. Seventy plus years in the Marxist-Leninist laboratory gave rise to a new kind of man, the Homo sovieticus.’ This ‘red man’: that’s whom Alexievich has been studying since her first book, published in 1985 – a people and a culture condemned to extinction by the implosion of the
Soviet Union. In this magnificent requiem to a civilization in ruins, the author of Voices from Chernobyl 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. Music, dances, hairstyles. The myriad sundry details of a vanished way of life. This is the only way to chase the catastrophe into the framework of the mundane and attempt to tell a story. Try to figure things out. It never ceases to amaze me how interesting ordinary, everyday life is. There are an endless number of human truths... History’s sole concern is the facts; emotions are out of its realm of interest. It’s considered improper to admit feelings into history. I look at the world as a writer, not strictly an historian. I am fascinated by people...’
From this fascination emerges a brilliant, poignant and unique portrait of post-Soviet society, built on the traumatisms of its predecessors’ collapse.
Svetlana Alexievich is a curator of stories. She is neither strictly an oral historian nor a writer, but somehow straddles both of these worlds. In this fashion, Second-Hand Time is a remarkable catalogue of tales, parables and musings by people from the former Soviet Union, all documented from interviews between 1991 and 2012.
The result is a portrait of a population. Somehow in the multitude of voices that include everything from young to old, from wealthy gentry to starving immigrant, from the islands, Georgia, Belarus, Ukraine, Siberia there is an honest reflection of a complex people. In our current climate, this book also served as a timely warning (unheeded).
