When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing \u201ca new kind of literary genre,\u201d describing her work as \u201ca history of emotions\u2014a history of the soul.\u201d Alexievich\u2019s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who are rarely given the opportunity to speak, whose experiences are often lost in the official histories of the nation.<\/p>\n
In Secondhand Time,<\/em> Alexievich chronicles the demise of communism. Everyday Russian citizens recount the past thirty years, showing us what life was like during the fall of the Soviet Union and what it\u2019s like to live in the new Russia left in its wake. Through interviews spanning 1991 to 2012, Alexievich takes us behind the propaganda and contrived media accounts, giving us a panoramic portrait of contemporary Russia and Russians who still carry memories of oppression, terror, famine, massacres\u2014but also of pride in their country, hope for the future, and a belief that everyone was working and fighting together to bring about a utopia. Here is an account of life in the aftermath of an idea so powerful it once dominated a third of the world.<\/p>\n A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time <\/em>tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. \u201cThrough the voices of those who confided in her,\u201d The Nation <\/em>writes, \u201cAlexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil\u2014in a word, about ourselves.\u201d<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing \u201ca new kind of literary genre,\u201d describing her work as \u201ca history of emotions\u2014a history of the soul.\u201d Alexievich\u2019s distinctive documentary style, combining extended individual monologues with a collage of voices, records the stories of ordinary women and men who 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