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“... for themselves, in other words, which was neither a Soviet nor a pre-Soviet literary practice. Svetlana Alexievich, a young Belorussian journalist, has managed to escape from the leaden disciplines of Soviet journalism in which she must have been trained, to discover this mode of presenting her material, and has used it well, if at times ...”

“... Svetlana Alexievich​ won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015, but some people still don’t think her books are literature. In fact, they are collective oral histories, of similar genre, though completely different in tone, to those of Studs Terkel in the United States, whom she has probably never read. Her main influence as far as genre is concerned was the Belorussian writer Ales Adamovich, who in the 1970s (with Daniil Granin) collected the testimonies of wartime Leningrad survivors in Blokadnaia kniga, but that’s not very helpful in a Western context since nobody has heard of him ...”

“... both the trauma and the possibilities of the post-Soviet world – among them Medvedev and Svetlana Alexievich. Following Moscow’s 2014 annexation of the Crimea, Gessen’s dispatches from Odessa and separatist Donetsk gave voice to the ‘losers’ from the fall of the USSR, whose many legitimate grievances, often flailing and inarticulate or ...”

“... you at least have made me Italian?’) They argue about her abandoned piece, and about Svetlana Alexievich: ‘The reason people now cringe at the idea that you have to be gifted in order to write,’ she says, ‘is that it leaves too many voices out. Alexievich makes it possible for people to be heard, to ...”

“... the same tone of Soviet/Communist nostalgia to be found in the film Goodbye Lenin! or the work of Svetlana Alexievich and the late Svetlana Boym. But it’s an interesting variant, in that the subject is not the Soviet Union itself but rather a vision of the West that collectively entranced several late Soviet ...”

“... awfulness and grandeur of the revolutionary years. There are still Soviet nostalgics like Svetlana Alexievich around, but the world they have lost is a postwar one. For Platonov and Sats, born respectively in 1899 and 1903, the Revolution was the touchstone of their lives. As a 15-year-old student of piano at the Kiev Conservatory, Sats ran away ...”