Svetlana Alexievich Research Articles

Rationalizing Inquiry and Historical Understanding

Abstract In ‘The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities’, Stephen Grimm (2024) argues for epistemic continuities between the humanities, on one hand, and the social and natural sciences, on the other. This paper focuses on discontinuities. Drawing inspiration from Svetlana Alexievich’s literary non-fiction, I argue that if a reader is to gain a specific kind of understanding of the actions of the agents who appear in such work, they must engage in a rational evaluation of those agents’ reasons and actions. This epistemic process may yield, not just understanding of another’s action, but a grip on the evaluative distance between the reader and the agents she reads about, together with a greater appreciation of normative matters. These epistemic gains are, I suggest, central to the value of the humanities, and play a key role in its corrective power.

Gender Identity and the Myth of the “Great Patriotic War” in Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War

Abstract Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s first book U voiny ne zhenskoe litso (The Unwomanly Face of War), a “novel in voices” based on oral histories, challenges the heroic narratives of the late Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War by depicting the ordinary lives of Soviet women soldiers. Alexievich contends that war is “unwomanly” and downplays the overt challenges to traditional gender roles that women soldiers posed. Nevertheless, she includes episodes that undermine her own assertions about women’s difference from men and their desire to preserve life, creating ambiguity in her message and offering glimpses of an alternative gender order lurking under the surface. These alternative possibilities of understanding gender threaten both the war myth and the norms of Soviet gender relations.

Попавшие в „мышеловку”: анализ отношения местного населения к Чернобыльской Зоне Отчуждения в кино- и телепродукции (1990–2021 гг.)

The release of the television series Chernobyl (HBO, Sky Atlantic 2019) drew renewed attention to the tragedy, its locations, and the affected population, generating new productions in Russia, such as the film Chernobyl: Abyss (Danila Kozlovskij, 2021), explicitly made in response to the Western series, signalling a desire to re-appropriate the narrative of the disaster and its territories. Indeed, a recurrent characteristic of the film and television productions of the countries most affected by the 1986 nuclear disaster (Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia) has been the representation of the land and the inhabitants’ relationship with it (Lindbladh 2019). This is also a central theme in Svetlana Alexievich’s renowned 1997 work Voices from Chernobyl: Chronicle of the future, whose stories inspired some episodes of the Anglo-American series. This article analyzes the representation of the relationship between the inhabitants of the Chornobyl/Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and their homeland in film and television productions dedicated to the nuclear disaster, beginning with Eastern European films made in the early 1990s, moving on to the representation in the Western series, and culminating with an analysis of Kozlovskij’s Chernobyl: Abyss. Features considered include the development of romantic narratives within the contaminated zone, the visual representation of radiation, and the depiction of the local institutions’ response to the disaster.

Thematic Analysis of Non-Violence in the Select Excerpts of Svetlana Alexievich and Thiruvalluvar

The universal prominence attained by English language has paved way for translation and thereby, offers access to world literature and comparative studies. India has witnessed a growth in the field of comparative studies since it received an impetus from Rabindranath Tagore's lecture delivered on the subject when he was invited by National Council of Education in 1907. Tamil Literature has endorsed stalwarts like Thiruvalluvar whose couplets focus on valuable topics that have not only stood the test of time but also has its influence across cultural, political, ethical and topographical diversity. His magnum opus titled Thirukkural is a masterpiece of human thought, equivalent to the Bible, Milton’s Paradise Lost and works of Plato. Svetlana Alexievich is a Belarusian writer who writes in Russian language. He works have been translated into 35 languages and more that 20 documentary films have been produced based on her testimonies collected from victims, survivors, and firsthand witnesses of war and disaster. Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, for her polyphonic writing skill which fetched her veneration in the 21st century. This research article aims to compare and contrast how two literary stalwarts belonging to two different centuries and completely dissimilar ethnicities have unified thoughts on human existence. Thiruvalluvar’s views about ‘war’ and ‘killing’ and Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich’s perception of the futility of war are analyzed in a novel attempt to corroborate that peace and harmony are themes validated since the origin of species and will continue to be valued as long as human civilization exists.

Implementation of positive psychology to surmount demoralization caused by a cataclysm in select works of Svetlana Alexievich.

Cataclysm refers to a large-scale and violent event involving disaster, catastrophe, calamity, and tragedy. The recent surge of a pandemic (coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)), humanitarian crisis in Sudan, civil unrest, and war, such as the attacks in Syria and Ukraine, reiterate the need to address the trauma attached to such catastrophes. This study focuses on adapting positive psychology, one of the newest branches of psychology to emerge, to help human beings prosper and lead healthy, happy lives. It also explores post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and means to overcome traumatizing psychological dejection caused by such mishaps. Demoralization is the immediate effect caused on victims and survivors of such devastations. A comprehensive study of cataclysm and demoralization is concomitant with the suffering produced by various factors pertaining to mass annihilation. A deductive methodology is incorporated into the qualitative data to analyze the oral testimonies of war and disaster survivors in Svetlana Alexievich's works titled Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War, Second Hand Time, The Unwomanly Face of War and Chernobyl Prayer. Interpretation of the polyphonic voices in the oral sagas of interviewees in Alexievich's works reveals an increased level of anxiety, stress, and trauma post-catastrophic events. The implementation of positive psychology has been identified as an appropriate psychological intervention to address the issues related to psychological devastation.

Secondhand stories in between fact and fiction: the impact of translators’ footnotes in Svetlana Alexievich’s narrative

This article examines the role of footnotes in interlinguistic translations of historical references from the Soviet era. The chosen corpus is Vremja sekond hènd, a collection of witness testimonials documenting the collapse of the USSR, compiled by Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich. This polyphonic narrative covers critical moments in Soviet history and contains numerous references to the past of the communist empire that may be unclear to the average Western reader. The aim of the study is to identify possible translation challenges and to analyze the strategies implemented in translating the original Russian text into four languages: French, Portuguese, Spanish, and English. The research findings suggest that the use (as well as the non-use) of footnotes in Vremja sekond hènd serves as the primary tool for translators to determine their degree of intervention in the text and, as a result, the extent to which they attempt to make the content more accessible to the audience. Furthermore, the decision whether to use footnotes (or not) in the translated versions appears to be influenced by the translators’ and publishers’ categorization of Alexievich’s works as fiction, non-fiction, or a hybrid literary genre.

Political Discourse and Oppression – Influences on the Mentality and Culture of the Soviet Man

Abstract The culture and mentality of a nation is formed in a process of interaction between individual and environment, and, consequently, its behaviour can be influenced by the changes of the social and physical environment. Politics is one factor in this process, as it uses power to control people’s thinking and behaviour through various instruments and techniques, and in this way, it can be regarded as a governmental extension on human actions. Using an imagological approach, the article’s purpose is to highlight that oppression, along with political discourse, shaped the mindset of the Soviet people. Also, the regime attempted to shape Soviet society in order to achieve the image desired. The Soviet political apparatus was based on oppression, the technique of repetition, and the role models highlighted by the regime. All the measures taken influenced the mentality of the Soviet people and, implicitly, led it to a transformation and, later, an adaptation because people had to comply with all the rules, laws, and measures taken by the Communist Party. This will be analysed in the first book published in Romania by Vasile Ernu, Născut în URSS [Born in the USSR], and in two works by Svetlana Alexievich, namely The Unwomanly Face of War and Chernobyl Prayer. By analysing these works, the reader learns how a society, its culture and mentality can be influenced by the social and physical environment. The three works present the transition from fiction to the non-fiction category, portraying authentic experiences and depicting the tangible impacts on people.

Temporal and Spatial Narrative Labyrinth: A Bakhtinian Chronotopic Exploration of the Non-fiction - Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War

The paper delves into the temporal and spatial aspects known as Chronotopes propounded by Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) underlaid in the non-fiction ‘Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War’ (1992) of Svetlana Alexievich (1948). The concept of chronotope has special significance in understanding the text in its historical and cultural context. The Chronotope helps to understand the meaning construed by the author in contemporary settings to discover the connotative meaning of the art form. This paper attempts to study the narrative of time and space relations that shape the non-fiction of Svetlana Alexievich to analyse the interplay of time and space to understand the voices of people who are either the victims of the war or the survivors of the war. The study also tries to interpret the non-fiction in the context of the war that lasted for ten years between the USSR and Afghanistan creating a lasting impact on the people of both nations forever.

Anthropocentrism and Environmental Apocalypse in Svetlana Alexievich’s Narrative

Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl: An Oral History of Nuclear Disaster (1997) presents how the age of anthropocene is driving the earth towards an imminent peril. In this era, humans acknowledge they are capable of the technological fix, repair and enhancement of natural systems. For instance, the Chernobyl explosion which occurred in 1986 is a consequence of human centered and technocratic worldview. Its aftermath such as a series of apocalyptic events have appeared in the narrative one after the other, and each existence of this biotic community is deadly threatened. Hence, this paper argues that this oral narrative of Alexievich admonishes the humans of this present era to prevent the future catastrophes by unmasking the perilous consequences of the Chernobyl explosion based on the voices of its survivors. To address the issues raised in the paper, the relevant insights of Lawrence Buell, Lynn White, Val Plumwood and Vandana Shiva are taken as a theoretical framework to analyze how and why humans are wrecking nature, and summoning the end times. Finally, this paper concludes that human beings must learn lessons from past deeds and respect nature as a whole entity in order to save the planet.

Grasping the scale of events: Voices from Chernobyl between the historical and the monumental

ABSTRACT The paper discusses the significance new forms of literary narration can have on the representation of groundbreaking historical events. Based initially on Hayden White’s work and his term modernist event, we argue that new kinds of events need new ways of writing history. However, neither has White given any concrete persuasive examples of how his paradigmatic historical work might look like nor have his critics given enough attention to his considerations on the matter. By focusing our analysis on Svetlana Alexievich’s literary work and specifically on her book Voices from Chernobyl, we try to achieve exactly this: to analyze the innovative literary features that Alexievich develops in the testimonial narratives she builds and to highlight the importance they have for representing the past. For this purpose, we take a closer look at the thematic connection of the testimonies and the sense of non-linearity they create; comment on her success to approach in this way the ‘unseen event’ and bring the reader closer to the horrific and confusing reality that the witnesses describe; and show how literary techniques like the use of parataxis can efficiently grasp and mediate the differences in the temporal scale of hard-to-comprehend historical events and their consequences. Especially examining how Alexievich deals with this temporal particularity in her narrative, the paper suggests new ways to deal with the complex temporalities and discontinuities that go beyond modern historical thinking.

Svetlana Alexievich: Voice of the Oppressed People

Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 Nobel laureate for literature, has interviewed hundreds, if not thousands, of people for her books. When she talks about her mission as a writer, she roots herself in the lived experiences of her interviewees, and one gets the feeling that she truly recalls every one of them. An escape from history seems impossible for 2015 Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. After chronicling the Soviet Union through her “documentary novels,” her own genre often mistaken for oral history, since 1985, she had begun working on two new books, one on love and another on aging and death. She saw these topics as an opportunity for something different, untethered to the history of what she calls the “Red Person” in the former Soviet Union. Alexievich called the war in Ukraine an indication that the former communist mentality among many people in Russia and Belarus has not been eradicated. As Alexievich said, "Now we see that we were so naive and romantic in times of 'perestroika,'" Alexievich said. "We thought and kept saying that people were disappointed with communism, that we managed to deal with it with a peaceful revolution. Now, it turns out that we did not overcome communism. We never prevailed." Alexievich has defined the main thrust of her life and her writings thusly: “I always aim to understand how much humanity is contained in each human being, and how I can protect this humanity in a person.”

Holocaust testimony or ‘Soviet Epic’: Svetlana Alexievich’s polyphonic texts

ABSTRACT This article examines the wartime fate of the Jews in Belarus as it is represented in Svetlana Alexievich's ‘documentary fiction’. It asks whether the Jewish experience, as reported by survivors, rescuers and bystanders, is presented as part of a broad Soviet history, or, as western readers might expect, as a central part of the Holocaust. The article considers whether this question can be addressed in literary terms by analysing Alexievich’s use of a wide range of social utterances in the composition of her works, to determine whether such polyphony gives expression to Jewish voices or erases their distinctiveness

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

Migrants, Vagrants, and the Making of the Anthropocene

„Write as your ear hears it”: Text and pretext in the polyphonic reportages of Svetlana Alexievich

The article analyzes the process of incorporation of the witnesses’ verbal testimonies into the public sphere, of which polyphonic reportage is a part. This genre has become known mainly thanks to Svetlana Alexievich, whose works are based entirely on recorded conversations and interviews. Listening to the witnesses enables the reporter facing the dominant discourse of the past to reach out to others, the process of discovering and textualizing of which can be described with reference to the folk tradition of collective singing.

Witnessing migrant memories through literature: The case of Nagorno-Karabakh in transnational perspective

This comparative essay explores the relationship between memory and migration/integration through the example of two recent literary texts—the German-language novel All Russians Love Birch Trees by Olga Grjasnowa and a story from the Russian-language “novel in voices” Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich—that portray personal memory of ethnic violence in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1990. In Grjasnowa’s novel, the protagonist’s traumatic memories cannot be integrated into German memory culture, despite the fact that she, as a legal immigrant, enjoys the status of political subject. In reversed dynamics, Alexievich’s protagonist, who remains vulnerable on the political and social level, has been able to articulate her trauma in the presence of the empathetic listener—the implied author. Analyzing narrative devices that aim to engage the reader as a respondent to the characters’ suffering during the conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in the 1990s and after their arrival in Germany and Russia, this essay identifies a call for a holistic integration of migrants on both the civic level and the level of memory through the medium of secondary witnessing.

Rock Star Dreams Co-created (auto)ethnographies

The article is a two-part piece where the first part is a narratively written composition of interview excerpts, and the second part is a theoretical and methodological reflection about this way of writing. The narrative of the first part consists of extracts from in-depth interviews conducted within the framework of an ethnological and autoethnographical re- search project examining grief, friendship and kinship in the wake of the deaths of two of the authors childhood friends – Marcus and Noel. The potential of the ethnographic material is explored as text by compiling it in an entirely new manner, where multiple voices are condensed into a single narrative. The point of departure is sociologist Carolyn Ellis’ ideas on co-constructed narratives and autoethnographic texts as jointly authored. The writing method is also inspired by author Svetlana Alexievich and her way of facilitating a focus on specific details of human experience from a larger empirical material. The intention is that the whole should appear to be greater than the sum of its parts. The common narrative is something new, something singular, something greater than could be conveyed by any one of the interviews, or interviewees, alone. The result is a narrative of death, grief, friendship, parenthood and kinship. About how masculinity can be intersected by the lines of class, place, mental illness and substance abuse. In the text, those who grieve for Marcus and Noel are not alone – in the text they stand together as part of a heterogeneous collective with many voices.

Tożsamość płciowa w narracjach żołnierek Armii Czerwonej, uczestniczek II wojny światowej

Gender Identity in the Narrative of Women-Soldiers Serving in the Red Army during World War II The analysis of gender identity is based on the narratives of women who volunteered to serve in the military after the start of World War II and fought as soldiers in the Red Army. Forty years after World War II, Svetlana Alexievich conducted interviews with women veterans, which she published in the book War’s Unwomanly Face. Their memories of wartime and post-war period were analyzed from the perspective of their gender identity, i.e. the ability to reconcile the role of a woman determined by their biological sex with the role of a soldier determined by the circumstances. The interpretation of this problem offered in the paper is based on developmental psychology theories of Erik Erikson, James Marcia, Daniel Levinson, and Jeffrey Arnett, and the sociological perspective on identity. Selected narratives from Alexievich’s reportages are analyzed focusing on identification and interpretation of different themes, which are assessed according to their relevance to the understanding of the process described. The narrators were only 16–20 years old at the time of joining the military and they were still at the stage of identity moratorium. It required a lot of determination for them to become a soldier. Their identity as a soldier was their assumed identity, defined by Marcia as ideological or professional engagement without completing the period of exploration. Women were not welcome in the army, they suffered because of logistical shortcomings, but they still supported all of the units, became officers and military leaders, and were awarded medals for their valor, courage and reliability. After the war, they were socially rejected and condemned and they needed to process their identity, i.e. reject their military ethos in order to strengthen their sense of being a women. Based on Arnett’s concept one can conclude that their “in between”period of identity exploration was determined by external events and social relations.

Women’s Acumen of War: An Analytical Textual Discourse of Svetlana Alexievich’s The Unwomanly Face of War

War is often a portrayal of the intrepid male realm in history; consistently reiterating the eminence of the male populace and overshadowing the contributions of women. Despite demonstration of capabilities in par with men and involvement in various jurisdictions, historical records have bequeathed minimal representation to the participation of bold women. Svetlana Alexievich is one of those few writers who interviewed these unsung heroines and compiled their testimonies in her book titled, The Unwomanly Face of War, offering them a platform to share their honest opinions. In the wake of human accomplishment, women have contributed phenomenally in the militia, but their humane and feminine instincts have differed widely when compared to men. In spite of, disparities and disparaging views on women’s progress, there are a few authors who continue to acknowledge women’s prowess. This paper is an analysis of Alexievich’s work which brings forth the dark realities of war and a femino centric perspective of women warriors.

ТРАВМА ДИКТАТУРЫ В ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННЫХ ТЕКСТАХ ХЕЛЕН ДАНМОР И СВЕТЛАНЫ АЛЕКСИЕВИЧ

This article presents a comparative study of fictional representation of one type of collective trauma – the trauma of dictatorship. Two contemporary writers – the English Helen Dunmore and the Belarusian Svetlana Alexievich – explore the spirit of the Soviet post-war years. Dunmore fictionalizes the historical fact – the infamous “Doctors’ Plot”, using documentary evidence, while Alexievich documents live narrative, turning living memory into document. Both writers explore the mechanism of dictatorial suppression resulting in mass trauma; its major tool being fear in various forms. The traumatic discourse in both novels is shown as disrupted, silenced and distorted, while such defence mechanisms as displacement, acceptance, dissociation, humility, introjection, repression and rationalization are reenacted trough the narrative and plot.

The body as a translation: the senses and World War II in U vojny ne ženskoe lico, by Svetlana Alexievich

: In this paper, we aim to study the human body as a form of translation by unfolding the (non)presence of the senses in two editions of U vojny ne ženskoe lico, one of the most successful “novels of voices” by Nobel Prize-winning author Svetlana Alexievich. First published in 1985, the book gathers testimonies of women who fought in the ranks of the Red Army during World War II. By conducting a comparative analysis of the appearance (and absence) of sensory perceptions in two versions of the text (from 1985 and 2013), we have concluded that the writer makes multiple changes at a microstructural level. The overlapping of the senses in the discursive construction of the most recent version of the book helps Alexievich to translate the horrors of the bloodiest conflict in history, enabling the reader to feel the war through the body of another person.