“The Nobel Prize in Literature is not just a prize; it is a cause and a context. The cause to discuss, condemn and praise an author; to complete his or her context, ranking him among the writers who deserve more than just a high number of copies and royalties.”
I wanted to write about Svetlana Alexievich on the day when she was declared the prizewinner, however the desire not to join the inharmonious chorus of detractors and worshippers overwhelmed the initial feeling. I don't regret it, because I've read and heard all opinions: from an “average journalist”, to the “torch of contemporary literature”. It would be reasonable to say “the truth lies somewhere in the middle”, yet it isn’t so; it does not lie in the middle.
Photo by Daniel Roland
Roots and searches
Famous Belarusian poet Uladzimir Nyklyaev said in regards to Alexievich: “If the entire Russian literature comes from Gogol's Overcoat, all Alexievich's works come from the documentary book ‘I'm from the Burned Village’ by Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik.” I agree, but only partially.
Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Uladzimir Kalesnik are three prominent Belarusian writers who in the early 1970’s decided to create a novel telling about the destruction of 600 villages by the Nazi troops during World War II in Belarus. The writers chose a method based on collecting materials, like journalists usually do. They visited villages and questioned more than 300 eyewitnesses who escaped death by a mere coincidence.
Later, Ales Adamovich, the project's initiator and mainspring, called this method “above-literature”. Later, in the early 90s, this method, when applied to prose and plays, will be given a name that the whole literary world will accept – verbatim.
Yes, Svetlana calls Ales Adamovich her teacher, and she certainly develops her work via the same method. However one should understand that the effective phrase “he comes from a literary work” in regards to a writer is to a certain degree deceptive. We can also say that the Nobel Prize winner was raised by Selskaya Gazeta newspaper, where she had worked as a journalist in 1973-1976, but it would be no less deceptive.
Svetlana was in her final year at the Belarusian State University when the book ‘I'm from the Burned Village’ was published. There is no doubt that the book, as well as the method of writing, clearly influenced her work. Yet we should understand that eight long years passed since Alexievich’s first book ‘The War's Unwomanly Face’, was published. She worked as a journalist during that period. In this case, it is appropriate to use the common saying “the truth is somewhere in the middle”, because her experience as a journalist helped her to develop understanding that literature isn’t only highly artistic ‘Tolstoy’ and ‘Dostoyevsky’, but also Vasil Bykau and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who are no less valued for their reliance on personal experience, and Adamovich, whose works are based on the discourse of witness records.
Style and method
I dare say that Alexievich's method is more complicated than the approach developed by Adamovich's group in their book. It seems logical: pioneers don't have enough time to master all risky methods in the first work. Svetlana had the necessary time and knew their experience.
Alexievich methods of writing books can be compared to the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, developed by Genrikh Altshuller in the 1950s. Which goal is to be more precise, to draw parallels rather than to compare. In simple terms, Altshuller developed a mechanism of creating inventions that includes collecting information, its systematization and finding a solving algorithm. Alexievich does almost the same in the field of humanities, in literature.
She collects information and carries out long and meticulous systematization, placing material in boxes of different fields of her work. After that, each ‘field’ needs to be converted into a literary form by cutting off all unnecessary elements, like a sculptor would do. The rest is the choice of style.
At this point, I again cannot agree with the opponents who persistently try to push Svetlana Alexievich out of the literary field into the journalist field. To understand and accept her literature, one needs to reject his or her ideas based on works by the 19th century classic writers. Alexievich is the other literature, the literature of another time, another pace, another paradigm, other readers, if you like it. This is the axiom that the material defines the style. If Alexievich picked just one story from the kaleidoscope she creates, she would certainly increase the degree of artistry, appealing to emotions and feelings of readers, and she can do it without a doubt. But if the author draws a cross-section of the generation and the epoch, using the collage technique, he or she must be harsher, more accurate, and more meager. The composition must be perfect to make seemingly meager documentary material strike the reader, causing a burst of emotions by its honesty and accuracy rather than by the beauty of the representation.
Works by Alexievich make the reader go through a whole range of emotions from a joy to sadness; from laughter to tears; from tenderness to anger.
I used an extract from Chernobyl Prayer in my production. It is a monologue of a woman whose husband, a fire-fighter, died during the cleanup operation after the Chernobyl accident. The actress says it quietly, steadily, in a slightly detached way, in the same style it appeared in the book. Audience members always cry as they realize the horror of the tragedy through a document, through a witness’s words that hide pain, pain, and pain.
Speaking about Alexievich's style, I'd like to call three permanent features that don't change in all her books: tact, taste and decency. A tactful way of writing without artistic emphasis on drama, without strain and without any hysteria. Taste in the composition is when you can feel the accurate balance of the work and the author seems to see the work as a whole. Decency in relation to characters is when you respect them for the truth they say, for sharing their pain with the author and readers.
Photo by Markus Schreiber
Timeserving and sincerity
Talks about Alexievich's biased approach and timeserving can be heard throughout her literary career. But only the people unfamiliar with the past Soviet and today's Belarusian reality can accuse her of such things.
The first volume of The War's Unwomanly Face was written in 1983. It was before Gorbachev's perestroika, when the absolute majority of USSR citizens heard nothing about free press and free speech and had no hopes for changes.
The first parts of the novel published in Oktyabr and Nyoman magazines provoked a storm of criticism, mainly accusing the author of “destroying the heroic image of the Soviet woman”. There were also accusations of the “lack of literariness” and “journalism”. It was obvious even in those times that the writer's future won't be easy. For what Truman Capote was praised appeared to be the “black spot” for Alexievich that caused endless delays of publications.
I don't remember any publication of her books that passed without accusations from critics and “ordinary citizens”, worrying about the “distortion of the Soviet reality”. Even her recent Second-hand Time, telling about psychology of a Soviet person, provoked criticism, because Alexievich again appeared in the wrong time – her new book doesn't coincide with the revival of the Soviet model in Russia.
It would be ridiculous to say the writer hoped for international recognition. She however was recognized by foreign readers and publishers who translated and printed her novels, which as the result were inevitably becoming popular. Svetlana received her first international awards only in the current century, two decades since the beginning of her career as a writer. In regards to her recognition in Belarus, she still doesn't have it on the state level – Svetlana Alexievich hasn't received a single award or prize in her home country, and none state-owned publishing houses published her books.
The Nobel Committee is not a crowd of politically charged dilettantes; they are serious specialists who know literature and developments in the perception of literature. The beginning of the 21st century was obviously marked with the interest in only two trends in art, be it literature, cinema or theatre. These are documents and fairy tales. Readers and spectators have lost interest in fiction. Well, let's say so, they haven't lost it, but fiction moved to the entertainment field, closer to fairy tales. What was placed in the focus is either fiction based on documentary materials, or pure non-fiction, which is what Svetlana Alexievich does. Yes, we can now say about timeserving, but Svetlana Alexievich had to wait for more than 30 years to see it.
Inheritance and heritage
Every writer inherits something to bring it throughout his or her creative work. Ernest Hemingway had a childish passion for nature; Joseph Brodsky – criminal prosecution and Leningrad; Joanne Rowling – a child's dreams; Svetlana Alexievich – the burden of the Soviet past.
No writer has ever succeeded in showing the cross-section of the Soviet epoch, the cross-section of those generations and their sore spots in such an accurate and comprehensive way as Alexievich did. Her works are unique for their ability to be taught in schools and universities not only in literature lessons, but also in history, social science, psychology and anthropology lessons, and I hope we'll see it.
Photo by Sergei Gapon
When analyzing Svetlana's works, critics ignore one more important and unique for a prose writer factor – the staginess of her books. The use of her works by theatres is extremely wide, which can be compared to prose by Dostoyevsky or Hugo. We can expect even more breakthroughs in this sphere of the application of her talent: for example, a boom of turning to Alexievich's book of love stories, which she is writing now, among theatres.
Svetlana is great in defining the topic of her works. Each time after the publication of her new book, her admirers try to forecast what topic she will choose next. The suspense about the theme of her next book becomes even more anxious in todays complicated period for post-Soviet countries.
Returning to the Nobel Prize, I'd like to conclude that the very phrasing of the Nobel Committee was the most accurate evaluation of Svetlana Alexievich's work – “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time." One can hardly find more exact words.
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