Favourite long time, Svetlana Alexievtich finally receives the Nobel Prize for “polyphonic writings, tributes to the suffering and courage of our time” . The Belarusian writer, who is also a journalist at heart and training, likes to define as “person-ear” . Its mode of being in the world is listening: “I see the world through the voices, the details of everyday life and existence.” Obsessed with the real, seeking tools to transcribe it with the greatest possible fidelity, she forges a genre, at the crossroads of journalism and literature, which mixes human speech, confessions, testimonies and documents (1). It is with absolute hearing that it intends, records hundreds of votes, and consists, for over thirty years, veritable symphonies to tell the people, his people, struggling with his painful destiny.
On the front in Afghanistan
fading meekly behind them, it gives voice to the people, simple, ordinary, who survived the greatest catastrophes of their age. “I made the image of our time, as we see it and we imagine, and the country through the people who live in my time. I would like my books become chronic, the encyclopedia generations I have known. How did these people live? In what they believed? How were they killed and were killed? The way they aspired to happiness and why they were unable “ the writer explained in an interview.
Svetlana Alexievitch was born March 31, 1948 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine a Belarusian father and a Ukrainian mother, both teachers. His family then moved to Belarus, where Alexievitch grew up and studied journalism. A graduate of the University of Minsk, she began to sharpen his pen in local and regional newspapers and literary journals. His first book appears in 1985, at the dawn of perestroika. “Roman’s voice” , in the words of the writer herself, The war was not a woman’s face tells the story of World War II World through the stories of women on the front and back, as men would never have told. Res “unpatriotic, naturalist, degrading” , the work caused a scandal in the USSR, but the approval of the General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev is still a bestseller.
In 1989 , Alexievitch loose a new bomb, far more powerful than the first. In zinc coffins, she gives voice to soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and mothers of those who do not return. To prepare the chronicle of this war that the power hiding in his own people, the writer-reporter toured the country for four years, and went to the front. Many of his compatriots have not forgiven the deafening image of pain and truth it has drawn from this conflict, particularly the achievement she wore to the official triumphalist myth, by challenging the validity of the commitment of the Soviet army. Acclaimed in the West Alexievitch has not least been condemned at home, on the occasion of a “political trial” symbolic held in Minsk.
Polyphony documentary
Seven years later, she masterfully directs a choir of men and women who tell this time the horror of the explosion of the nuclear power plant Chernobyl and agony that follows. The Supplication (Lattes, 1998), still banned in Belarus although translated into seventeen languages, confirms his immense talent coryphée. Combining eloquence and unspoken pain cries and silences of sadness that weave the monologues of his interlocutors, the writer delivers a violent story, sometimes unbearable, the terrible catastrophe and the question of cost of human life. By letting people off, maintaining their same phrasing, she always tries to keep the pace and color, Svetlana Alexievitch book does not least, through his works, his own worldview, his convictions and interrogations .
The writer sums up the essence of his work: “I always try to understand how many of humanity in every man. And how to protect this humanity in man. “ humanity constantly threatened by the steamroller of history. His book The End of the red man (published in France in 2013), still in the same documentary polyphonic genre, tells the story of a great utopia, leaving the talk and grieve Orphans of the USSR – which was, for the writer, an abysmal tragedy in itself. “Communism was a foolish project: to transform the” old “man, the old Adam. And it worked … It is perhaps the only thing that market. In seventy-somethings, was created in the laboratory of Marxism-Leninism a particular type of man, the Homo Sovieticus. Some consider him a tragic figure, others deal sovok, poor nerdy Soviet. I think I know this man, I know him very well, we have lived side by side for many years. Him -. It’s me, “ writes in the preface Alexievitch
For the courage rewarded by the Swedish Academy, it is also the right not to dissociate himself from his characters that are primarily of persons for whom the writer feels a palpable compassion and devoid of any value judgment. It’s still the resolution with which it will listen to the distress of others, it faces with bare hands and openly. It is finally the audacity to not conceal his convictions, openly oppose activism but that it can not accept.
At a time when there is no good criticizing leaders, she has never hidden his lack of love for the authoritarian Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (which led her to live long in exile in Europe), nor for the regime of Vladimir Putin. A few hours after receiving the Nobel Prize, Alexievitch confided to journalists gathered around her in Minsk that “like the Russian world, good and humanist, before which everyone bows, the ballet and music [...] but not to Beria, Stalin, Putin and Shoigu [Russian Defense Minister, ed], this Russia, which comes to 86% to rejoice when people die in the Donbass [pro-Russian rebel region east of Ukraine], laugh Ukrainians and believe we can solve everything by force “.
Fourteenth woman
The works of Svetlana Alexievitch, published in nineteen countries, have been the subject of dozens of bets scene as well as theatrical film. She has received numerous prestigious awards and decorations, including the price of the Erich-Maria-Note Peace (2001), Ryszard Kapuściński-Price (2011) and the Order of Arts and Letters (2014). She is the fourth woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the sixth writer in Russian to be rewarded after Ivan Bunin (1933), Boris Pasternak (1965), Mikhail Sholokhov (1965), Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987).
(1) A report, republication Actes Sud a volume of works in the collection “Thesaurus”, 780 pp., 26 €.
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