Second-hand Time

(Paperback)

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When the Swedish Academy awarded Svetlana Alexievich the Nobel Prize, it cited her for inventing 'a new kind of literary genre,' describing her work as 'a history of emotions-a history of the soul.' Alexievich's 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.

In Secondhand Time, 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's 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-but 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.

Reviews

In this spellbinding book, Svetlana Alexievich orchestrates a rich symphony of Russian voices telling their stories of love and death, joy and sorrow, as they try to make sense of the twentieth century, so tragic for their country.
J. M. Coetzee, winner of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature

Absolutely fantastic.
Karl Ove Knausgaard

The non-fiction volume that has done the most to deepen the emotional understanding of Russia during and after the collapse of the Soviet Union of late is Svetlana Alexievichs oral history Second-hand Time.
David Remnick, New Yorker

Second-Hand Time is [Alexievichs] most ambitious work: many women and a few men talk about the loss of the Soviet idea, the post-Soviet ethnic wars, the legacy of the Gulag, and other aspects of the Soviet experience.... Through her books and her life itself, Alexievich has gained probably the worlds deepest, most eloquent understanding of the post-Soviet condition.
Masha Gessen, New Yorker

A series of monologues by people across the former Soviet empire, it is Tolstoyan in scope, driven by the idea that history is made not only by major players but also by ordinary people talking in their kitchens.
Rachel Donadio, New York Times

Alexievichs work follows the strands of thought and emotion wherever her voices take her through nightmares, but also flashes of joy The work is unique in the intimacy of the experience transmitted through the writing: which is, after all, only the ability to have a human ear, to listen, and to publish.
John Lloyd, Financial Times

I am engrossed in Svetlana Alexievichs extraordinary Second-hand Time, an oral tapestry of post-Soviet Russia.
Julian Barnes, Guardian

Author Bio

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ukraine in 1948 and grew up in Belarus. She's primarily a newspaper journalist, and spenther early career in Minsk compiling first-hand accounts of World War II, the Soviet-Afghan War, the fall of the Berlin Wall,and the Chernobyl meltdown. Her unflinching work - the whole of our history ... is a huge common grave and a bloodbath- earned her persecution from the Lukashenko regime, and she was forced to emigrate; she lived in Paris, Gothenburg,and Berlin before returning to Minsk in 2011. She's won a number of large prizes, including the National Book Critics CircleAward, the Prix Medicis, and the Oxfam Novib/PEN Award. In 2015, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.