In early October, Belarussian journalist Svetlana Alexievich became one of the few Nobel laureates recognized for nonfiction. Known for chronicling Soviet national tragedies through the collection of hundreds of individual interviews, Alexievich received the award “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy Sara Danius called her work “a new kind of literary genre” offering “a history of the soul.” Though her receipt of the Nobel comes at a politically charged moment for former Soviet republics and the international community, Alexievich’s recognition is more important for what it means to literature and the stories she elevates than for its partisan implications.
It has been over fifty years since a nonfiction writer won the prestigious award now bequeathed to Alexievich. The New Yorker’s Philip Gourevitch describes “a kind of lingering snobbery in the literary world that wants to exclude nonfiction from the classification of literature,” disparaging it as less inspired or visionary than fictional work. Yet Alexievich’s books render narratives of Soviet history with as much poignancy and distinctiveness of style as any work of fiction might. As Alexievich puts it, “The heroes, feelings, and events in my books are all real.” The voices of those she interviews construct images vivid enough and stories real enough to grip the reader as forcefully as any line from the literary canon, and cast history in the profound detail of humanity. Perhaps even more deftly than fictive writing, her work provides language to experiences and people previously starved for it.
Each of Alexievich’s books, which requires five to ten years to write, catechizes history through compilation of hundreds of individual stories. She documents events that individuals and societies deliberately forget, from the Chernobyl disaster to the catastrophe of Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. For her first book, War’s Unwomanly Face, Alexievich interviewed hundreds of women who fought as Soviet soldiers in the Second World War. By the 1980s, when Alexievich began speaking to these women, they had long traded their positions as combatants for roles as wives and mothers in respectable society. She often spent entire days easing them from the rehearsal of a stock narrative of the war and its triumphs into sharing their memories of their youth. Out of her subjects’ internalized myths, Alexievich uncovered their experiences of the war. It is this patient mining for oral history that characterizes her work, as well as what renders it so profoundly empowering. In her words, “Each person offers a text of his or her own.”
Alexievich chronicled the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the book Zinky Boys, an English title somewhat awkwardly translated from her Russian prose alluding to the zinc coffins in which young men were sent home from the war. The London Review of Books called it “sometimes unreadably sad,” a vivid record of the manners in which the conflict scarred those involved. Rather than interpose her own framing of the war, Alexievich simply renders her interviews as short narratives, literally allowing the people impacted by the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan to speak for themselves.
A later title, Voices from Chernobyl, opens with a woman’s memory of seeing her husband, a firefighter sent to mitigate the damage of the accident, literally crumbling to his death in a hospital. To the interviewer Masha Gessen, Alexievich described the woman’s account as possessing the quality of Shakespeare, but it took hours of interviewing to coax out the story. Again, Alexievich’s work made visible a story buried beneath public narrative, elevating a voice previously rendered powerless. The sheer number of people affected by the Chernobyl disaster has meant that countless individual experiences are lost in the world’s collective memory, especially because many of those affected lack an outlet through which to voice their accounts. Alexievich provided that outlet.
It is these monumental efforts to amplify the many, sometimes hidden voices of Soviet identity that the Nobel committee chose to recognize. The prestigious award constitutes not only validation of the importance of Alexievich’s work, nor only the recognition of nonfiction writing as a mode as aesthetically moving as fiction, but also an implicit bolstering of the stories Alexievich’s books attempt to highlight. At a basic level, her status as a Nobel laureate and the attendant international prominence will offer opportunities for her books and their stories to attract greater readership. The receipt of the award implies that the individual stories Alexievich documents are worthy of prestige. For that, the Swedish Academy has gifted recognition to nonfiction as a valuable pursuit and acknowledgement to the articulations of people who are often rendered voiceless.
Some have misguidedly attempted to cast Alexievich’s award as a purely political act. Certainly, she has hardly refrained from opining on political matters, denouncing Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and speaking harshly of Russian President Vladimir Putin as “a KGB agent…not a politician.” Her work’s exposure of woes under the Soviet system has done little to endear her to a government that has attempted to glorify its Soviet legacy. Almost immediately after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, she condemned the election-rigging practices of the Belarussian government under President Alexander Lukashenko, which falsifies election votes to inflate the appearance of popular support and exercises utter control over the political milieu. And in light of Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine, the fact that Alexievich was born in the region to a Ukrainian mother and Belarussian father bears some political weight. Indeed, the Swedish Academy has consistently given the Nobel to writers who dissented from Soviet rule, a prominent example being Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who won the prize while his works were banned in the Soviet Union. Given this history, Russian writer Zakhar Prilepin’s argument that Alexievich is “not a writer” and received her prize only because she opposes Moscow is somewhat understandable.
It can be difficult to extricate purely aesthetic considerations from the political affiliations of a writer, especially when political conflicts tend to seize the attention of the public more forcefully than literature itself. As with the selection of Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel committee has often recognized political dissidents, including Günter Grass, who exposed the shame and suffering of the Third Reich at a time when many Germans hoped to forget the events of the Second World War, and Wole Soyinka, whom the Nigerian government once jailed over accusations of conspiring with rebels in the country’s civil war. In 2005, when Harold Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature, his vociferous criticism of American foreign policy brought a distinctly political reverberation to his receipt of the award. Literature and politics, though semantically and even philosophically distinct, can have a tangled relationship. Indeed, Nobel laureates such as Grass, Soyinka, Pinter, and now Aliexievich demonstrate the leverage that literature exerts over politics: written elevation of certain aspects of history or the present can center these points within the world’s political consciousness. This relationship has frequently been implicitly recognized in the selection of Nobel winners.
However, while political implications are often apparent in the designation of Nobel laureates, these motives are not necessarily most important. Because the award recognizes a writer’s entire body of work—a literary career—the argument that it is determined by the political issues of the day can overlook a fundamental part of the meaning of the prize. Alexievich’s receipt of the award represents a tribute to her genre of “polyphonic” oral history; that this history focuses on tribulations faced by individuals living under the Soviet regime does not automatically render the Nobel a political symbol.
Svetlana Alexievich joined the ranks of Nobel laureates as a result of her commendable ability to document history that is largely forgotten, returning agency to people whose experiences have been lost to a master narrative of the Soviet Union’s past. Perhaps the best way to understand the importance of her literary impact is to adopt her own strategy and permit one of the individuals interviewed in Voices from Chernobyl to speak for himself: “I’m only going to tell about what’s really mine. My own truth. . . I want to bear witness.” Alexievich has received due recognition for helping people do exactly that.
