Secondhand Time
The Last of the Soviets. An Oral History
(Sprache: Englisch)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia, from Svetlana Alexievich, winner of the Nobel Prize in LiteratureNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE WINNER
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
The New York Times The Washington Post The Boston Globe The Wall Street Journal NPR Financial Times Kirkus Reviews
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.
A magnificent tapestry of the sorrows and triumphs of the human spirit woven by a master, Secondhand Time tells the stories that together make up the true history of a nation. Through the voices
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of those who confided in her, The Nation writes, Alexievich tells us about human nature, about our dreams, our choices, about good and evil in a word, about ourselves.
Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time
The nonfiction 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 Alexievich s oral history Secondhand Time. David Remnick, The New Yorker
Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand Time
The nonfiction 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 Alexievich s oral history Secondhand Time. David Remnick, The New Yorker
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Lese-Probe zu „Secondhand Time “
SNATCHES OF STREET NOISE AND KITCHEN CONVERSATIONS (1991 2001)
ON IVANUSHKA THE FOOL AND THE MAGIC GOLDFISH
--What have I learned? I learned that the heroes of one era aren t likely to be the heroes of the next. Except Ivanushka the Fool. And Emelya. The beloved heroes of Russian folklore. Our stories are all about good fortune and strokes of luck; divine intervention that makes everything fall right into our laps. Having it all without having to get up from your bed on the stove.1 The stove will cook the bliny, the magic goldfish will grant your every wish. I want this and I want that . . . I want the fair Tsarevna! I want to live in a different kingdom, where the rivers run with milk and their banks are heaped with jam . . . We re dreamers, of course. Our souls strain and suffer, but not much gets done--there s no strength left over after all that ardor. Nothing ever gets done. The mysterious Russian soul . . . Everyone wants to understand it. They read Dostoevsky: What s behind that soul of theirs? Well, behind our soul there s just more soul. We like to have a chat in the kitchen, read a book. Reader is our primary occupation. Viewer. All the while, we consider ourselves a special, exceptional people even though there are no grounds for this besides our oil and natural gas. On one hand, this is what stands in the way of progress; on the other hand, it provides something like meaning. Russia always seems to be on the verge of giving rise to something important, demonstrating something completely extraordinary to the world. The chosen people. The special Russian path. Our country is full of Oblomovs,2 lying around on their couches, awaiting miracles. There are no Stoltzes. The industrious, savvy Stoltzes are despised for chopping down the beloved birch grove, the cherry orchard. They build their factories, make money . . . They re foreign to us . . .
--The Russian kitchen . . . The pitiful Khrushchyovka3 kitchenette, nine to twelve
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square meters (if you re lucky!), and on the other side of a flimsy wall, the toilet. Your typical Soviet floorplan. Onions sprouting in old mayonnaise jars on the windowsill and a potted aloe for fighting colds. For us, the kitchen is not just where we cook, it s a dining room, a guest room, an office, a soapbox. A space for group therapy sessions. In the nineteenth century, all of Russian culture was concentrated on aristocratic estates; in the twentieth century, it lived on in our kitchens. That s where perestroika really took place. 1960s dissident life is the kitchen life. Thanks, Khrushchev! He s the one who led us out of the communal apartments; under his rule, we got our own private kitchens where we could criticize the government and, most importantly, not be afraid, because in the kitchen you were always among friends. It s where ideas were whipped up from scratch, fantastical projects concocted. We made jokes--it was a golden age for jokes! A communist is someone who s read Marx, an anticommunist is someone who s understood him. We grew up in kitchens, and our children did, too; they listened to Galich and Okudzhava along with us. We played Vysotsky,4 tuned in to illegal BBC broadcasts. We talked about everything: how shitty things were, the meaning of life, whether everyone could all be happy. I remember a funny story . . . We d stayed up past midnight, and our daughter, she was twelve, had fallen asleep on the kitchen couch. We d gotten into some heated argument, and suddenly she started yelling at us in her sleep: Enough about politics! Again with your Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, and Stalin! [Laughs.]
Endlessly drinking tea. Coffee. Vodka. In the seventies, we had Cuban rum. Everyone was in love with Fide
Endlessly drinking tea. Coffee. Vodka. In the seventies, we had Cuban rum. Everyone was in love with Fide
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Autoren-Porträt von Svetlana Alexijevich
Svetlana Alexievich was born in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which gathers a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include War s Unwomanly Face (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Svetlana Alexijevich
- 2017, 496 Seiten, Masse: 13,9 x 20,9 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Übersetzer: Bela Shayevich
- Verlag: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- ISBN-10: 0399588825
- ISBN-13: 9780399588822
- Erscheinungsdatum: 07.03.2017
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
Praise for Svetlana Alexievich and Secondhand TimeThere are many worthwhile books on the post-Soviet period and Putin s ascent. . . . But the nonfiction 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 Alexievich s oral history Secondhand Time. David Remnick, The New Yorker
Like the greatest works of fiction, Secondhand Time is a comprehensive and unflinching exploration of the human condition. . . . Alexievich s tools are different from those of a novelist, yet in its scope and wisdom, Secondhand Time is comparable to War and Peace. The Wall Street Journal
Already hailed as a masterpiece across Europe, Secondhand Time is an intimate portrait of a country yearning for meaning after the sudden lurch from Communism to capitalism in the 1990s plunged it into existential crisis. 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. The New York Times
The most ambitious Russian literary work of art of the century . . . There s been nothing in Russian literature as great or personal or troubling as Secondhand Time since Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn s The Gulag Archipelago, nothing as necessary and overdue. . . . Alexievich s witnesses are those who haven t had a say. She shows us from these conversations, many of them coming at the confessional kitchen table of Russian apartments, that it s powerful simply to be allowed to tell one s own story. . . . This is the kind of history, otherwise almost unacknowledged by today s dictatorships, that matters. The Christian Science Monitor
Alexievich s masterpiece not only for what it says about the fall of the Soviet Union but for what it suggests about the future of
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Russia and its former satellites. . . Stylistically, Secondhand Time, like her other books, produces a mosaic of overlapping voices deepened by extraordinary stories of love and perseverance. Newsweek
A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful . . . [Secondhand Time] is one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts of [Soviet] society caught in the throes of change that anyone has yet attempted. . . . Alexievich stations herself at a crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. . . . [She] makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony. The Washington Post
An enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism fall, [Secondhand Time] gives a staggeringly deep and plural picture of a people that has lost its place in history. San Francisco Chronicle
A trove of emotions and memories, raw and powerful . . . [Secondhand Time] is one of the most vivid and incandescent accounts of [Soviet] society caught in the throes of change that anyone has yet attempted. . . . Alexievich stations herself at a crossroads of history and turns on her tape recorder. . . . [She] makes it feel intimate, as if you are sitting in the kitchen with the characters, sharing in their happiness and agony. The Washington Post
An enormous investigation of the generation that saw communism fall, [Secondhand Time] gives a staggeringly deep and plural picture of a people that has lost its place in history. San Francisco Chronicle
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