Slashdot Mirror
'Voices From Chernobyl' Author Svetlana Alexievich Wins Lit Nobel (theguardian.com)
Lawrence Bottorff writes: The author of Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, Svetlana Alexievich, has won the Nobel Prize in Literature. It's somewhat surprising, since she is an investigative journalist and not a fiction writer/novelist. And yet her "novels in voices" style, as the Nobel jurists believe, clearly has a literary impact. Here's what a review from the Journal of Nuclear Medicine says about Voices from Chernobyl:
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
"Alexievich was a journalist living in Minsk, the capital of Belarus, at the time of the Chernobyl accident. Instead of choosing the usual approach of trying to quantify a disaster in terms of losses and displacement, the author chose instead to interview more than 500 eyewitnesses over a span of 10 years. ... It tells us about the psychologic and personal tragedy of the modern-day nuclear disaster. It is about the experiences of individuals and how the disaster affected their lives."
Although the Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded based on "lifetime work" rather than an individual book, Voices... is her best-known and most celebrated work.
Do you notice how her books lack stories like this:
My family lived 25 kilometers from Chernobyl in a small village, my husband worked on a small furniture factory and I worked as a teacher. Several days after the explosion, soldiers came to us and told that we'll have to relocate soon. We were allowed to take only small personal items and all of them were inspected.
We were offered a new apartment in Ryazan' and received several thousand rubles, enough to buy new furniture. We also got cards to buy imported Bulgarian child food for our 6-months old son. Even after the USSR collapse we received free medical checkups every year and our son got free admission into a top Russian university. He's working as a nuclear engineer in Bryanks now.
A true story, I worked with their son. But of course, this story is not sufficiently full of bullcrap to win a Nobel.
She has won the Nobel price because she risked her freedom to write journalist investigation with a high quality in literature. She didn't only make yet another propaganda documentary about Chernobyl, but she actually tried to describe the life of regular people in late USSR/Comobol countries and there after.
She writes about how it was to life in those Communist countries, and about the failure to reform to an open democratic society. She is from the last remaining dictatorship in Europe, Minsk, and her books are banned. And you probably know what happens with these kind of independent journalist in Russia who dare to say something else than state propaganda.
Her work is the only work that has an alternative view on the USSR before and after and is of high quality. Enough to win prices. She tries to be neutral, but of course, nobody is neutral because she already does something illegal in her country: using free speech and writing books that are not allowed by the government. That doesn't mean her work is worthless or anti USSR, or anti capitalism, or anti socialism or feminist or anti capitalistic. She is a documenter and does a great job at describing how life was in those countries.
The reason why Chernobyl was so important was the time when it happened. It was during Gorbachev reform policies that promised more openess and freedom of press. Normally such an event would not be publicized and news would be boycotted. Because of the change of policies 'journalists' who were still used to being propaganda writers could all of the sudden describe what happened, the heroes but also the horrors, the errors, those responsible, etc...
They could even start asking critical questions. Although it was all uneasy at that time, both for the journalists and the politicians, it was the start of a critical public opinion that would lead to the fall of the USSR. A pretty surprising fall without revolution, without competing warlords, without war, especially for such a super power with such an extensive system to control an entire society (KGB, Army, propaganda...).
There books are really interesting to read and are well written if you like to read about how life is in some other regime.