Nobels: 2015: Svetlana Alexievich

Pic by Elke Wetzig CC BY-SA 3.0

Svetlana Alexievich is a Belorussian documentarist. The book that I have read, Boys in Zinc, is based on interviews with former soldiers in the Soviet action in Afghanistan from 1979 - 1989 and with their family members - most often mothers.

It's a fairly harrowing read. The descriptions by the soldiers of what the war was like are often detailed and distressing, as of course they should be. But the testimony is not just about the nature of war, but is set among the collapse of the Soviet Union - in part triggered by the war - and spans a change in attitudes towards the soldiers. There's a general sense of grievance that soldiers went off to Afghanistan on rhetoric that evoked the Great Patriotic War and promised them hero status, but returned to a society that saw the war as a terrible mistake, a crime even, and wanted nothing to do with the veterans.

The edition I've been reading (Penguin 2017, translated by Andrew Bromfield) includes a selection of documents about "Boys in Zinc on trial". After publication two of those interviewed sued Alexievich for (broadly speaking) libel. By this time Belarus was an independent country, and much less reformed than most of the former Soviet states. There's a suspicion that the suits were brought on the instigation of the government and army, to denounce the way the interviews had portrayed the former Soviet army. The result was mixed. Alexievich had to pay some damages.I suspect the legal action only highlighted the problems her book reported.

And presumably was a factor in her winning the Prize. With Alexievich we run straight into one of those questions that always plague the prize: does the Academy have a political agenda in making the award? Oh dear, here we hit the problem of "what is political?". Just yesterday an MP accused the opposition of trying to make the death of a homeless man a political issue. And in America, anti-gun protestors are sometimes accused of bringing politics into the debate. It's an irregular verb: I apply common sense; you bring politics into it; he she or it has an ideology.

The campaign against Alexeivich was a political campaign which threatened freedom of expression. Of course the Nobel academy should take that into account and can reasonably use the award as a means of defending literature itself.

A worthwhile read about a subject not many of us know much about. As a start on this Nobel project, it's what I hoped for: I've been led to something I would never have read otherwise, and enjoyed it.

Coming next: depending on the postal service either Alice Munro or Patrick Modiano.