Review by Choice Review
Journalist Alexievich, winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in literature, has published an intriguing new work that examines the lives of ordinary Russians from the collapse of communism in the early 1990s into the second decade of the 21st century. Using extensive interviews, the author reveals a complex picture of post-Soviet Russia that often defies propaganda and media accounts about the new Russia. Alexievich experiments with a new style of writing that combines oral history with traditional reporting, which results in a compelling, useful account of contemporary Russia. The work also reveals what ordinary Russians think of their Soviet past. Even though communism collapsed in the Soviet Union over 25 years ago, the power of that idea and regime has continued to influence Russia in both positive and negative ways. Probably the greatest contribution of this work is the chronicling of the varied views of contemporary Russia woven into a compelling story that grips readers from beginning to end. This work will be influential for its literary and historical merit. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. --William Benton Whisenhunt, College of DuPage
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH HAS said that when she assembles one of her remarkable collections of oral histories she is constructing a "novel in voices." In this latest book, one voice is of a woman who seems to have stepped out of a tale by Chekhov. With three children, she is married to a good man who loves her. But then, on the strength of a photograph, she decides that someone else is the man she really loves - whom she once saw in a dream. He, however, is in prison, serving a life sentence for murder. To top it off, his prison is a converted monastery, with walls five feet thick, on an island in an isolated northern lake. She divorces her husband, abandons her children, marries the prisoner, whom she is seldom allowed to see, and finds a low-paying job nearby. Then they quarrel and she disappears. But recent history has added a twist Chekhov could not have imagined. This prisoner committed his murder in what was then still the Soviet Union. If he is ever released, it will be into a radically different Russia, where, as one of Alexievich's interview subjects says, "the discovery of money hit us like an atom bomb." It is the contrast between these two countries - as felt by people living in the second but remembering the first - that is the subject of "Secondhand Time," her first book to appear in English since she won the Nobel Prize in Literature last year. (It appeared in Russia in 2013.) As in many a Chekhov story, few of the people she records are happy. "There is something in the Russian spirit," she said in her Nobel lecture, "that compels it to try to turn . . . dreams into reality." This was true of the woman who loved the prisoner, and it was also true of the Russian people as a whole, who lived, for some 70 years, in a society ostensibly based on a dream of human brotherhood that turned out to be something catastrophically different. Among believers in the dream of Soviet Communism, Alexievich finds a nostalgia for its achievements and a deep sense of loss. Quite poignantly, she zeros in from several angles (press reports, official documents, an interview with someone who knew him) on Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, who was said to be a supporter of the 1991 coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev, and who hanged himself in his Kremlin office when it failed. "I cannot go on living," he wrote, "while my Fatherland is dying and everything I heretofore considered to be the meaning of my life is being destroyed." In a final humiliation, symbolic of the crass market society replacing Akhromeyev's beloved Communism, his grave was robbed and his uniform, cap and medals - all of which now fetch high prices from antique dealers - were taken. Alexievich also describes another military suicide. Anyone who spent time in the old Soviet Union will remember the immense honors lavished upon World War II veterans. One, Timeryan Zinatov, won a medal for his role in defending the famous fortress at Brest, and then fought through the rest of the war. A construction worker in Siberia, he returned to the fortress, the scene of his moment of glory, every year. In 1992, shocked by the new Russia, where brand name fashion accessories mean more than war medals, he came back one last time to Brest, which by then was in a different country, Belarus. Then he threw himself under a train, leaving a message asking to be buried in the fortress. It's more surprising that Alexievich finds similar true believers among those who suffered the very worst Soviet fury. A onetime factory director, for instance, had been arrested during Stalin's Great Purge of the late 1930s, beaten, tortured, hung "from hooks like it was the Middle Ages!" After the interrogator is done with you, he says, "you're nothing but a piece of meat . . . lying in a pool of urine." Luckier than millions, he was released after a year: "It had been a mistake." In the army in World War II, he ran into his former interrogator, who now said to him, "We share a Motherland." The Soviet dream, as much about patriotism for the Motherland as about utopia, offered a universe of certainties despite "mistakes," even to those who were its victims. For this factory director, in his retirement, tells Alexievich that he feels "surrounded by strangers" in the new Russia. "When I go into my grandchildren's room, everything in there is foreign: the shirts, the jeans, the books, the music. . . . Their shelves are lined with empty cans of Coke and Pepsi. Savages!" He finishes: "I want to die a Communist. That's my final wish." Despite their oppressive "mistakes," empires of all kinds keep a lid on things, and one of the tragedies of the post-Soviet world - as it was of post-British India and of the post-Tito former Yugoslavia-is the upwelling of long-contained ethnic and religious strife. Among those whose voices Alexievich brings us is an Armenian woman married to an Azerbaijani. In Soviet times, they lived in Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, "my favorite city . . . in spite of everything! . . . I don't remember any discussion of . . . nationalities. The world was divided up differently: Is someone a good or bad person, are they greedy or kind?" To welcome spring, everyone in her apartment building - Armenians, Azerbaijanis, Georgians, Russians, Ukrainians - would share food around a long table in the courtyard. Then, as the Soviet Union collapsed, demagogues everywhere whipped up tensions. The bodies of murdered Armenians appeared on the streets. Azerbaijanis attacked her husband, beating him with iron rods, for being married to an "enemy." She asked her mother, "Mama, did you notice that the boys in the courtyard have stopped playing war and started playing killing Armenians?" When she fled for her life to Moscow, her husband's family refused to pass on her phone messages to him - and claimed to her that he had remarried. Years later, he finally made it to Moscow too, where they now five, illegally and traumatized. I have a few minor quibbles with the way Alexievich weaves her rich tapestry of voices. Although the interviews are grouped by decades (1991-2001, 2002-12), she does not tell us whether she talked to someone in 1991, when the enfeebled Soviet Union was still alive, or in 2001, when it was 10 years dead. She uses many ellipses in each paragraph, which show how a monologue has been edited but give it a slightly spacey and disjointed feel. And unlike her distinguished American counterpart Studs Terkel, who sometimes set the scene in a head note to an interview, she gives us little or no background on her subjects, usually just something as cryptic as "Olga V., surveyor, 24." And when she does provide a rare headnote, her own editorial voice can intrude: "Sometimes I think that pain is a bridge between people, a secret connection; other times, it seems like an abyss." There is no need for this: She has successfully bridged the abyss. Alexievich finds true believers even among those who experienced Soviet fury. ADAM HOCHSCHILD'S eight books include "The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 29, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl, 2005), winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in the Ukraine and has lived periodically in Russia and Belarus. Her previous works focused on Soviet history in the post-Stalinist period. Here she concentrates primarily on the period from the emergence of Gorbachev to the current pseudo-democracy under the Russian state and Putin. Once again, she uses a plethora of short remarks, complaints, regrets, and other observations by one-time Soviet citizens who now must adjust to life in a non-Communist Russian nation. Her hope is that this jigsaw of micro histories will provide a larger insight into the present and future of Russian society. Some of those who came of age before Gorbachev and his liberal reforms express longing for the lost glories of socialism and the Soviet Empire. Despite the endless lines at stores and material deprivation, life apparently had more certainty and a sense of devotion to an ideal. Those who were just entering adulthood recall the sense of exhilaration as the casting off of Soviet restrictions promised a more normal future. There is also great cynicism and disappointment expressed here, as modern Russia is viewed as both materialistic and repressive. Those who wish to understand this important nation will find Alexievich's inquiry to be absorbing and important.--Freeman, Jay Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl), a Ukrainian-born Belarusian writer and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature, documents the last days of the Soviet Union and the transition to capitalism in a soul-wrenching "oral history" that reveals the very different sides of the Russian experience. Revealing the interior life of "Homo sovieticus" and giving horror-laden reports of life under capitalist oligarchy, Alexievich's work turns Solzhenitsyn inside out and overpowers recent journalistic accounts of the era. Readers must possess steely nerves and a strong desire to get inside the Soviet psyche in order to handle the blood, gore, and raw emotion. For more than 30 years Alexievich has interviewed then-Soviets and ex-Soviets for this and previous books, encountering her subjects on public squares, in lines, on trains, and in their kitchens over tea. She spends hours recording conversations, sometimes returning years later, and always trying to go beyond the battered and distrusted communal pravda to seek the truths hidden within individuals. Her subjects argue with and lie to themselves; nearly everyone talks about love and loss in the context of war, hunger, betrayal, financial ruin, and emotional collapse. Yet with little intrusion from Alexievich and Shayevich's heroic translation, each voice stands on its own, joining the tragic polyphony that unfolds chapter by chapter and gives expression to intense pain and inner chaos. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Journalist Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl), who won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, captures the heartache, excitement, and harsh realities of life at the end of the Soviet era and the birth of modern Russia. A collection of oral histories linked by topic, theme, and the author's own musings, this impassioned and critical study, originally published in Russian in 2013, documents the immense changes the Russian people underwent in the 1990s and 2000s. Alexievich poses clear, pointed questions and is faithful in her transcriptions of the conversations that span 1991 to 2012, creating a riveting look at everyday culture, even as people recount their experiences through difficult economic and political transitions. Other oral histories have relied on a blended structure whereby the individual stories form the supporting elements to the historians' larger narrative; the grace and power of Alexievich's work is the focus on intimate accounts, which set the stage for a more eloquent and nuanced investigation. VERDICT A must for historians, lay readers, and anyone who enjoys well-curated personal narratives. All readers will appreciate the revelations about Russia's turbulent transition and present cultural and political status. [See Prepub Alert, 2/21/16.]--Elizabeth Zeitz, Otterbein Univ. Lib., Westerville, OH © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A lively, deeply moving cacophony of Russian voices for whom the Soviet era was as essential as their nature. Nobel Prize-winning (2015) Russian writer Alexievich (Voices from Chernobyl, 2005, etc.) presents a rich kaleidoscope of voices from all regions of the former Soviet Union who reveal through long tortuous monologues what living under communism really was like. For a new generation of Russians born after World War II, the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, perestroika and glasnost, the attempted putsch of the government, collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequent economic crises of the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin heralded a sense of freedom and new possibility, yet many Russians were left disillusioned and angry. What was socialism now supposed to mean for the former Homo sovieticus, now derogatively called a sovok ("dustbin")? Indeed, how to reconcile 70-plus years of official lies, murder, misery, and oppression? In segments she calls "Snatches of Street Noise and Kitchen Conversations," Alexievich transcribes these (apparently) recorded monologues and conversations in sinuous stream-of-consciousness prose. People of all ages delineate events with bewilderment and furye.g., those who had taken to the barricades during the putsch of 1991 hoping for another utopia ("They buried Sovietdom to the music of Tchaikovsky") and ending up with a scary new world where capitalism was suddenly good and "money became synonymous with freedom." The older generation had lived through the era of Stalin, the KGB and arbitrary arrests, betrayal by neighbors and friends, imprisonment, torture, and the gulag, and these remembrances are particularly haunting to read. One horrifying example is an older neighbor and friend of a man who burned himself alive in his vegetable patch because he had nothing left to live for. The suicides Alexievich emphasizes are heart-wrenching, as is the reiterated sense of the people's "naivete" in the face of ceaseless official deception, the endurance of anti-Semitism, war in the former Soviet republics, famine, and the most appalling living conditions. The author captures these voices in a priceless time capsule. Profoundly significant literature as history. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
