Svetlana Alexievich: The Voices of History

“If you look back at the whole of our history both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath. An eternal dialogue of executioners and victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. (…) Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.”

This is the description of the theme of her works offered by Svetlana Alexievich. The Swedish Academy highlighted her “polyphonic writings” and the fact that in her books “historical events are a pretext for exploring individuals and the human soul”. And the fact is that Alexievich has produced a powerful and committed body of work in which, between journalistic research and fiction, between nonfiction and literature, she has profiled her own literary genre: the “novel of voices”. Through the eyes of the common people, Alexievich tells of the most transcendental events that took place in the Soviet Union and the countries that formed part of it, with an honesty and a courage that position her among the great journalistic writers/ writer journalists of our time.